Zero Ambitions Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

A wise woman once said: "sustainability is the doing, ESG is the talking about it".

Today an Irish house-building giant has made a major move on Passive House — publishing a positioning paper and announcing the ongoing construction of over 1,700 homes to the standard.

Joining us to talk about this are Nicola Cronin (Senior Sustainability Analyst) and Stephen O'Shea (Head of Sustainable Construction and ESG Reporting).

Rather than this being another episode about Passive House we're more concerned with why a massive housebuilder has chosen to build to the standard. In this case, the answer highlights the positive impact that corporate reporting – in this case ESG – can have on the practice of construction. 

Where we've often derided ESG factors as a corporate fig leaf, in this instance ESG factors have driven institutional change. Most importantly, the scale of this change clearly illustrates the massive impact that big developers can have. If they choose to try.

In short, we're talking about how change is made and why change is made.

Links are below.

Notes from the show

• Nicola Cronin on LinkedIn
• Stephen O'Shea on LinkedIn
• Cairn Homes' Passive House positioning paper
• Cairn on LinkedIn
• Cairn Homes' 2023 sustainability report

**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 (we still don't have a proper website)
• Jeff, Alex, and Dan about websites, branding, and communications - zap@eiux.agency; 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

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

Jeff invited Mhairi Grant, co founder of award-winning architectural practice Paper Igloo, to join us to talk about the challenges of ensuring that one's ideas for sustainable design actually make their way through to the construction phase.

The subject was sparked by a conversation she and Jeff had about lessons learned from a flawed project (that we discuss) and what it takes to ensure that our best, or even just easiest ideas are delivered upon in the build phase.

Usually, we'd think about specifying a project in a way that can resist value engineering, but sometimes the project can be scuppered by something as simple as an easily avoidable comprehension issue.

Notes from the show

• Mhairi Grant on LinkedIn
• A link to Scotland's Passivhaus Consultation: Building Regulations: Determining the principles for a Scottish equivalent to the Passivhaus standard: Stage 1 consultation
• The Paper Igloo website
• Paper Igloo on Instagram
• The Passive House Plus feature on Mhairi's own home in Stirlingshire 

**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 (we still don't have a proper website)
• Jeff, Alex, and Dan about websites, branding, and communications - zap@eiux.agency; 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

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

This week we're joined by Iva Merheim Eyre from SMARTER4EU to talk about her recently published report the Catalogue of Good Practices, a document that details a variety of place-based hybrid finance models that have been used to rebuild and renovate homes in locations as wide-ranging as the postwar Balkan states to London's own Westminster.

This is all part of a concerted effort to use finance to drive better building standards across the world, not just the EU, and there's a lot we can all learn.

Notes from the show

• Iva Merheim Eyre on LinkedIn
• The Smarter Finance 4 EU website
• The Catalogue of Good Practices a hybrid green finance catalogue for the reconstruction of Ukraine
• Let's build green and elevate 
• A call to action for municipalities to get in touch with SMARTER4EU

**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 (we still don't have a website)
• Jeff, Alex, and Dan about websites, branding, and communications - zap@eiux.agency; 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**

Guestless, we had a chat amongst ourselves and talked a lot about social housing and retrofit. Eventually, we even got on to talking about Alex's passiv shed. 

We've got some links below to the things we talked about. 

• A link to the BE-ST Fest 2022 web page.
• Jan Rosenow's article 'Is heating homes with hydrogen all but a pipe dream? An evidence review'.
• That Richard Seymour book: The Disenchanted Earth: Reflections on Ecosocialism & Barbarism (it's really good and a very easy read).
• Ryan Philip's blog 'Heat Pumps are not the Answer'.
• That Guardian article about how the Scottish rent cap will affect social housing.
• The white paper we wrote about how social housing could be a catalyst for the retrofit industry.
• We'll add a link to some photos of Alex's shed. Keep an eye on his LinkedIn profile.

**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.

• Join the AECB 
• Join ACAN
• Subscribe and advertise with Passive House Plus (UK edition here too)
• Email Alex and Dan about websites, branding, and communications (zap@eiux.agency; Everything is User Experience)

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

We got a chance to have a chat with a bonafide celebrity, Ed Begley Jr. As well as being a TV and Hollywood actor, Ed is a long-time environmental activist, and in those terms, Ed is a man who walks the walk, not just red carpets.

Jeff got in touch with him to speak about the Platinum LEED house he was able to build following the success of his reality TV show. The interview was actually conducted for Passive House Plus magazine, but we thought it might work as a podcast episode too, so we recorded it and have a version ready to put out as a bonus episode on the Zero Ambitions feed.

We talked about Ireland, what it's like to be a sustainability-focused person promoting better practice in a land of overconsumption, his long-time interest in environmentalism, the challenges of any resource-conscious building project, and Ed's three pillars for driving progress in sustainability activism.

**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.

• Join the AECB 
• Join ACAN
• Subscribe and advertise with Passive House Plus (UK edition here too)
• Email Alex and Dan about websites, branding, and communications (zap@eiux.agency; Everything is User Experience)

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

The immensely knowledgable and experienced Marina Topouzi and Nigel Griffiths joined us for a chat about retrofit, this time adding heritage into the mix and acknowledging the past, not just thinking about the future.

Marina Topouzi is a research associate at the Environmental Change Institute's energy research programme in the Lower Carbon Futures team. Her current project researches deep renovation policy initiatives and policy mixes across the world including both technology-focused and people-focused policies. Marina has been involved in building the Eco Retrofit App - a risk management tool to support low-energy skills literacy and mitigate the risk of poor-quality retrofits. She is a steering group member for the BSI PAS 2035: 2019 Retrofit standards.

Nigel Griffiths is a sustainability and energy efficiency expert in the built environment with over 25 years’ of experience as a practitioner, project manager, author, and consultant. As Director of the Sustainable Traditional Buildings Alliance, he works at the cutting edge of sustainability for heritage buildings. He is the author of numerous reports and several books on sustainable building including the Eco House Manual (Haynes 2007, paperback edition 2016) and more recently From Retrofit to Regeneration: A blueprint for post-Covid recovery.

**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.

• Join the AECB 
• Join ACAN
• Subscribe and advertise with Passive House Plus (UK edition here too)
• Email Alex and Dan about websites, branding, and communications (zap@eiux.agency; Everything is User Experience)

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

Alex and Dan took some time to speak with Allan Smith, Low Carbon Manager at Morrison Construction, to find out about how a tier one contractor is approaching the low-carbon game.

The conversation took in the viability of the Passivhaus standard at scale, the responsibility for leading your supply chain in learning how to deliver for you, a little bit of retrofit, and a little about the difference between private and public sector demand.

**OUR OWN 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)
Join the AECB
Join ACAN
Subscribe and advertise with Passive House Plus (UK edition here too)
Speak to Alex and Dan about websites, branding, and communications (Everything is User Experience)
**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**