2007 will most likely go down as the year that Green went blue, as in it’s now cool. Listen to any NPR station, watch any nature show on television, or read any major news outlet and you’ll run across people waking up to the climate change problem. Marketing huckster are jumping on the band-wagon to try and “greenwash” everything from consumer products to oil companies.

People tend to focus on automobile emissions as the major problem for the planet warming up. Yet, the energy use of buildings is often glossed-over and rarely do you see mention that buildings use on average 71% of America’s electricity and are directly responsible for 38% of all greenhouse-gas emissions (Department of Energy).

So, the US Green Building Council (USGBC) sets up the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) in 2000, as a way to promote green building. The problem is the program has grown so fast (more than 6,500 projects and counting since 2000) that the organization has struggled with defining its long-term vision in the marketplace.

FastCompany ran an excellent article in its October issue, detailing how LEED is at the cross-roads going forward. It has the power to dictate what is sustainable building AND the marketplace is demanding that green be a component of any architecture project.  Design a building and get LEED certification and you’ve got a PR home-run on your hands.  This sells property faster, developers look like heroes, and the architects are slapped on the back for saving the planet.  But as always, the devil is in the details:

The opportunity for LEED to grow and exude more influence is tied directly into its different rating systems.  Points are accumulated from the following categories:  More points earns a higher certification (or a rarer metal certificate like platinum)

• Siting
• Water Use
• Energy
• Materials and Resources
• Indoor Environmental Quality
• Innovation

The article points out a couple of glaring omissions in how it awards the points for different levels of certification:

1. The point categories are not weighted.  Installing a bike rack and buying 50% of your energy from renewable sources are each given the same credit.  Ouch.  A couple of these are freebies to get the ball rolling.  That makes sense but it would be great to see a project being rewarded for really ponying up and making a serious investment.

2. No regional adjustments.  If sustainable design is about melding with your local environment, than why shouldn’t a building in the southwest have water conservation as a key metric?  What if every LEED building going in Las Vegas had to specifically address this issue to get approval by the US Green Building Council?  Developing water conservation standards based on annual precipitation data and tying this back to the water use criteria is a no-brainer.

A couple things in closing…LEED is good but its still an infant.  It’s moving the needle and provides a basic barometer for the general public to rate sustainable design being done by architects and engineers.  The opportunity for really changing the world lies in tightening up that rating system and when that does LEED will grow up.