Steps towards a Sustainable Built Environment

Fifty years ago energy use was less than one third of what it is today. Even then, global carbon emissions exceeded sink capacity. Most journeys were made on foot, by bicycle or by bus. Motorways were a novelty and air travel undreamed of experience for most of the population. It has taken the industrialised world fifty years to engineer its present position, for the most part inadvertently through cheap energy and an apparently unlimited free sink for the products of combustion. It appears that it will take us as long again to engineer ourselves out of it again.. Steps Towards a Sustainable Built Environment make meaningful, quantitative projections about the implications of climate change and the wide range of mechanisms - regulatory, technical and political - by which construction can contribute to solving the problems facing modern society.