so welcome tonight i am sort of the act before the act before the act so you have to pay a lot of attention but give me one minute my name is andrew speedo i work as a community connector for the washington school neighborhood which is just close by here we're actually in west corner neighborhood and i also sit on the holland historic neighborhood association board and so i'm associated with them and this is kind of our annual meeting tonight so i wear a couple hats here in the neighborhood but i wanted to let you know if you haven't heard about this already about next door dot com and we're going to do a little we were going to do a little promotional video and stuff but i was going to tell you go to next door dot com or come find me if you want to get connected to a local neighborhood online sort of posting board and a lot of neighbors are getting connected on that it's been very helpful in getting out information or if you're going to  grudge sale or if you just want to find find a babysitter anything you can think of her neighbors it's been working really well so we want to encourage people in the core city to get on next door dot com if possible and that's my plug thank you and we are really excited to have our speaker tonight name is matt grow cough did i say that correctly grow coffee matt is the founding principle of the thrive collaborative working to create life enhancing buildings that harvest their own energy and water create zero waste and our beautiful and restore it to among many other accolades he was honored as a tw michigan green leader by the detroit free press he's been called a proven zero energy master by green building elements and one of greater detroit's most progressive personalities by my ford magazine matt has contributed to many publications and programs including the environment report on public radio writer and green renovation expert for old house web and improvement center dot com mats in our home was selected as one of us eight today's best green homes of two thousand and ten and the atlantic called it sustainable perfection it is america's oldest and michigan's first net zero energy building meaning it annually produces more energy than his family consumes and he is going to share all the details with you momentarily his work has been featured in two recent books people habitat twenty ways to think about greener healthier cities no regrets remodelling and green is good save money make money and help your community profit from clean energy that describes his new website happy home for you the intelligent d i y or mat states that smart home improvements that make us truly happy require us to redefine home home is more than just a house we get a drug like rush from rearranging the furniture right repainting walls or remodeling the entire house however like a drug the rush is short lived when the excitement fades we need another fix we become home make over junkies but we are happy or happy home is about sustainable home improvements that sustain happiness and improve community matt also is an accomplished woodworker amateur behavioral economist maybe you can explain that to us in a little while because i don't know what it is avid sailor backyard chicken enthusiastic andrew in cali do you know that backyard chicken enthusiastic urban farmer certified california gray whale naturalist energy geek and a daddy to two darling girls probably your most important role right so it's my pleasure to introduce matt thanks for coming really excited here you i don't know how far back she was going to go you forgot about when i played the red red robin in the first grade play a picture taken from the cassini spacecraft and every single thing that humans have ever done every first kiss every hug every child that has been born hundred seventy two that we ever even had a photograph of the whole earth was in one thousand nine hundred seventy two it wasn't even that long ago i mean can you imagine we went through all of human history fourteen thousand years of civilization we had never seen a picture of the earth and all that kissing and hugging and loving that has ever gone on on that planet all in one single photograph so we ask ourselves so how do we design a home if this is our home how do we design home and what i want to make the case for you all tonight is that we need to design everything we do from dishwashers to our houses to our neighborhoods short civic centers design them more like biodiversity rye so when things are really incredibly complex they thrive and the funny thing is the radically simple solutions i haven't tried to see if i'm going to try with velcro or actually i think we have little baby velcro things we just toss them on the wall and go make dinner these radically simple solutions they fail in nature because nature has its own set of rules  of these what does happen is he designed a building that violated the immutable laws of physics right he just built it on a conference room table with a disregard for where that building was in place so this isn't in las vegas nevada  where i just spoke a few weeks ago and what happened was when the sun shined on that building it created like this parabolic lens and it sort of frying vegas tourists out by the pool all right this is serious this guy actually is within thirty seconds the back of my legs were burning first i thought my first thought was jesus they destroy the ozone layer because these architectures are completely disconnected from what they're doing on that conference room table from where their buildings are in the environment what these laws of physics say they are and when you find a couple of vegas tourists nobody pays that much attention but then you start getting world attention when you start frying people's jaguars out on the streets of london same architect different building melted all the plastic parts on the job so we have