ShortList_0® LLC was founded by Bill Caplan in 2010 to bridge the gap between claims of sustainability and their true efficacy. Focusing on the built environment’s impact on people and the natural environment, ShortList_0’s goal sought to unify architectural form with sound sustainable technology and science. As global warming accelerated over the ensuing years, the built environment’s emissions—both embodied and operating—became its primary focus.

Mr. Caplan’s tenure at the multi-national instrumentation company he founded spanned high technology projects from U.S. Space and Defense programs to decoding the human genome. Facilities in the USA, UK, France and Germany led to a wide spectrum of high-tech projects in the Americas, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, Japan and China.

With an engineer’s understanding of sustainability, a passion for people-friendly building design, and a 34-year career in high-technology, Mr. Caplan then researched the built environment from a human and environmental perspective for more than a decade, contrasting designers’ claims with their ecological veracity. With growing concern for global warming and a penchant for proactive design, Caplan analyzed the built environment’s role—especially buildings and technologies that purported to be sustainable.

In 2016, he published Buildings Are for People: Human Ecological Design, a holistic approach to creating user- and community-friendly buildings that are sustainably designed. A sober look at our unsuccessful efforts to contain global warming, and the public’s self-delusion with all things “green” and “sustainable”, inspired Bill to write Thwart Climate Change Now: Reducing Embodied Carbon Brick by Brick, published by the Environmental Law Institute in November 2021.