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xi The idea for this book came out of the Quality Growth Alliance, a Puget Sound organization that brought together a diverse group of business, urban, and environmental interests who agreed on how growth should be accommodated in the region. In 2009, I was part of the alliance’s initial working group on carbon emissions and was looking for a comprehensive resource that addressed the built environment’s impact on carbon emissions. At the time there were many new (and not-so-new) strategies being embraced in building design and an emerging interest in the role of land use and transportation as part of the solution to climate change. Existing works tended to focus on specific technologies (green roofs, solar energy, walkable streets), but none provided a good survey across all the necessary strategies to consider in concert with each other. Even those works that grouped certain strategies together in one book tended to focus either on the building or on the urban environment. With some encouragement from the working group, I began to pursue the idea of a compendium and to look for an expert who might have the time and wherewithal to put such a document together. Several conversations and grant applications later, it occurred to me that it might be more productive to just take a crack at this project myself. Over the summer of 2009, I worked on an outline for “the handbook,” trying to distill built environment energy strategies into eight to ten manageable buckets. From my experience in building design and real estate development, I knew that many of these strategies were technically sound but challenging to implement in practice. As I worked on Preface PrEFACE xii the handbook, it evolved from a list into a matrix, where the strategies were cross-referenced with the institutions that impact building and urban development : municipal governments, investors, and state governments. It was hard to think about what needed to be done in technical terms alone; I quickly realized that this project needed to address the legal and economic frameworks we operate in, just as much as the technical strategies. The project had grown from a handbook into something more like a real book. By the fall of 2009, I knew I couldn’t research, write, and edit the whole project myself. My dad, Al Hurd, had just retired from a career as an executive in the information technology industry, and I asked him if he would work on the project with me if I went ahead with turning the six-thousandword outline into a full draft. Neither of us knew at the time that this would become a two-year intellectual collaboration that has been incredibly rewarding for both us. Relatively few people have the opportunity to engage in this type of partnership with their parent. To be able to work with someone who understands you so well, with whom you have such a high degree of trust, who may have a different style but who shares a similar sensibility is a gift. My father and I found that we appreciated each other’s judgment, edits, and ideas. Our debates were productive and satisfyingly resolved. It has been a pleasure to work together in this way. The resulting book is fundamentally a pragmatic one. We are passionate about slowing climate change but recognize at a deep level that our development patterns, cities, and buildings are shaped by economics. Those who see regulation as a stand-alone solution must recognize that regulation has its limits in a capitalist democracy. If our economic and political institutions are a given, how much change can we accomplish within these very real constraints ? After a couple of years of pushing on these ideas, I’m happy to say that the answer may be “quite a lot” and possibly even “enough.” Some readers of the original manuscript recommended that the book also address the politics of suggested practices. While there is no doubt that political strategy is required to implement any idea, and this book has economic, legal and policy ideas, a “political” book in an age of partisan politics can be the death knell of good ideas. The concepts presented here are worth embracing because they are economically sound and supported by a strong, transparent , and efficient economic system. Furthermore, politics is local. One person may embrace public transit because it’s “green,” the next may see its value in fostering greater energy independence as a key component of national security...

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