to start localising the consequences of these things if we made architects if architects had these consequences immediate to them we really begin to understand the all just got that so what we do is we create these building codes to try to make people fit into something so this was the first building code and now we have building codes that are actually when i could see the other one had a nice color i could change shirts so the building code right to this is the world's first building code it was actually in seven hundred seventy two b c remaking all kinds of rules and laws one of the first ones is actually set in stone i think that's where the expression actually comes from where is it written it's set in stone so this is the first building kind of this is a performance based code meaning that it has to perform this way actually  exactly how to build it there is going to tell you if it does this unless and if a builder builds a house for someone and does not constructed properly and the house which he built falls and kills its owner that builder shall be put to death that is the  performance code imagine if we localize the consequences in these ways and what's happening by not localizing the consequences last year globally was the hottest year on record two thousand and fourteen was the hottest year throughout humanity right now if you're wondering about it was in michigan take a look there's a couple of places on earth that actually get below normal temperatures and thanks to us we live right up there in the great lakes that had the polar vortex that came down so while the rest of the world was baking we were actually cooler but it's starting to have consequences thirteen of the fifteen hottest years on record have all happened since the year two thousand and thirteen in the past fifteen years the hottest years on record so james hansen he was the first one that brought attention to what we're doing right by just kind of desecrating our atmosphere in our air and he said that stabilizing atmospheric c o two and the climate requires that net c o two emissions approaches zero by the year twenty fifth ok so there are twenty fifty and he also said we have to keep that level of carbon dioxide under three hundred fifty parts per million and we'll talk more about that in a little while so what's happening now is we have what's called a prescriptive code which the code says you need to build this way you need to have this much r value in your walls the level of insulation your windows need to be like this you need to do this this is this is longer check off the right that are completely disconnected from the next little box and they all operate in their own in this very very linear fashion but there's nothing in nature that operates this way so nature has its own performance code things that work get passed on and things that don't get recalled by the manufacturer and this is part of the human circulatory system the human heart the self assembles think about this it has a one point three watt pump human heart only one point three watts and it can push blood through sixty thousand miles of plumbing in your body sixty thousand miles in the human circulatory system there's no one straight pipe there are no straight pipes in nature yet everything that we do is completely linear and with straight pipes so what we need to do is get away from this idea of grid is right with the ungraded from these systems our energy system has single lines right we take everything we come over here we build a big big power plant nuclear coal natural gas solar whatever it is we build a giant power plant and then we take a single line and then we just run everybody off of these lines so what's happened with this grid system again that doesn't appear anywhere in nature is our biggest threat is not from terrorists like you might think it's from squirrels no kidding now forests in rivers don't do anything like this right but squirrels really are responsible for some of the biggest blackouts in the united states the whole western day that we remember in the east coast when the that was a giant regional blackout that was caused by a squirrel getting into a transformer disrupting a part of the grid part of the grid goes down the whole thing goes down now in a computer network if your computer goes down or the server at your office goes down everybody else's computers don't go down because that's a networked system right so again nature doesn't do this and i think about this if nature did right if we had river systems that work like this you would say like oh you know sorry the colorado river isn't flowing today because a chipmunk nibbled one of the valves the colorado river keeps flowing so there's this new phenomenon that's been going around you google this i promise you this is true it's called p o c b s three scientific term what this means is power outages power outages caused by squirrels true you look it up so we need to under it our energy system we also need to under it our water system right our water system does the same thing that our energy system does we we've tended to concentrate everything we take everything we pull it out of the river we pull  iraq for whatever it is and we take it a single pipe and we pump it in clean that water pump it to everybody's house in a single pipe and everybody comes off that pipe and so there's one pipe that comes into the house like this is actually a diagram of our house we have one pipe that comes into the house and then we have another pipe after we poop in it that goes out that sewage so now there's two pipes and then there's a third pipe that really provides no benefit whatsoever except to catch rainfall that's called the storm water pipe where rain used to be something that was a real benefit right farmers pray for rain and yet we take rain and we have a whole nother pipe just to deal with storm water runoff