Z E M C H 2 0 1 2 I n t e r n a t i o n a l C o n f e r e n c e
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power for 50 million people for up to 48 hours in places at the hottest time of year with
problems exacerbated by high air temperatures and resulting high air conditioning use.
Yet we have known, for a long time that these problems approached us so why have our
actions to avoid them been so ineffectual? Hardin (1968 and 1994) developed the idea
of the Tragedy of the Commons to describe the dilemma that arises from the situation in
which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-
interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is
not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen. His ideas were taken up by many
attempting to rationalise why in the face of our growing knowledge base decisions were
being made that appear to push progress into socially, environmentally damaging
directions. Increasing numbers of authors suggest that the internal mechanisms of
Capitalism are to blame and will inevitably take us to the cliff edge highlighted by Hardin
(Ayres, 1999). Certainly the cry of ‘Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes’, who guards the
guardians is a key one and some suggest that until we have tackled the inordinate
influence of the minority of very clever, vested interests capable of navigating their way
through the ‘wickedly’ complex systems involved then we will never have truly
sustainable development (Lazarus, 2009). Nowhere is this better illustrated than in huge
pressure paid for by the fossil fuel industry that has held back the solar industries for
decades but thankfully not prevented them from having a bright future regardless
(Aanesen et al., 2012).
The growth of our environmental awareness and global and national legislations has
been described by many authors, as has been the pragmatic design steps required to
achieve demonstrably low carbon buildings. The simple mantra of having a well
performing building, with efficient equipment, run as much as possible on renewable
energy with optimised behaviours and controls was epitomised by the Ecohouse design
movement that pioneered building integrated photovoltaics (PVs) on low energy
buildings (Roaf et al., 2012).
However counter to this is a political system at play that, while ostensible driving
development in the direction of increased sustainability, may well be, in reality, doing
exactly the opposite. The UK building regulations for instance push designers into air
conditioning offices (Touhy, 2008), when the widely referred to ECON 19 Guide
(BRECSU, 2000), first published in the early 1990s showed that they consume typically
three or four times more energy than naturally ventilated ones (Touhy, 2010). Modern
approaches to office construction are in fact typically leading to more energy hungry
buildings than traditional ones (Touhy, 2010). Many designers have their modest robust
designs failed by local planners on some technical issues, while the richest people on
the planet as granted permission to build glass sky scrapers that meet no technical
requirements of the building regulations and are have huge energy and environmental
penalties that must be paid for by the ordinary citizen. The dangers of these unfettered
trends to higher energy using buildings were discussed by Roaf et al., (2009) in relation
to growing extreme weather trends in our changing climate as shown in Figure 1.
How can this have happened? The use of prescriptive fixed thermal comfort
assumptions are partly responsible, such as are required by the Predicated Mean Vote
method developed by Fanger (1972) and used in many building climate models. The
single target temperatures not only do not reflect when people do actually feel
comfortable (Nicol et al., 2012) but require clients and designers to meet them using
mechanical systems that may be untried on a large scale in different climates. Recent
studies have shown that the result can be widespread thermal dissatisfaction, poorer
indoor air quality and higher energy bills (Balvers et al., 2012). Many reasons for this
