“Buildings account for 40% of all energy consumption and represent 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions”. Yes, this is another article that starts with the same statistic you’ve heard for the past decade! Like a bad smell, it permeates every research report, media article and industry conference you’ve attended in recent memory. It must be the most commonly used statistic to demonstrate the impact of buildings on the environment, but how many people actually know where the figure comes from and how it was calculated? “There are three ways to not tell the truth: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” is a saying that was made famous by Mark Twain, though he attributed it to 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. It points to a problem with statistics, which is that while they can be true, they can change meaning depending on the context in which they are placed, and then there are multiple different ways […]