Earlier this spring, two enterprising folks based in Aspen, Colo., published an 18-page screed entitled, “LEED is Broken … Let’s Fix It.” While researched quite a bit, the article is a Nietzschean-style polemic in keeping with the deprived oxygen levels of the 7000-plus foot elevation of the Aspen highlands. In comparing the adoption rates of energy-efficient (Energy Star) $200 computer monitors with $10 million buildings (the average size of a LEED-registered project), the authors commit a logical fallacy so egregious as to defy imagination. Their qualifications are not much more weighty than the air in Aspen; one directs environmental affairs for a ski resort that was a LEED 1.0 Bronze-certified pilot project, while the other runs a renewable energy program with local utilities. Neither is involved regularly in building design or construction, nor are they involved with project certifications.

Nonetheless, one would think that someone had claimed that the new Pope was not really a Catholic, given the fur-flying that took place as this critique began circulating, with LEED defenders hurling barbs, while LEED critics had this “I told you so look,” as if someone had just revealed that the emperor had no clothes.

Basically, the Aspen clique’s critique has five main claims:

1. LEED costs too much, and the funds used for LEED certification could be used to add more green value to a project instead;

2. LEED certification leads to “point mongering” among project teams, with design teams “obsessively focused on getting credits, regardless of whether they add environmental value” (authors’ words);

3. Energy modeling is “fiendishly complicated”;

4. LEED has a “crippling bureaucracy”; and

5. The benefits of green buildings are “overblown claims.”

In place of LEED, the authors offer up the U.S. Department of Energy’s “Building America” program, claiming that it has “yielded” 20,000 new homes, with a “minimum 30 percent reduction in energy…at no net cost,” in the same time frame that LEED has taken to certify less than 200 projects. Leaving aside the “apples to oranges” comparison of new residential construction with the commercial and institutional focus of LEED, the fact is that few if any Building America projects would be certified under LEED, since they would not be able meet the “across the board” environmental standards of LEED and the third-party certification requirements.

Is LEED “broken?” As a practitioner working with LEED projects on a regular basis, I can certainly testify that there are issues with the certification process. Let’s look at the full picture, however. Since the spring of 2000, five years and a few months, LEED has certified nearly 200 projects and registered nearly 2,000. More than 24,000 people have attended LEED workshops, nearly 20,000 are LEED Accredited Professionals, and nearly 8,000 people attended last year’s U.S. Green Building Council annual conference in Portland, Oregon. LEED has already penetrated more than 10 percent of its institutional target markets, according to my calculations, as referenced in my book. (Please see the author's Bio).

What of the Specifics of the Critique?

1. LEED does cost real money, as does anything that adds value to a building; the key question is whether project owners and developers are getting something in return for the certification effort. The evidence to date is mixed, for sure, but increasingly (in my experience), it is the case that people who put their own money on the line see value in LEED’s third-party certification. The authors imply that architects, owners and engineers will build green buildings, with or without LEED, but there are a number of studies that have shown that this does not happen in most projects. Nothing like an objective evaluation of your projects to keep most “value assassination” reviews at bay, the type that throw out most of the items that LEED promotes, just to save money.

2. LEED certification leads to “point mongering” by design teams, with architects and owners doing things they don’t want to do just to get LEED points. This does happen, but it is the rare exception: building budgets, schedules and programs are by and large too tight to allow for inclusion of anything that isn’t of real value.

3. Energy modeling is complicated; hey, guess what, building energy performance is complex! That’s why LEED insists on modeling protocols that can be verified in the field. At our firm, we consistently find the first-year energy performance of our projects is within 5 percent or less of the a priori modeled energy use. Sounds like a pretty good tool to me, in the right hands.

4. LEED has a “crippling bureaucracy;” well, it’s true that most people have stories about LEED documentation reviewers who are more like seminarians parsing scripture than experienced practitioners of building arts and sciences. This is an ongoing problem that can be addressed with a simple solution that I present below.

5. The benefits of green buildings, such as reduced illness and absenteeism and increased productivity are “overblown.” I would wager that most architects and engineers have scant idea how their buildings actually affect the users, since sober post-occupancy evaluations are seldom carried out on projects. However, serious work has been done, for example, by the BIDS project at Carnegie Mellon University, which has turned up more than 200 fully peer-reviewed academic studies that indicate that the claims for green building benefits are, if anything, understated in the extreme. For example, we are just beginning to understand the full range of benefits of such green building measures as day lighting, views of the outdoors and higher levels of indoor air quality in buildings.

Not to be outdone, the author has a simple suggestion. Since LEED is at its core a quality assurance program for buildings, similar in intent to the ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 series evaluations for total quality management, why not certify “LEED Assessors” who will coach design and construction teams, carry out the evaluation and certify the result? The benefits will include certainty of outcome, fixed costs (typically an ISO 9000 assessment will cost $25,000, about the current cost of LEED coaching, documentation and reviews), and far fewer complaints about the slowness and uncertainty of the review process for LEED certification. Then all U.S. Green Building Council has to do is to “assess the Assessors” on a periodic basis and get on with its core mission of promoting a market transformation for green buildings.