so three pipes clean water in water out by we were and in our drinking water and then we just take all of that we put in and then we take the storm water which you know it's rain and we flush that down a different pipe and after we had all the pollutants from the roof from the sidewalk in the in the salt on the roads in the oil from the cars and everything else it goes generally straight into our streams and rivers and awkward for years rights but this is what nature does this is what's called a fractal watershed it's beautiful this infrared image this is a centralized system this is grand rapids  and nothing looks like this in nature this is what this ingenious system looks like after a big flood a couple of years ago and now this system is amazingly intelligent think about this we turn on our tap water as we can go around the corner the bathroom right now we turn the tap and we know i bet my house on it without water is going to flow out it's going to be clean it's amazing it's incredibly intelligent it's ingenious but it's over simplified it's not complex and if one part of it goes wrong if one part fails the entire system fails so that's why you have things like flint and detroit and toledo and portland oregon portland oregon has has had several e coli alerts boil water alerts over the past three years an arbor had one raise your head what if if you think which one of these is an e k g of a healthy heart now he's asked this question to groups of hundreds of medical professionals and cardiologists but were smart as smart as they are if you think a is the healthy heart raise your hand how about it's b and b is the most complex rhythm of all of them and what he discovered is that the simpler the rhythm of the heart that's an indicator of disease is anybody know what this e k g is that's flat lining that's the simplest e k g you can find that's death complexity equals health simplicity equals death everything in nature operates by the same set of rules so we try to apply this idea to our houses or dream house right here right this is the house we rode through but we ran by that on a morning run in two thousand  six when the when there was no stopping the housing market said to him we want that house that is beautiful and have everything you could possibly want to specify siding it had no insulation except for a layer of newspaper in the attic dated one one thousand we had lead paint on all of the walls we had windows that were completely in operable there's a couple of windows that open but every single one of them were painted shut but there was air leaking through them they had carpet over the hard pine floors that have been growing when columbus had sailed for america they cover these these these floors with carpet we had a refrigerator from one nine hundred eighty nine that you could hear this thing running all over the house that's how efficient it was we had toilets that were flushing five gallons per flush every single time you flush the toilet we had a genuine pink formica marble in the in the bathroom there was no shower in the house at the time actually that's the tub right there and my favorite is the pink towel curtain shower  right there and we had faucets that were running it two and a half three gallons per minute with him ular climate troll furnace dating from one thousand nine hundred fifty nine was when that was installed we saw the label on there that thing was never going to die right why get rid of a perfectly good furnace well we would go to sleep every single night with fully dressed in sweat pants and sweat shirts with socks on and a buckwheat pillow heated in the microwave and shoved down the bottom of two down comforters piled on top of us and for that privilege we got to send a check to see for three hundred fifty dollars in the wintertime each month and that was to keep the temperature somewhere around fifty five sixty degrees if you were lucky because you couldn't get  much higher than that even if you wanted to so what we did was we set out what we called our mission zero right we were going to eliminate our energy bill completely we're going to power this house with one hundred percent renewable energy we were going to harvest own water that we needed and we're going to make this house zero waste and we did it because we didn't know it wasn't possible and this is what we did we want all kinds of preservation awards i should have had a before picture  the day we put the solar panels up so what's happened is this house has become a celebrity in its own right and i've started thrive collaborative and polymath development i've been in like you you just heard that entire resume by the in the atlantic and fox business news in all of these magazines and books and i was called the proven zero energy master and lots of covers of books they brought me on to fox news they brought me into google to speak for one of their talks at filling up with a tank full of sunshine right there and gave it all ted talk usa today called us one of the best green houses in america got to this we want to be favorites actually the realtor station gave me the environmental awareness award not think about what that means they give me an award for being aware of the environment and so i said and the atlantic called us sustainable perfection heard somebody gave applause but i've got a secret to tell you go your children up the re's no such thing as a sustainable building doesn't exist there's no such thing as a sustainable anything because all of life is sustained through underlying that it's all of life is sustained through underlying networks think about that so we've been building buildings for power eleven thousand years or so this isn't in jordan that they've discovered they believe that this is the oldest building ever constructed interesting enough it's not a house it was actually a community center so the first thing