The difference between them lies in the deadline: What should Washington aim for, right now?

On March 11, will highlight a goal, based on the state鈥檚 own policies and recommendations 鈥� 鈥淲ashington State Can Decarbonize in a Decade鈥� 鈥� and feature Schwartz, Simonen, and local youth activists Julia Barnett and Sarah Starman. The event will be broadcast live from the KUOW studios at 7 p.m. The event was originally scheduled before a live audience at Seattle University but was relocated due to public health guidance regarding large gatherings.

, upcoming chair of the 天美影视传媒 Department of Architecture and director of the , focuses on building materials and the carbon emissions of a building over its lifetime. The Carbon Leadership Forum brings together academics and building industry professionals working聽to eliminate embodied carbon in buildings and infrastructure by inspiring innovation and spurring change through collective action.聽Last fall they introduced the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator, or EC3 tool, which is a free聽tool for architects, engineers, owners, construction companies, building material suppliers and policy makers to evaluate and reduce embodied carbon emissions from construction materials.

is a UW professor of chemical engineering and director of the , which supports development of next-generation solar energy and battery materials and devices, and integrating them with systems and the grid. Created by the state in 2013, the institute鈥檚 mission is to 鈥渁ccelerate the adoption of a scalable clean energy future that will improve the health and economy of our state, nation and world.鈥�

So the irony is not lost on Schwartz that, in this debate, he鈥檚 arguing the 鈥渃on鈥� side of decarbonizing 鈥� or lowering greenhouse gas emissions to zero 鈥� in a decade. Simonen will argue the 鈥減ro.鈥�

But for Schwartz, it鈥檚 not about whether lowering emissions is a good idea 鈥� that gets a resounding 鈥測es.鈥� It鈥檚 about setting what he sees as realistic targets and time frames.

鈥淚 am the most optimistic person about how we鈥檙e going to tackle this problem, but I want us to focus on the real challenges, and I believe Washington focusing its attention on 100% elimination of emissions from energy use in 10 years we take our eyes off the most important prize, which is decarbonizing the planet,鈥� he said.

Schwartz said he supports goals that have realistic pathways to success, like the Clean Energy Transformation Act or a low-carbon fuel standard, because they provide wins along the way, reduce fear of change, and empower people to do more.

鈥淲hen you start with a goal that鈥檚 unachievable, you don鈥檛 get started, And when you don鈥檛 get started, you don鈥檛 learn how to go faster,鈥� Schwartz said.

Simonen, meanwhile, is enthusiastic about the chance to engage the public on the issue. She wants listeners to recognize the urgency of climate change and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and that there are steps everyone can take to be part of that solution.

Simonen approaches the topic from a construction angle: the carbon impacts of buildings and infrastructure. Buildings, she pointed out, are responsible for over 40% of global carbon emissions.

鈥淪cience-based targets tell us that globally emissions must reduce by over 50% in the next decade,鈥� she said. 鈥淲hile our work at the Carbon Leadership Forum at UW is keenly focused on building material impacts, we鈥檝e been interacting with global organizations setting regional decarbonization targets, and I will bring knowledge about these initiatives to inform the debate.鈥�

Both Simonen and Schwartz want listeners to come away with a sense of optimism and opportunity.

鈥淲e in Washington have an opportunity and responsibility to be global leaders,鈥澛燬imonen said.

Kate Simonen, Vikram Prakash honored by Association for Collegiate Schools of Architecture

and , faculty members in the Department of Architecture, have both received 2020 Architectural Education Awards from the .

The honor architectural educators across a dozen categories for “exemplary work in areas such as building design, community collaborations, scholarship and service.”

Prakash, professor of architecture, received a Distinguished Professor Award, recognizing “a positive, stimulating and nurturing” influence on students, inspiring them to contribute to the advancement of architecture.

Simonen, associate professor of architecture, received the TAD Research Contribution Award, for the best article 鈥� “Benchmarking the Embodied Carbon of Buildings” 鈥� from the association’s Simonen’s co-authors are graduate research assistant and Swiss researcher . Simonen is founding director of the UW-based . Learn more on the College of Built Environments .

