Can LEED Survive the Coming Carbon Neutral Age?

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As China chokes on air pollution and glaciers rapidly recede, green design in mainstream America has taken on a boutique sheen. Eco-homes feature a bit of FSC-certified cabinetry, paints that don’t off-gas, and fancy air filters. The sell lays the green message on thick. Sustainability feels like a Zen spa, with the bathwater triple filtered and floor-to-ceiling windows opening to a patch of pesticide-free green roof.

Increasingly the soybean inks on these marketing brochures include the acronym LEED, for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, the voluntary green-building rating system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). With global-warming concerns growing, LEED is on everyone’s lips. After all, buildings use about 70 percent of the electricity produced in the U.S. — more than half of which is generated by coal, the dirtiest fuel and worst contributor to global warming. In the absence of any substantive Federal effort, LEED has by default become the primary way that America’s builders tackle today’s daunting environmental challenges.

And yet the program has only certified 1,000 buildings since its inception in 2000. It’s a tiny accomplishment compared to the 1.4 million American homes that will start construction in 2007 — a slow year. But LEED numbers are growing rapidly. There are some 40,000 LEED accredited professionals awaiting your call, says Scot Horst, the chair of USGBC&rsqo;s LEED steering committee. “That suggests the level of market transformation.” Dozens of states and cities now either encourage or require LEED certification for building projects. Corporations that did not even know what the acronym stood for a year ago now clamor for a platinum rating.

Though global warming has made LEED hot — as it were — the program has been slow to reflect the importance of climate change. That’s because LEED’s cherished vision of environmental sustainability is exceedingly broad, taking in site development, water efficiency, recycled building materials, and fresh air, among other issues. Until June of this year buildings could get certified without any of the energy points that reduce carbon emissions. LEED has suffered many growing pains, but coping with climate-change challenges could threaten the LEED model.

The primary reason so few buildings have actually certified their LEED performance is that it has never been easy. Architects not only have to design a better building, they have to copiously document it, and then await the USGBC’s judgment on whether they’ve actually achieved the rating they sought. And certification is not cheap. Fiona Cousins, who runs the mechanical engineering and sustainability group at Arup in New York, estimated that it can cost $100,000 to document building performance for LEED. “It’s a drop in the bucket for a $50-million project but very expensive for a small one,” she says. Cost has certainly kept the number of certified buildings low, compared to the number of clients who ask designers to follow LEED’s guidelines.

“Point mongering” is another sore LEED subject. That’s the cherry picking of low-effort strategies — some bamboo flooring, a couple of never-used bike racks — that raise the score without doing much of real environmental significance. It&rquo;s a peril of LEED&squo;s oft-criticized checklist approach. “We think LEED can only be successful if its environmental strategies are so integral that you can’t walk around the building and count the points,” says Steve Kieran, whose Philadelphia architecture firm Kieran Timberlake Associates scored platinum — LEED’s highest rating — for its Sidwell Friends school in Washington, D.C.

Still, LEED critics are harder to find these days. “People who were doing something for the first time five or six years ago have learned a lot, and they can do it faster and cheaper now,” says Steven Selkowitz, who heads the Building Technologies Department at the University of CaliforniaÕs Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. &lddquo;If a client asks whether A is better than B, they can give an answer in five minutes rather than having to do a week of research.” Auden Schendle — who with his colleague Randy Udall called LEED “its own worst enemy,” criticizing its cost, complexity and rigidity in a detailed and widely quoted 2005 Grist magazine critique — now tempers his comments. The program, he says in an email, is “moving in the right direction. They have addressed the energy aspect to a degree, and they are trying to make it easier to document. I like and support LEED. We are doing more LEED buildings.”

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