that humans built it was a permanent building was actually for the entire community which is pretty incredible but our nature has been building houses for three point eight billion years in nature makes the rules if you take a look at all of these things in creation you see things like the trees and like how do you design a tree in the same way you design a watershed in a river system and these patterns throughout the universe start imitating each other this is amazing this is actually a grid that i just laid over that this little flower and what that great is that's the that's the golden rectangle which has the thing called the fibonacci sequence and each time you take this rectangle it is  it's so perfect in religious cultures throughout history have recognized this pattern in nature and they even try to build their buildings like this as well each time you take this triangle if you make a perfect square in there what's left on the other side is another golden rectangle with the exact same ratio and if you take that one and you make another square what's left there at the lower right hand corner is another perfect golden rectangle and if you take that one and do it you go on infinity and keep going until you get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller parts and if you go the opposite way the same thing happens and the pattern is repeating every single place in the universe think about that and snail shells and sunflowers and if you count the number of seeds inside of a sunflower it's no matter what size that sunflower it's a fibonacci it's a fibonacci number it's one of the numbers in that sequence it's always there because it has to be so that's the big what how do we design if we're humans the thing that we have the other animals don't is this frontal cortex that can think about the future ants can't do this bees can't do this they're smarter than we are in a lot of ways but they can't think about the future that we can't they can't design things like we can in a way we we play god like that architect thinks he's god there is actually a term for these architects they called the god complex because they think their show powerful because they're capable of that kind of design but we're not we can't do that so how do we design with this kind of complexity that nature happens but that's the big what and i have to say i like to mix a lot said i like a pig watson i cannot to you all day to yourself the ones who are laughing so everyone was asking before about biofuel you're right she called me a biophilia so biophilia is this term o wilson and what it is is that it's this it's this innate love of nature he discovered or he hypothesized and it's now been proven that humans are actually hardwired to find these patterns in nature beautiful right who didn't think those patterns before were beautiful and there are certain things of fractal density like a density of a tree and all these other things that we find beautiful this is a jackson pollock painting and this guy richard taylor at stanford discovered that he went back and he looked now the fractal geometry was an invention it away or wasn't coined until way after jackson pollack who painted these paintings but somehow jackson pollock knew and what they what richard taylor discovered was the density in other words the void space versus the solid space inside of a jackson pollock painting was the same as you find in nature in trees and they've discovered that there's this area that if one is a straight line and two is a completely black and dark in space that somewhere in between there is this ideal ratio that appeals to us and it's somewhere in the neighborhood of one point three which incidentally is also close to the golden ratio but what's really neat is this self similarity that's happening inside of a jackson pollock painting it's happening in nature and what self similarity means is that there are certain patterns that keep repeating themselves in every single level of magnification right so what that means is if you take a little square inside the jackson pollock painting or the tree and you take the fractal density of the whole and then you look at the  of that that smaller part it's the same and if you zoom in a little further further out wherever you go at every level of magnification it's the same and what's really cool is that ari gold were a figure that was the same thing that was happening with the human heart right these branching systems this is a computer model on the left of a self similar structure of a branching tree or a river system or the human circulatory system or neurons in the brain or think about how many patterns in nature we've seen like that it's a computer simulation of that but itself similar at every level of magnification what he found was that the human heart to the same thing if you take that heart rate the healthy heart at three hundred minutes or thirty minutes or three minutes it has patterns that keep represented itself and that in the rhythm is the same and his son  musician decided that he was going to create music with the rhythms of different kinds of hearts right diseased hearts healthy hearts and then he played back this music for different people guess which one everyone liked the rhythm of the healthy heart was the one that they liked the ones that were diseased hearts they found stressful and irritating and people did not prefer those those pieces of music so the question for us is how do you design so how do you take this this idea of  what the hell is this rate how what is a fractal formula for home interesting enough this design here the classic architecture was actually designed with the golden ratio every single window is a little golden triangle the with between the top and the bottom each one there's all over this place there's different images that mimic the golden ratio the taj mahal all the the mona