I am vice president of BuildingGreen, Inc., editor of Environmental Building News, and coeditor of the GreenSpec product directory. I also work with McGraw-Hill Construction on GreenSource magazine, which has earned me a spot on the masthead as executive editor. For the past 5 years I've chaired the Materials and Resources Technical Advisory Group (MR-TAG) for the LEED Rating System. I'm a LEED Faculty Member, which means that I get tapped to lead workshops on LEED (mostly LEED for New Construction and Major Renovations — LEED-NC — but occasionally others). Back in the 1990s I was a principal author of the Applications Reports for the AIA's Environmental Resource Guide that compares the environmental value of different building materials in various applications. I do some consulting and lecturing on sustainable design, with a particular focus on green materials. In addition to running LEED training workshops, I've taught seminars for various USGBC chapters, CSI chapters, state AIA chapters, and private architecture firms. I also serve on the U.S. team for Green Building Challenge, oversee BuildingGreen's management of the U.S. Department of Energy's High Performance Buildings Database project, and generally lead the content development team for Web and software resources at BuildingGreen.com.

Here's a tool that tries to connect the best available science directly to the international climate change negotiations and commitments, and the politicians are using it!

Perhaps that, in itself, is progress.

"How Does It Work? In the run-up to COP-15, we are scanning UNFCCC submissions and news sources from around the world to collect a list of what we call 'current proposals' — possible scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions by UNFCCC parties. We share our compilation and use the C-ROADS-CP climate simulation to calculate the expected long-term impacts (in terms of GHG concentration, temperature increase, and sea level rise) if those proposals were to be fully implemented." For more info, see the Climate Interactive website.

Rob Watson recently published "Green Building Market & Impact Report," his second annual report on the impact LEED is having in addressing environmental problems. The report highlights the continuing remarkable expansion of LEED: 2009 registrations for new design and construction projects in the U.S. may actually exceed total new construction starts! (This is possible because projects don't typically register when they start construction, and a flurry of projects were registered just before the requirement to use LEED 2009 kicked in, to keep their options open.)

Watson takes note of the shift from whole building construction to Commercial Interior tenant fit-outs (CI) and Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance (EBOM) registration and certification. And he compares 2009 certifications to registration numbers from 2006 and 2007 to see what fraction of projects are making it through the system. (In this analysis he assumes a three-year registration-to-certification timeframe for all except LEED-CI projects, for which he assumes two years. I would have given EBOM projects a shorter turn-around as well — in our market analysis for LEEDuser we assumed 18 months.)

Analyzing certification and registration trends is not Watson's main point, however. His focus is on the environmental benefits that follow. And that focus is what really caught my attention. I'm thankful he's taken that on, because it's so easy to forget what LEED was created for in the first place.

So, how is LEED doing at achieving its original goal? Watson explores this question category by category, looking at numbers of projects in each of the various rating systems that have achieved certain credits.

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When you can and when you cannot count one material as contributing to more than one credit in the Materials and Resources category of LEED has confused me for years. Even the LEED Reference Guide doesn't lay it out clearly. So, after sorting it out for LEEDuser, I thought laying it out in a table might help.

Here's an example. Cotton insulation is typically post-industrial recycled material AND it's a rapidly renewable plant material. So LEED allows you to count the cost of that material towards both MRc4 (Recycled Content) and MRc6 (Rapidly Renewable). If it also happens to be manufactured locally, in LEED-CI you could claim it towards MRc5 (Regional Materials) as well. Three-for-one!

But if you're using salvaged timbers to earn MRc3 (Resource Reuse), you cannot also claim them as recycled materials for MRc4. Sometimes a material can count towards one credit or another — you can choose which, but you can't claim it for both.

Of course, the fact that you're allowed to count one material towards more than one credit only applies if the material actually has the characteristics that both credits require. FSC-certified wood counts for MRc7 and MRc5, but it only gets the latter point if it actually was harvested and manufactured (or, for LEED-CI, just manufactured) within a 500-mile radius of the project.

Anyone have further examples or experiences that might help clarify this situation?

I've been involved with the AIA Top Ten Awards Program for a long time. In the early years, when Gail Lindsey started it as an informal program to generate some recognition for a handful of green projects, Environmental Building News was one of the very few media outlets available to provide that publicity. Later we participated in conversations with the national Advisory Group of AIA's Committee on the Environment (COTE) as they worked to refine the metrics and formalize the program. In recent years, BuildingGreen has provided technical support to the AIA Top Ten Awards. Because we manage US DOE's High Performance Buildings Database, which also hosts the Top Ten online submission forms, we've supported those submission forms — updating them with changes each year, providing technical support to applicants, and then editing and preparing the winning projects for publication on the www.AIATopTen.org website.

As we edited and published the winning entries each year, I thought it would be great to sit in on the jury process and learn more about how they make their selections. So when I was invited to join the jury for 2009, I was thrilled. I'd finally have a chance not only to observe the process, but to participate!

