Straight.com

If you fell asleep today and woke up in 2035, you’d never be able to recognize the places where you now live, work, and play. That’s because they’ll no longer exist as they do now. By then, if current trends continue, almost two-thirds of Canada’s built environment will be new, according to Natural Resources Canada statistics. That’s partly because, as UBC planning professor Bill Rees estimates, the world will have added more people to cities in the first 30 years of this century than had accumulated on the planet up to 1932. Because the building industry is already responsible for 30 percent of the world’s energy consumption and 40 percent of the Lower Mainland’s greenhouse-gas emissions, the not-so-distant consequences are frightening.