PH+ revisited: Seeing the wood for the trees (part one), with Andy Simmonds (AECB) and Lenny Antonelli (PH+)

Merry Christmas!

This week we have a Passive House Plus revisited two-parter for you, led by our occasional co-host Lloyd Alter, looking at his favourite article of 2021: Seeing the wood for the trees - Placing ecology at the heart of construction.

We're joined by authors Lenny Antonelli and Andy Simmonds and the conversation wheels around, covering the place of mass timber as a solution to construction's problems, embodied carbon, why we should just use less, and why it's so hard to use less, amongst lots of other things.

It turned out to be an extra long one but it felt deserving of the space, so rather than butcher the conversation we thought we'd just cut it in two and let you hear the lot. Hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Notes from the show

• The PH+ article: Seeing the wood for the trees - Placing ecology at the heart of construction
• Lenny Antonelli on Linkedin
• Andy Simmonds on LinkedIn
• An article with the 'just do less pyramid' from Treehugger: Can Architects Survive in a World Where We Have to Build Less?
• Another article with the 'just do less pyramid' from Treehugger: The Key to Green Building Is to Use Less Stuff
• A link to the Half earth paper: Protecting half of the planet could directly affect over one billion people
• The AECB Youtube channel
• Biomass - a burning issue, the AECB-commissioned article by Nick Grant and Alan Clarke (only the cached version appears to exist online now)
• The Guardian article about the 10% contributing the most carbon emissions  
• The Finnish paper Lloyd references: The sufficiency perspective in climate policy: How to recompose consumption
  
  

**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.

• Follow us on the Zero Ambitions LinkedIn page
• Jeff, Alex, and Dan about websites, branding, and communications - [e-mail]; Everything is User Experience
• Subscribe and advertise with Passive House Plus (UK edition here too)
• Check Lloyd's Substack: Carbon Upfront
• Join ACAN
• Join the AECB 
• Join the IGBC
• Check out Her Own Space, the renovation and retrofit platform for women (but not in a patronizing way)

**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**

What is Zero Ambitions Podcast?

Zero Ambitions is a consultancy and weekly podcast about sustainability and the built environment.

We find interesting and experienced guests who know what they're talking about, usually to discuss how we navigate the complexity of decarbonisation and sustainability in the built environment and its many related sectors.

Hosted by Jeff Colley and Dan Hyde, publishers of Passive House Plus magazine (UK and Ireland), the podcast has now grow into a consultancy, Zero Ambitions Partners.

The consultancy specialises in defensible sustainability communications. We create the strategy that makes built environment leaders stand out, enabling them to occupy positions that are distinct and defensible.

As with the podcast itself, we help organisations to communicate about what they do and the value that they offer. Usually, this means strategies to change a conversation from price to value and how to futureproof an offer with evidence that makes its claims watertight.

If you're a leader, or want to become one, we help you to make sense of where you stand in your sector, how to improve your positioning, how to communicate this to the market you operate in, and how to highlight the difference between you and your peer group.

If you can engage your value chain by speaking about what matters to them, you can educate your key stakeholders and turn them into evangelists for your cause.

Book a ‘ZAP Defensibility Audit’, but brace yourself
- Uncover value and opportunities that you may 
not have recognised
- Find out if your sustainability claims are defensible
- Find out if your claims are too meek
- Change the conversation from price to value