The jury that assembled in March to pick the winners was high-powered and diverse. Before diving into the projects themselves, we spent a little while talking about each of our priorities and intentions. That, in itself, was a fascinating conversation.

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They found Greg, and his car, yesterday — a month after he mysteriously disappeared. According to the Denver Post, he had slipped off the road and rolled into a ravine. Daily Camera has a more detailed article.

I was hoping that when we found out what happened to Greg, even if the news was bad, there would be relief in the closure. There is some of that relief, but it's overwhelmed by the suddenly concrete sense of loss. And of my own vulnerability. It's funny how my response to someone else's huge misfortune becomes about me and my fears, but that's how it's playing out right now.

Greg exuded vitality and energy. He embraced and energized those around him, literally all over the world. If someone with that strong a presence in the world can die so unexpectedly, what does that mean for me? A reminder that we're all here on borrowed time — at least in our current form. An invitation to use this time well.

For his family and friends, for everyone who is committed to green buildings and making a better world, Greg's sudden departure is a huge loss. There is some consolation, however, in recognizing how much great work he left behind, in his designs, his ideas, and the thousands of people he taught and inspired.

Look to the great folks at the Rocky Mountain Institute to help channel grief into yet more positive action.

— Nadav Malin

I'm not usually all that comfortable in front of a camera, but I had fun walking the Greenbuild 2008 Expo floor with a video crew from CNNMoney.com and Fortune magazine.

We focused on four or five technologies in our tour, only two of which made it into the final two minute video (after a nice lead-in by Scot Horst of 7group). The CNN crew were looking for photogenic presentations, while I was looking for products I believe in to talk about. I'm pleased with how it came out in the end — though it would have been nice to cover a lot more stuff!

7/1/09 Update: There's recently been discussion on this topic and related issues on the credit-by-credit forums at our siter website LEEDuser.com, which was recently launched. Recommended!

Maverick NYC mechanical systems designer Henry Gifford has long been a critic of LEED, arguing that it encourages the wrong things, and doesn't go far enough to ensure that certified buildings really save energy or provide good air quality. I have great respect for Gifford and the work he does to design and commission low-energy buildings with great ventilation on very tight budgets. Unlike too many practicing engineers, he knows exactly how much energy his buildings are using.

Gifford is also a thorn in the side of many policymakers, because he has little patience for initiatives and programs that don't live up to his ideals. Recently he's been distributing a paper attacking a study of actual energy use in LEED buildings.

The study in Gifford's sights is from New Buildings Institute and USGBC, Energy Performance of LEED for New Construction Buildings. It analyzed actual energy usage in buildings that were certified based on predicted energy use. The study compared actual to predicted energy use, and compared both to national average energy use in existing buildings as reported in the U.S. Department of Energy's Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS). USGBC and NBI reported on many interesting findings from that study, some of which were summarized in the December 2007 issue of EBN.

graphic from the NBI study

Gifford's paper is especially critical of the primary finding that LEED buildings were shown to be, on average, 25% to 30% more efficient than the national average. He provides an alternate analysis of the data that concludes that the LEED buildings are, on average, 29% less efficient than average U.S. buildings. The differences between Gifford's analysis and those of USGBC and NBI are based on two areas of disagreement:

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Greg Kats of the venture capital firm Good Energies has argued for a while now that a company's carbon emissions can have a material impact on its financial performance, and by failing to disclose that risk the company may be liable to shareholder action. That argument was used to explain part of the appeal to corporations of green (low-carbon-emitting) real estate in our article on valuing green buildings.

Now, according to a report in today's New York Times, New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo has taken that argument a step further. Cuomo reached an agreement with Xcel Energy of Minneapolis that requires Xcel to disclose a detailed assessment of the long-term financial risks from its ongoing investment in coal-burning power plants. He got that agreement using a legal mechanism that could have led to criminal as well as civil charges if they failed to disclose those risks, and he's still pressuring four other companies to go along. How can a NY AG control a Minnesota company? Because they issue securities on New-York-based stock exchanges.

The Times suggests that the other companies may not be as cooperative, because Xcel is already quite proactive in its reporting. I have anecdotal evidence corroborating that — after a little prodding, an Xcel engineer gave me an estimate of the carbon emissions behind the high-pressure steam they distribute in downtown Denver. (I needed that figure for a case study of EPA's Region 8 headquarters.) It's 185 pounds of CO2 per thousand pounds of steam.

In my years as chair of LEED's Materials & Resources Technical Advisory Group (MR-TAG) I've gotten lots of questions and comments about interesting interpretations and claims from product manufacturers. Most manufacturers are sincere in their efforts to understand the credit requirements and present their products in a positive light. Sometimes they just don't go far enough in studying the credit language before making their claims. Sometimes they just lapse into wishful thinking.

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