Houston faces a serious problem in air pollution, leapfrogging with Los Angeles as the city with the most polluted air in the country. Our energy-driven economy has found itself at odds with the crisis in public health that has come from industrial pollution. With five million people living and driving here, the solutions will not come quickly, or easily.

While the impact industrial plants and cars have on air pollution seems obvious, few realize our houses negatively impact air quality as well. In fact the average home produces twice as much greenhouse gas pollution as the average car! Because of emissions produced by power plants that generate the electricity used to run modern homes – plus home emissions from such things as oil or gas-fired furnaces – an average house is responsible for the release of 22,000 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually compared to a typical car's 11,000 pounds of CO2, estimates the EPA. Today we are building the most costly, wasteful, environmentally damaging homes on the planet.

New home construction consumes two-fifths of all the lumber and plywood used in the United States, purchased at ever-escalating prices. A typical 1,700 square foot wood frame home requires the equivalent of clear cutting one acre of forest, says the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2003, 35,000 homes were constructed in the eight-county area comprising Houston, according to the Houston Applied Research Center. At least that many homes will be built each year for the next five or six years. That means that at least 175,000 acres of forest will be cut over the next five years to build these new homes in Houston. Because trees offer our first line of defense in absorbing hydrocarbons, thus decreasing greenhouse gases, every tree we cut increases our exposure to global warming.

CLEAN is committed to finding solutions that can clean Houston’s air and benefit our city socially and economically. One of our solutions bypasses the bureaucracy involved in changing legislation, steps around the need to regulate industry, and offers a grass-roots, business-friendly, incentive-based approach to clean our air, save people money, and benefit the economy. Our mission with this project is nothing less than to change the way we build houses in this country.