lisa all of these things have the same golden ratio in them so if you go and google off the grid for some reason i come up like two or three times on the first page of this term off the grid because people are misunderstanding what we've done in our house i think oh i look the grocer off the grid they put solar panels on the roof they get really energy efficient inside their house incredible comfortable house there off the grid but we're not nature doesn't do off grid doesn't exist nature does on network and so we're trying to do is provide this fractal example this rule that can be self similar and can be repeated over and over and over again to create a network of energy a network of water where you have localized sources for each and localised management of waste and everything else where the local  people in that community to know it the best and just recently we were certified as net zero energy we've been there any of two for a number of years but we actually went through the international living future institute and where the twenty first project on the planet to be certified under the living futurists and it's right here in michigan thank you and the neat thing is is that there's been a number of these buildings all over the world there's a there's a third house that there's one in new zealand there's one in austin texas and there's one right here in michigan and we did it we documented this vortex last year when we had these record cold temperatures and we can also even show exactly how comfortable the house was inside but so netzer energy is really so what we've proven by doing this is it's not a challenge it's a choice but as we talked about for it's also a requirement we're to have to do this this is the way nature does if you violate the rules of nature you get recalled by the creator so what is the simple rule the performance measure according to the living building challenge in the living future institute is really simple this is it onsite renewable energy going out is greater answer then the energy coming into a house that's it use less energy from the grid than you're giving back to the grid we took our gas meter we disconnected that because combustion is not allowed in these things there's nothing in nature that actually uses combustion or for energy my wife asked me this morning because we were talking about you know the way the way ants work inside of these farms there is actually this species of ant that actually farms their own food and it's amazing they actually go out and do all these incredible things and try to make this comparison she said but isn't that a little different to i said no what they're doing is they're using local resources they're using current solar income to do their system they're not taking a finite resource and pulling it out and using it to create their food they're using an infinite resource and they've been doing it for millions of years longer than we've been farming these ants have been farming it's crazy stuff they actually literally take little pieces you should just google this but they take little pieces of branches and leaves the called leaf cutters i think and they bring them back in their nother  off to another group another group takes them and cultivates them inside this little chamber underneath the ground and then another group comes by and kind of cultivate it works with it and they grow mushrooms and that's their food source is this little fungi and so actually farming their own food income what natural gas the one of the things google maps is started putting these methane sensors on all of their map trucks and so as they're going around neighborhoods this is boston they're able to see not just the street view maps and everything else but they're also able to see what is the level of methane that is in the air that's leaking out of it and you know you're going for a jog or walk into a neighborhood you smell natural gas you call a utility coming a smell of gas that got yada yada you turn on your stove you smell little gas that's all gas it's not being used to cook or anything like that it's just being it's lost it's going straight up in the air and it's methane so this is the map of just boston of what they're discovering so some of these really dark red red patterns that you see in there though those are there are the equivalent of nine thousand cars a day the same amount of emissions and the reason for that is because in the short term methane is eighty four times more potent than c o two right so this is one of the reasons that we need to do all like trick in the cool thing is that right here in michigan they're making amazing amazing appliances that we'll talk about that run just electricity that are way more efficient and gas appliances and the other reason is this this is a that's backdraft so my friend carl seville actually did this video so  what they did was they shut it off obviously and then they filled it with theatrical smoke and then they went up to the kitchen and they turned on the get the vent when they turn on the vent and blown out a thousand cubic feet per minute out of the house once you've sealed up the house which are everybody trying to do let's weather house what's happening is it's creating a negative pressure and it's pulling the carbon monoxide that supposed to be venting out of that gas pipe back into the house is poisonous gas coming back into the house and an extraordinary number of people die every single year of carbon monoxide poisoning so we don't have to worry about that anymore this is the numbers from january i should have updated this but because we have the numbers from february and they're a little bit better already so eighty three eighty nine thousand hundred eighty nine hundred is what we produced on the roof eighty three hundred is what we use we have a surplus of six hundred three kilowatt hours and not the rest