White House Pushes ‘Wooden Skyscrapers’ To Stop Global Warming

Because who doesn’t want to live or work in a 30 story building made out of kindling.

The White House launched a new campaign to sell its global warming agenda to rural America: “sustainable” buildings, including skyscrapers, made out of wood to lower carbon dioxide emissions.

The Agriculture Department (USDA) announced it was launching a new $1 million program to promote wood as a “green” building material to boost rural economies, as well as a $1 million competition “to demonstrate the architectural and commercial viability of using sustainable wood products in high-rise construction,” according to Department.

“Wood may be one of the world’s oldest building materials, but it is now also one of the most advanced,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “Building stronger markets for innovative new wood products supports sustainable forestry, helps buffer reduce [sic] greenhouse gas emissions, and puts rural America at the forefront of an emerging industry.”

Help reduce greenhouse gas emissions?  Just like the “Green” buildings were supposed to be oh, so energy efficient?

The project is combines parts of President Barack Obama’s Climate Action Plan and the administration’s push to win over rural America using green jobs. The USDA hopes to spur the use of wood technologies in industrial building projects like “tall buildings and skyscrapers, as well as other projects,” claiming that such buildings would produce be more energy efficient and reduce carbon emissions.

“By some industry estimates, a 3-5 story building made from emerging wood technologies has the same emissions control as taking up to 550 cars of the road for one year,” according to USDA. “Wood-based designs have also been demonstrated to improve energy efficiency, thereby reducing energy consumption for heating and cooling.”

The wood industry applauded USDA’s plan to promote wood from rural America, saying that such efforts would help the environment and save energy.

“Wood building products provide numerous environmental benefits, not the least of which is reducing greenhouse gas emissions and storing atmospheric carbon for decades,” American Wood Council President Robert Glowinski. “Wood products manufacturing also requires much less energy and results in less air and water pollution than many alternative building materials.”

Let’s look at some of the actual science regarding wooden structures from NCSEA, shall we.

… Figure 5 shows an apartment complex that was completed in 2010 and was about half occupied at the time of the tornado. The whole facility was damaged extensively because it was in the direct path of the tornado and wind speeds increased even further because of the terrain, which consisted of hills on all sides. Evidence suggests that the structures were likely designed and built according to the 2006 IBC, with hurricane clips between trusses and the top plates, code-required nailing of roof and wall sheathing, and anchor bolts in exterior wall sill plates every four to six feet. Part of the complex was leveled down to a clean concrete slab, where even linoleum flooring was removed. This illustrates the difficulty of designing a wood frame building economically that can resist the effects of the most severe tornado wind speeds.

wood damage from tornado

Clearly the “Party Of Science™” brain trusts in the Obama Administration missed this golden nugget of structural information.  I’m going to take a guess that not one of these geniuses would live in a ground floor wood structure in tornado alley, much less a 30 story building.