LEED buildings get points for green things like bike racks and good energy use, but it doesn’t actually enforce energy efficiency (Photo by Lester Graham)
The biggest energy users in America are not cars and trucks – they’re buildings. Buildings use about 40% of the nation’s energy. In 2000, the US Green Building Council introduced a program that certifies “green” buildings. It’s called LEED. That stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. A new version of the LEED standards is being released today, April 27. But Samara Freemark reports some critics see serious flaws in the LEED program:
Transcript
The biggest energy users in America are not cars and trucks – they’re buildings. Buildings use about 40% of the nation’s energy. In 2000, the US Green Building Council introduced a program that certifies “green” buildings. It’s called LEED. That stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. A new version of the LEED standards is being released today, April 27. But Samara Freemark reports some critics see serious flaws in the LEED program:
Before LEED came around in 2000, developers didn’t really spend a lot of time worrying about whether their buildings were green. They were designing and constructing buildings they could market. Green just wasn’t a priority.
“It was always the last thing on the agenda for the staff meeting, because nobody really understood what success looked like.”
Brendan Owens is a LEED spokesman. He says the people who came up with LEED wanted to change the culture of building in America. Make building ‘green’ marketable.
And they realized that to do that, they’d have to define what a green building looked like.
So they created a checklist. Install solar panels and you get points. Bike racks: more points. Get a green roof – somewhere you can grow plants — add some points.
Enough points and the developer gets a LEED certification. Certified buildings get a plaque. Developers get the PR boost that comes from building green. The public gets a more sustainable building. That’s the idea, anyway.
The program really caught on. More than 10,000 projects are currently going through the LEED process. And universities, municipalities, even the federal government are writing the standards into their own codes.
But critics say the system might be spreading too fast.
“The people who are writing the LEED Standards are in effect writing our country’s most important laws.”
That’s Henry Gifford. He’s a building engineer in NYC. He’s also one of LEED’s most outspoken critics.
Gifford says it’s possible to earn LEED certification – and cash in on the PR benefits of being green – without actually fixing a building’s biggest environmental problem.
“The 3 most important things to make a building environmentally friendly, are energy use, energy use, energy use. All the other things in the LEED checklist, which I think are wisely chosen and very important, they pale in comparison to the energy use.”
The LEED checklist does give points for good energy use- a lot of them, actually. But it doesn’t enforce energy efficiency.
Instead, developers win points by predicting their buildings will perform well. Developers do have to submit energy use data once their building is up and running. But if the building turns out not to save any energy? Brendan Owens says…
“What we do, is we notify the building that they’re not performing up to their potential.”
But no one’s coming around to unscrew that accreditation plaque. The building gets to keeps its certification.
On average LEED buildings seem to do better than others on energy use. But there are plenty of LEED-certified buildings that do use more energy than comparable non-certified ones.
Gifford says that’s unacceptable. No energy hogs, no matter how many bike racks or green roofs they have – should be allowed to call themselves green.
“It’s a scandal to have any underperforming building win or retain a rating for being green. I’m sorry. Every building labeled as green should have very good energy performance. Until we get there, we’re making believe.”
LEED doesn’t claim that certified buildings are perfect. Instead, Brendan Owens says the standard is meant to provide a holistic measure of greenness.
“I’ve heard LEED certified buildings described as sustainable. And there are a few, but the lions share of those projects haven’t achieved it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the rating system is flawed. It just means that people are misunderstanding what it’s about.”
In other words, people are reading more into certification than they should. Critics like Henry Gifford worry that will lead to complacency when it comes to truly greening buildings.
For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.