of that just gets dumped into our ship evil's this was our bill from january that some minus sign right there at the bottom there minus five hundred thirty two dollars this was last year the first day of spring my little daughter dalia was born and we brought her across the threshold of the house and we had mail and there's a check in the mail from the utility company from d t e for five hundred dollars and i had to take a picture that because i had this moment it was like wow i'm bringing in this brand new human being into this earth and i'm crossing into this threshold of our house it's a beautiful home we've created and she's one of the first children on the planet that is going to grow up in a home that is net positive energy that is harvesting and living completely on current solar and and i thought that was pretty amazing but how did we do this right this one hundred fourteen year old house now clearly we must have gotten all the walls and we destroyed everything and we spent a million dollars to hyper insulated if anybody's familiar with our value our value the higher the r value our thirteen is what we have in our walls why because that's what we can fit between the plaster in the laugh that's it three or thirteen or one star fifteen if you include the plaster in the clapboard in the attic we put spray foam insulation we had a big issue with the historic with the state historic preservation office with our tax credit they denied us we said you're wrong we went through two years of appeals we won and we set a precedent saying that this is actually a healthier way to insulate the house then   and their method and preserve the house longer so we have this our twenty nine it's great it seals it it stops in the air gaps but it's not that much insulation again some of these passive houses that we're talking about of are ninety in the attic and we have our twenty nine so not that much we also have the original single pane windows they look a lot like this one we put some storm windows on the outside we weatherstripping as best we could we did whatever we could but at the time everybody was telling you had to build a net zero energy house so i said i said so so what's the secret that we accidently uncovered because i'm not an architect or an engineer so let me ask you this which one of these uses more energy this energy efficient light bulb on the right there or this hundred plus year old victorian house which one uses more energy anybody you know it's a trick question and of course everyone thinks it's the house but the thing is buildings don't use energy it's the crap you put inside them that uses energy so it's that light pole that's on that's using more energy so what people were missing is how do people use energy to show the on below the windows all the others that's just a tool to keep your heating and it's an important tool don't get me wrong and it's good that into smaller and smaller parts these are all actual appliances that are in our in our house and actually pay attention that local talk over there on the side so what we did was we took a look at every single place that we were using energy figure out how do we get that service get it better than what other people are getting and use less energy so the first thing we did was when we when we were doing this rehab we finance into our mortgage we put in a geothermal system thirty percent tax credit on that we didn't even get the thirty percent tax credit and the math still worked out because we got in before the tax credit was there  eighty percent savings on our heating bills and we could actually turn the heat up to six hundred seventy degrees then we put a smart thermostat as soon as they came out a few years ago says the eco be the nest is another one you can buy at lowe's at home depot this is my favorite  one is great started by the guys who made the i phone and the i pod they actually left the company because they didn't want to be making toys anymore they wanted to do something that fear fear was actually good for the planet and good for people so they start a company called nasa which was recently bought by google and what these thermostats do is all we can talk about are forever but just get one they will save at least at least another ten percent on your energy bill and they're between two hundred two hundred fifty bucks and you can turn your heat on and off from your phone and impress your friends this is what i call the light the lights are on but nobody's home but so it was we don't have to change train our daughters to turn lights off we train them to turn the lights off but they don't have to if the lights aren't turned off manually they will insignificant why should i worry well if you multiply that by eight thousand seven hundred sixty hours which the number of hours in a year i kilowatts that's eighty seven kilowatt hours a year wait a minute your t is actually using less energy than that little clock radio so what these people flat screens can use only sixty kilowatt hours in a year when you're actually get to watch honey boo boo marathons and you don't get to do that with the clock so the dear fridge is another great when i was in somebody's house so i looked inside the fridge they had in the basement this couple that we were working with and i was like what is real is this fridge for and they said oh and we opened it up and it was filled top to bottom with hot dog buns and we got these on sale when you have all these while we have a barbecue in june it's january when did you buy these last june so they're going to run this for years you can spend two hundred bucks on energy for the cheap hot dog buns pitching with your friends buy a commandeer fridge and put your de in that one in a really really good one the new refrigerator is now the biggest one that whirlpool makes uses only sixty watts compared to the old fridges right these are actual