Please check out and support the Carbon Leadership Forum, a group focused on minimizing the overall carbon impacts of construction and the built environment.

The Carbon Leadership Forum is accelerating the transformation of the building sector to radically reduce the embodied carbon in building materials and construction through collective action. We pioneer research, create resources, foster cross-collaboration, and incubate member-led initiatives to bring embodied carbon emissions of buildings down to zero.

We are architects, engineers, contractors, material suppliers, building owners, and policymakers who care about the future and are taking bold steps to decarbonize the built environment, with a keen focus on eliminating embodied carbon from buildings and infrastructure.

I’m not sure Bill Gates is directly associated with Carbon Leadership Forum, but this video fits the bill perfectly:

Climate, Carbon and the Built Environment: The Impact of Buildings on Carbon Emissions

Globally, the building and construction sectors account for nearly 40% of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in constructing and operating buildings (including the impacts of upstream power generation).

1 Current building codes address operating energy but do not typically address the impacts ‘embodied’ in building materials and products. However, more than half of all GHG emissions are related to materials management (including material extraction and manufacturing) when aggregated across industrial sectors.

2 As building operations become more efficient, these embodied impacts related to producing building materials become increasingly significant.

Bill knows: “Innovation can do magical things…”