When Stacy Smedley was eight years she watched all the land around her house become clear cut a forest and turned into a field of cookie cutter houses. She decided that she could build things that are good for the environment. She went on to become an architect so that she could do just that. When she got involved with the fourth living building project with Skanska, she realized that it’s the construction industry which touches many more parts. For Smedley, this was the perfect fit: she could join a company with a massive footprint that was willing to lead on the climate front.

I like to consider opportunities to reverse climate change in terms of aikido. Aikido is a japanese form of martial arts which also translates to “the way of the harmonious spirit.” It takes an understanding of how things are and the inflection points of where to create the greatest impact. Essentially, aikido is able to use the force of the attacker against themselves with great concern for the well-being of the attacker. In this way, Smedley embodies a black-belt aikido climate practitioner. She is able to use the force of what is responsible for 40% of world carbon emissions into a force that can neutralize itself. If the attacker is the emitter, then Smedley is amongst the cadre of practitioners who can gently guide the attacker into doing the right thing through building open-source tools to understand emissions from different parts along the supply chain of the construction industry. It’s a practical approach: no one is arguing that the concrete, steel, or other structural components will go away. It is a question how to bring the cumulative emissions to zero. Reduce what you can, negate the rest.

Ross Kenyon and I sat down with Smedley on April 25th to bring her on to the reversing climate change podcast. We got into some geeky details like energy use intensity which can be calculated by energy use * square foot * year. In some way, it’s similar to how many of miles per gallon in a car (though a bit more complicated because it is normalized for weather data). As opposed to miles per gallon — which should increase, energy use intensity should decrease, and Skanska has worked to reduce the average Energy Use Intensity in their buildings from one hundred to forty.

Mother Skanska is committed to zero carbon emissions by 2050. This is a big deal, and they will do it by reducing what they can and negating the rest. They realize that there are different stakeholders along the chain of getting to this goal, so they’ve created an open-sourced tool to determine emissions and work toward standardized carbon accounting. What they’re building is an example of a functional tool that gets better the more people use it. It’ll only get used if it’s out in the open and if the data is normalized. It’s really exciting to see companies thinking in this way, because building something that can be open and have cross industry uses is how Nori thinks about the problem too!