Top newsmaker: Simonen also was named one of the by Engineering News Record. “It has been a banner year for Kate Simonen and her burgeoning band of embodied carbon busters bent on reducing the negative environmental impacts of building production,” the editors write. The top newsmakers will be celebrated April 2 at an event in New York.

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Seattle Times names Valerie Curtis-Newton among most influential people of the decade

The Seattle Times has named , UW professor of drama, as one of “.”

A professor of directing and acting, Curtis-Newton is head of directing for the School of Drama, and also heads the , dedicated to exploring African American life, history and culture.

Calling Curtis-Newton “a titan in the Seattle cultural scene,” the Times writes: “She got there not by being flashy (though she’s certainly capable of inspiring a crowd) but by doing the hard work in the trenches, with the community and inside arts organizations large and small, doggedly insisting on two things: artistic excellence and increasingly incorporating a Black lens into the collective view of what theater is and can be.”

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Alison Gray, professor of oceanography, receives first Microsoft Investigator Fellowship

, UW assistant professor of oceanography, has been named recipient of an inaugural . The awards are given to empower researchers of all disciplines who plan to make an impact with research and teaching using the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. Each fellowship provides $100,000 a year for two years and various training and community events.

Gray studies the circulation of the ocean and its impact on the physics and chemistry of the climate system. Her research seeks to improve understanding of the interactions between ocean circulation and global biogeochemical cycles.

Microsoft chose 15 fellowships among over 290 proposals received. Learn more on the College of the Environment or the original Microsoft .

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Donna Berry, Jennifer Sonney chosen for School of Nursing faculty endowed fellowships

School of Nursing faculty members and have been chosen the inaugural recipients of two endowed faculty fellowship awards.

Berry will receive the Health Informatics Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Nursing, established by Marjorie V. Batey. Berry will work to implement evidence-based practices in acute care and ambulatory settings by integrating health informatics technologies into clinical processes.

Sonney, an assistant professor of nursing, will receive the Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Symptom Science, which is supported by two endowments; one was established by Batey in the name of Elizabeth C. Giblin; the other is in the names of Lucia S. and Herbert L. Pruzan. Sonney will work to improve the health of children with asthma by reducing symptoms and establishing lifelong self-management skills.

Learn more from an .

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Four UW bioengineers receive Society for Biomaterials 2020 awards

, and will receive the 2020 Technology Innovation and Development Award from the which promotes advances in biomaterials sciences research and development. will receive the society’s 2020 Young Investigators Award. The were announced Jan. 6.

The Technology Innovation and Development Award recognizes an individual or team’s successful application of basic and applied biomaterials research in development of a new medical product or technology that significantly benefits medical or surgical patients.

The three faculty members were honored for leadership of the UW-based , which was started by Ratner and is co-directed by Castner and Gamble.

Gamble is a research associate professor of bioengineering, Castner a professor emeritus of chemical engineering and of bioengineering, and Ratner a professor of bioengineering and chemical engineering.

The Young Investigators Award recognizes an individual demonstrating outstanding achievements in biomaterials research. DeForest is assistant professor of chemical engineering and of bioengineering.

All four are of the .

The is a collaborative effort among academics and industry professionals based in the UW’s that studies reducing carbon emissions over a building’s entire period of use, or life cycle.

There is growing recognition in the building industry of the need to track carbon emissions across a building’s full life cycle, said , architect, structural engineer and UW associate professor of architecture, who leads the carbon forum. But she said industry professionals need better information and guidance on how to implement low-carbon method in practice.

The forum took a step in this direction in December by publishing the results of its . “Embodied carbon” is the name for all carbon emissions that occur when extracting, manufacturing and installing building materials. The study employs a process called 鈥� LCA for short 鈥� to measure embodied carbon emissions in buildings. Simonen wrote on the subject in 2014.

The benchmark study provides data to building industry professionals so they can include study of embodied carbon into their decision making. It includes the largest known of building-embodied carbon with information on more than 1,000 buildings. The report also provides a foundation for the next stage of the project, the development of a Life Cycle Assessment Practice Guide, due by the end of 2017.