appliances that we recently got rid of so that was the actual stove that we had that was our washing machine they did they were the this is the first generation of the high efficiency washer this is the ones that rattled like crazy and didn't quite get your clothes clean if you didn't do everything just right when they broke after eight years because they were rattling all the time so the new ones they've got are amazing we upgraded we put this induction cooktop on here and these are all solar panels here that's how many fewer solar panels we need or how many more solar panels we would have to put on if we had  old appliances in order to be nets or energy so each one of these is reducing the energy by that that many solar panels we have thirty six panels on a roof so you can think about the percentage of energy and how much it takes out so induction cooktop oh boy how do i explain that google ind n cooktop in my name and you'll find you tube video of me doing some cool stuff with induction it's amazing and we cook all the time this is the the heat pump water heaters and what heat pumps do is instead of using energy energy in the ground wherever it is you want to take that heat that energy and move it from the place that you don't need it in to a place you do so if your basement or garage is hot you can actually in the summertime you can pull out the air out of the heat out of the air in the garage or in the or in your dehumidifying it as well you're pulling that heat you're dumping it in your hot water so instead of being a you know a really great ninety eight percent efficient unit it's now can be two or three hundred percent efficient because for every unit of  energy that you're getting from the electricity you're actually moving more energy into that unit so in the summertime the energy in this thing is you can get sixty percent energy reduction so on the that way to me that we need to talk about that the heat pump clothes dryer these are brand new they just came out in january here they've had in europe for years but whirlpool l g kenmore maytag a bunch of these are all available now they're not cheap they're news of they're a fifteen hundred bucks thirty or so someone for thirteen hundred dollars but they're amazing you don't need  vent because what it's doing is all right again let's look at the fractal of this right let's break this down into the smallest component parts the old school dryer is linear in design it takes electricity brought from a central power plant it heats an element in that seat pushes all of the oyster out of the clothes creates humidity that heat goes out of a pipe the pipe gets clogged have all kinds of problems in the pipe goes outside right to where it's really really cold in the wintertime says wait a minute why can't i use that heat again so it takes the heat and puts it into a condensing unit the condenser squeezes out all the moisture the moisture runs down the drain which is already in your laundry room because you've got your washing machine right next door and then it takes that heat and puts it back into the dryer again sixty percent energy reduction on your dryer doesn't destroy your clothes because it's actually dry your clothes at a lower temperature it doesn't a fry your clothes in order to force that moisture out and in some and some modes it actually can do it faster than in a traditional dryer it's amazing stuff this  all things that are coming out that's more and more efficient every single appliance that goes in so that's our little plaque that we're getting now where your net zero energy source urgency of this why do we spend so much of my time talking about these things so last year a group of and that the melt there appears to be unavoidable that sea level rise of ten feet or more may be unavoidable and that the collapse of that ice pick shelf is inevitable it's going to happen nothing we can do about  it so what does that mean how did this happen before the industrial revolution some time in seven hundred fifty this was the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere two hundred ninety parts per million it had been like that throughout human history humans had never lived at any level above this number three fifty is what james hansen and most climate scientists around the world say that is the number we have to be can't go over that number for a very long time to avoid the worst consequences we've got to get to three fifty that's where we are today right this number has not been seen since the pliocene era three to five million years ago is the last time there's any evidence that the atmosphere had this level of carbon dioxide and every year it's been going up incidentally when i was here several years ago into the talk it was somewhere around three hundred ninety parts per million so every time we get invited back to home maybe it's you guys causing this stop inviting there's a correlation there so the global temperature during the pliocene was five and a half to seven point two degrees fahrenheit warmer than it is today the arctic was ice free when it was four and a parts per million sea level was between sixteen to one hundred thirty feet higher than it is today coral reefs suffered massive dials right that's the number if we stay on this path in the next hundred years that's where the number would be if we keep with the kind of current level of carbon dioxide so i say this not to depress you because there are things that are incredibly incredibly hopeful but the ambitious is of this task  this urgency and you have to understand the urgency i mean every living system is in decline and we talk about by twenty fifty having to reduce these levels we can do it this is a picture of my daughter in fact when i was invited here last that was the first time my wife and i had actually gone out of town without our daughter in two thousand and eleven i think it's