COURSE: Embodied Carbon, Walkable Cities, and the Climate Lawsuits That Could Change Everything

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Embodied Carbon, Walkable Cities, and the Climate Lawsuits That Could Change Everything

AIA CES program ID: GMGG.0010

Approved LUs: 1.0 LU|HSW

Prerequisites: None

Program level: Entry

Advance learner preparation: None

Who gets to decide whether climate risk becomes a legal reality with consequences, or stays a permanent argument that never has to change anything?

This course session follows the power path that sits upstream of climate outcomes: the donor networks, legal strategy shops, and political operators shaping courts, agencies, and the public story about climate risk. You see how Leonard Leo’s dark-money infrastructure functions as an influence pipeline for judicial nominations and coordinated legal pressure, then how that kind of machine shows up in real stakes like the Honolulu climate liability case and the organized efforts by Republican attorneys general and allied groups to block similar lawsuits nationwide.

You then zoom into Project 2025 and the Heritage agenda as a practical blueprint for deregulating energy, shrinking the EPA, and stripping climate language out of federal agencies, and you connect those institutional moves to the physical world architects and communities have to live inside.

The session grounds that urgency in the 1.5°C threshold and the idea of overshoot, then turns to where leverage actually exists in emissions sectors and the built environment, including the difference between operational and embodied carbon and the real toolkit of net-zero buildings, low-carbon materials, and walkable communities. It lands on civic engagement and day-to-day professional choices as the hinge point between a future organized around liability avoidance and a future organized around public health, safety, welfare, and planetary stability.

Program Description: