It's Way Too Easy Being Green

I found this article referenced in a blog post at the Daily Journal of Commerce. While I find it a bit cynical, it's a good read and does point out weaknesses in a LEED certification. Does it mean we should throw LEED out? No. Pointing out weaknesses forces improvements and the author notes that USGBC is doing that with its LEED certification process. But it is always good to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of systems we rely on.

From Slate:

In a high-end Mumbai neighborhood, Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani's personal high-rise, named Antilia, is under construction. When completed, the 24-story Ambani family home will include its own health club, terraced sky-gardens, and 50-seat screening room (the reclusive Ambani is reputed to be a huge Bollywood fan). Antilia also boasts three helipads and a 168-car garage. This may sound like transportation overkill, if not outright eco-terrorism, for a family of six. But despite its 38-to-1 car-to-person ratio, Antilia has been billed by its American architects as a "green building." And under the leading standards for green architecture, the building will likely qualify.

Antilia's architects, Perkins +Will of Chicago, plan to evaluate its greenness based on the criteria of the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit founded in 1993 "to advance structures that are environmentally responsible, profitable, and healthy places to live and work." The group's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system, launched in 2000, has become the widely accepted standard. Using its "Rating System Checklist," the USGBC evaluates a building's water and energy efficiency, land use, choice of materials, and indoor environmental quality. Based on the results, it certifies buildings on a scale from simply "LEED Certified" up through Silver, Gold, and Platinum. But because of the checklist-based system, even a building like Antilia loses only a single point for parking capacity.

Critics of LEED—many of them architects who were green before green was cool—see a system that's easy to game and has more to do with generating good PR than saving the planet. Just a few years ago, such criticisms were limited to architectural and environmental circles, but the loopholes in LEED are no longer a trivial problem. Green building has gone mainstream. Early adopters of LEED certification included usual suspects like the Natural Resources Defense Council, whose Southern California office was among the first LEED-certified buildings in the country. Today, seeking LEED certification is becoming standard practice for Fortune 500 companies, including many that don't have particularly good records on environmental issues. Goldman Sachs, a financier of the environmentally challenged Three Gorges Dam project in China, is seeking a Gold rating from LEED for its new Manhattan headquarters. Several cities, including Seattle, Chicago, and New York, now require all of their public buildings to be LEED certified. So does the General Services Administration, the agency that manages the federal government's real-estate needs. Even more striking, cities like Washington, D.C., and Santa Monica, Calif., now require that all major projects—public and private—meet LEED certification standards.

Read the full story here...