THE green-building craze sweeping the nation isn’t so much a movement as a highly lucrative regime of payouts and misinformation. You could call it a moral-protection racket.
In fact, “green” buildings don’t even use less electricity.
In less than a decade, the US Green Building Council’s green-rating system, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design,or LEED, has become a dominant force. Whenever you see a plaque on a building claiming it to be green, that’s LEED.
This month, Gov. Paterson signed a bill mandating that all new state construction projects and major renovations conform to LEED-developed standards. In 2005, Mayor Bloomberg approved a bill (allegedly at the insistence of then-City Council Speaker Gifford Miller) imposing LEED on billions of dollars of public projects. The Obama administration is even drawing up a plan to get the White House qualified under LEED.
Overall, LEED regulations are now on the books in 45 states, including more than 100 cities. The USGBC has certified more than 3,000 commercial buildings, with another 25,000 projects in the pipeline.
But here’s the problem: LEED buildings don’t conserve energy. In fact, a LEED study commissioned by the USGBC suggests that certified buildings often use more energy.
Much credit for this discovery goes to a Manhattan building-energy consultant, Henry Gifford, who was the first to blow the whistle on the USGBC’s bogus promises of energy savings.
The USGBC claims LEED buildings are 25 percent to 30 percent more energy efficient, a figure based on a 2007 study it commissioned from the New Buildings Institute. But Gifford figured out that USGBC fudged the study by comparing the me dian energy usage of a LEED sample to the mean (or average) usage of non-LEED buildings. By taking the mean value of both distributions, he found the same data indicated that LEED projects use 29 percent more energy than non-LEED buildings.
No one knows for sure why, but clearly, the group’s energy-modeling tools and arcane point system fail to predict how real-life mechanical systems function and tenants behave. For example, Gifford’s report showed a picture of the Hearst Tower on 57th Street — billed as New York’s first green skyscraper — with its lights blazing at night.
Follow-up reviews of the study have confirmed the inaccuracy of the USGBC’s claims. “There is no justification for USGBC claims that LEED Certified commercial buildings are using significantly less electricity or have significantly lower greenhouse-gas emission associated with their operations than do conventional buildings,” wrote Oberlin College researcher John Scofield in a paper last month.
So why is LEED so popular? Well, it lets politicians cloak themselves in the garb of environmental activism without upsetting real-estate interests. Thus, when city and state lawmakers imposed their sweeping regulations here in New York, they never bothered to check LEED’s claims.
For developers, LEED is a source of tax credits, a potent marketing tool and protection from environmental criticism. It has given rise to a whole new industry of “accredited” consultants — a constituency that’s grown to over 100,000 who get paid to advise developers on how to get their project certified and to assess buildings.
And the program has been good for the “nonprofit” USGBC, which reported a 300 percent growth in revenue from 2005 to 2007. The group rakes in tens of millions of dollars each year from examination and conference fees, member dues and speaking engagements. Many of the same people who developed the USGBC rules make money as private LEED consultants, members say.
But there’s a hefty cost here. While estimates vary, developers and officials say LEED often adds 5 percent or more to project costs — an expense that’s passed on to the tenant or (in the case of public works) to the taxpayer.
Gifford says it’s possible to make buildings efficient cheaply. In the short term, government LEED mandates and subsidies, resistance from the USGBC and a lack of practical expertise make that difficult.
Bottom line: As long as the builders, the designers, the engineers and the tenants have a stronger incentive to appear green than to actually achieve energy efficiency, phony systems such as LEED will dominate.
USGBC says it’s now requiring buildings going forward to report their energy usage — it won’t say what it will do with that data.
Meanwhile, the green industry will keep on patting itself on the back with one hand and pocketing tax dollars with the other.
jacob.gershman@gmail.com