“Manufacturing materials and constructing buildings results in significant energy use and carbon impact,” said Simonen. “This research helps us answer questions such as: Is this a high (or low) carbon building? Which material choices or building systems lead to lower carbon solutions? How significant are ‘green’ design choices?”

To place construction-related carbon emissions in real-world perspective, Simonen added: Construction alone of a single “low embodied carbon” office building could save 30 million kilograms, or 33,000 tons, in carbon emissions 鈥� “the emissions equivalent of avoiding driving a car around the Earth 3,000 times.”

This benchmarking stage follows the Carbon Leadership Forum work in 2012 to create one of the first sets of “product category rules” for reporting the environmental footprint of concrete, enabling concrete producers to more accurately report on their product’s carbon emissions. These standards have been used by the top six concrete producers in the United States to inform their selection of concrete mixes.

“In the design phase, our data enables architects and engineers to use carbon, and other environmental impacts, as a performance criteria in addition to common criteria such as cost and strength, when specifying and selecting concrete,” Simonen said.

To meet the goals of the on climate, global carbon emissions must peak by the year 2020 and fossil fuels be eliminated entirely by 2050.

The聽Embodied Carbon Benchmark Study聽is the first stage of the ongoing project called LCA for Low Carbon Construction, and was funded by the Charles Pankow Foundation, Skanska USA and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

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For more information, contact Simonen at 206-685-7282 or

Every year the United States alone uses about 300 million cubic yards of ready-mix concrete to make streets, bridges, buildings, dams and driveways 鈥� and it lasts a very long time.

But, what if concrete could be made “greener”? What would the global energy savings be if concrete had a 50 percent smaller carbon footprint?

Concrete is typically made of a combination of cement, rock, sand and water. To produce cement, materials are heated in a large kiln that emits greenhouse gases through the burning of fossil fuels and a chemical reaction termed calcination.聽 Rock and sand also must be processed and transported, and all these processes have environmental impacts.

That’s the question being addressed by the 天美影视传媒-led , an alliance of researchers, associations and companies in the building industry formed to develop what are called environmental footprint standards for building materials, especially concrete.

Those standards, also called product category rules, are designed to meet goals expressed by , an industry nonprofit working to dramatically reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in the manufacture and transport of construction materials. More specifically, Architecture 2030 came from the group’s , which seeks a 50 percent reduction in carbon-equivalent product footprint by 2030.

The standards alone don’t create energy savings, of course 鈥� they’re designed to enable direct comparisons of building materials from different manufacturers.

Methods already exist for reducing concrete’s environmental impact, such as replacing cement with ash from coal-fired power plants, called fly-ash. Innovative manufacturing methods and materials also are being developed.

But before now, there was no method to consistently compare different concretes to ensure selection of a lower environmental impact concrete.

“We already know how to specify concrete for a lot of performance characteristics 鈥� strength, shrinkage, permeability,” said Kate Simonen, UW assistant professor of architecture and director of the forum. “Now, people who want to specify environmental performance as a different performance characteristic will have a method to compare it.”

Simonen said that the results of these standards, called Environmental Product Declarations, help users understand and compare the environmental impacts related to product manufacturing, use and disposal, roughly the same way a nutrition label shows the ingredients in a food product.

She said the standards also will provide “quantifiable life-cycle information” to enable comparisons among products fulfilling the same function. Life-cycle assessment measures a project’s total environmental impact from design and construction through its entire use and end of life.

The standards will have practical applications, such as helping a city or company set and meet specific targets for reducing carbon use. Cities trying to push their carbon use even lower will be able to specify low-carbon concrete. Users who might be willing to pay a higher price for a lower-environmental-impact concrete could provide financial incentive to advance developing technologies.

Ed Mazria, Architecture 2030 founder and CEO, praised the standards. “Reducing the carbon footprint from concrete is one of the most significant actions that the building sector can take. The Carbon Leadership Forum recognized this issue, and its members set in motion a process for developing clear rules to govern the environmental reporting for concrete mix designs.”

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For more information or interviews, contact Simonen at 415-641-1421 or ksimonen@uw.edu. A copy of the new product category rules and environmental product declarations is available on request.