actually forty two years old in the twenty fifth she's six years old and that's her baby sister dolly he was born on the first day of spring last year and will be one years old in a couple of weeks to be thirty seven in the you're twent and now that i'm looking at all of your faces and think i said maybe i should have all these depressing slides so close to the end of this talk here and you're wondering should we do it how do we get from where we are now to twenty fifty i mean can we really visualize that kind of place really living in these really comfortable restored of homes but now let's think about here in michigan what it was like in one thousand nine hundred eighty there was not a single asphalt paved road on the planet not one not even in detroit the motor city was also the same year that henry ford started manufacturing his model t and this is actually a road in downtown detroit with the dead horse in the road one thousand eight hundred twenty sixteen for sold two and a half million model t s this is a photograph of woodward avenue in one nine hundred twenty who could possibly have envisioned that somebody would pick that dead horse off the road and we would have bumper to bumper traffic across there things can move incredibly incredibly quickly so you have to wonder why are we alone are we the only people doing this and the answer is no some the most beautiful buildings in the world now are living buildings this is a net zero multifamily complex in issaquah washington this is the van dusen botanical gardens this building stunning own water manages all of its own waste this is the packard foundation huge office building completely net zero energy this is a a cottage in san francisco but they're cheap in fairness you can sleep in a sleeping bag could be completely comfortable in san francisco especially if you have an ocean view but this is the center for stable landscapes in pittsburgh right same climate that we have for going to be a fully certified living building already has achievements or energy going to be harvesting all of its own water managing all of its own waste on site no sewer pipes no fresh water pipes coming in everything is treated everything is harvested just like a flower everything on site this is the omega institute this is a building interesting this is in in austria a colleague of mine at the university michigan designed this building and i was an engineer on this building this building doesn't have a heating cooling system and has almost the same number of heating cooling days as holland michigan is so this is near the mountains in austria and it doesn't have a heating cooling system it's completely passive design it's all operating by  by high tech windows that open and close and this is the bullet center home of the bullet foundation in the living future institute in seattle and it is also harvesting one hundred percent of its own energy one hundred percent of its own water and  managing all of its own waste right on site and now that we're net zero energy we're working with students from the university of michigan the college of engineering they have a team called the blue lab now they've started a living building challenge team and so we've applied for the living building challenge have already achieved that zero energy reaction to be adding more so that we can power our own water system and they're going to create the fractal rules for what it looks like to have a different kind of distributed water system a water system that we can harvest the water as it comes down from the sky directly where we would be using it and then return that water to the soil exactly the way it would if we weren't there at all that's the way the ant colony does it and that's the way a flower does and that's the way trees do it that's  everything in nature does it and if we violate those rules which he will be recall so it's just extraordinary the things that they're doing so now if we look at our homes typically they're not productive things right they're consumers we use things in our home and most of them only take from the communities that they're part of i bet net positive homes they can be beneficial to their communities they can actually give something back and so rather than being part of the desecration of these sacred places they can actually be respected and restore this crucial have this i just did yesterday why do you do this this is actually a model of this is the data visualization of the of the energy from the sun collected on a roof right each one of these little squares is an hour in a day those are two weeks in january the bottom one is two weeks in march now i want everybody to think about how did you feel and how did you feel today in this for this whole week in march when you're walking around in the weather is warming up in the sun is coming down on you that's energy from the sun the brighter the white the more energy from the sun is hitting our roof in holland michigan in grand rapids in an arbor in detroit that's a region and it dawned on me this morning actually wh spy i decided to add this thing is like wait a minute so i posted this on facebook yesterday as i was i question the need like you can see like the level of happiness were happier when the sun is shining and this thing that causes us to be been right it hits our skin it hits her eyes we walk around it's easier for us to love other people when it's this sunny that same thing that makes us happy is the same energy that gives us life and it's the same energy that's running our dishwasher and running or washing machine and running the heat in our house it's amazing it's amazing to think about this that this same energy that causes happiness is the same energy that we can use to power our lives to give us the comfort and space to create that joy and that love and that family so i'll leave you with this thought thank you very much