The U.S. Green Building Council [1] has gotten a lot of attention through promotion of its LEED standard. I am personally aware of several organizations that have focused intense PR campaigns on claims that their buildings have been modified, usually at considerable expense, so that they are LEED-certified and thus more energy efficient. Here’s the claim as to the meaning of LEED certification on USGBC’s website: [2]
LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is an internationally-recognized green building certification system. Developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) in March 2000, LEED provides building owners and operators with a framework for identifying and implementing practical and measurable green building design, construction, operations and maintenance solutions.
Consequently, buildings that are LEED certified are understood by the general public as indicating that a building is especially energy-efficient.
Today I read a disturbing article in Mother Jones [3] (not yet available online): “Leeding us On.” The article focuses on allegations made by Henry Gifford, a New York City energy efficiency consultant, who calls LEED “a joke.” Here’s an excerpt:
According to 2008 study commissioned by USGBC, LEED buildings are 25 to 30% more energy-efficient than conventional ones. But when Gifford looked at the study, he found that it had compared the meaning of one group of buildings to the median of another-what seemed to him a classic apples-to-oranges mistake. He got some of the data and calculated that LEED buildings actually used 29% more energy. “Going to so much trouble and expense to end up with buildings that use more energy than comparable buildings is not only a tragedy, it is also a fraud,” he wrote in a trade magazine. The USGBC stood by its numbers.
I’d like to know how to get to the bottom of this, but I don’t know how at this point. Those of us on the outside are faced with what you’d expect in almost any high-stakes financially-significant dispute these days: an esoteric battle between “experts” for the two disputants, both of whom appear, at least to laypersons, to have some credibility. Intrigued, I searched for “Gifford” at the USGBC website, and noticed an a posting that on August 11, 2011, the U.S. District Court dismissed a suit that Gifford had brought against the USGBC on the basis of “lack of standing” (which generally means that the plaintiff does not have the legal ability to serve as plaintiff to the suit; thus, this dismissal did not reach the merits of Gifford’s claims against USGBC). Here’s a copy of Gifford’s lawsuit. [4] As you can see, Gifford has brought harsh and detailed allegations against USGBC; they amount to a multi-faceted accusation that LEED-certification amounts to green-washing, or even worse, that that LEED certified buildings are expensive energy wasters. He has accused the USGBC of fraud for promoting the LEED standard. There is no way for this dispute between Gifford and USGBC to be a
[5]misunderstanding. If one of these parties is correct, the other is dramatically incorrect, and there is a lot at stake, including the integrity of America’s highest profile standard for building energy-efficiency.
According to the article in Mother Jones, a man named John Scofield, a physicist at Oberlin College generally agrees with Gifford’s analysis. Scofield’s website’s home page [6] offers this: “He has recently completed a study of energy consumption by LEED commercial buildings [7] in which he concludes LEED certification is yielding no significant reduction in GHG emissions associated with commercial buildings.” I clicked on the hyperlink offered in order to view Scofield’s report, but received the error message: “This File Cannot be Found,” but I tracked down his article here. [8]
The conclusion of Scofield’s article: “Our re-examination of the NBI data shows that LEED certification has done nothing to lower building primary energy consumption and associated GHG emission.”
Again, I’d like to know more–perhaps, someday, we all will.
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