I want you to picture a scenario. It's a Tuesday
morning. You're walking into one of those big
Class A office buildings downtown. Or maybe you're
checking into a new hotel for a conference. You
go through those big glass revolving doors. That
rush of, you know, conditioned air hits you.
And you head for the reception desk. And right
there, mounted on the wall. I know exactly what
you're talking about. Yeah, it's usually on the
right eye level, polished to a perfect shine,
is a plaque. I can picture it immediately. It's
usually that brushed silver look. Or sometimes
it's a thick piece of glass with those fancy
metal standoff bolts. Exactly. And it has that
little seal on it, the leaves, the globe thing.
And it says all -lead certification. Maybe it's
a silver, maybe gold. Or if the developer really,
you know, spent some serious cash. platinum.
We see these things absolutely everywhere now.
And I think for the average person, and I'll
include myself here, you look at that plaque,
you give a little internal nod and you think,
OK, good. This building is one of the good guys.
It's saving the planet. It's a green building.
And then you get in the elevator and, you know,
check your email. That is precisely the intended
effect. It is the modern seal of approval for
the built environment. It's a signal that says
we care. Right. But today I want to. sort of
stop the elevator i want to stand in that lobby
and really stare at that plaque for a minute
because i started wondering what does it actually
mean Is it this rigorous scientific proof that
this building is an environmental superhero?
Or is it basically a participation trophy for
a developer who just, you know, filled out the
right paperwork and paid the right fees? That
is the multi -billion dollar question. And frankly,
the answer is going to frustrate you. It's going
to fascinate you. And it will probably make you
look at every single building you enter a little
differently from now on. That's what we're here
for. So welcome to the deep dive. Today, we are
taking a sledgehammer, metaphorically, of course,
to the LED certification system. Metaphorically.
BELLEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy
and Environmental Design. We are going to unpack
the history. The weirdly addictive point system,
this phenomenon called lead brain, and the actual
hard data on whether these buildings save energy
or, you know, just burn cash. It's a massive
topic. And to be clear, right off the bat, we
aren't just talking about a little plaque. We're
talking about, well, probably the single most
dominant force in global construction over the
last 25 years. Let's just establish the scale
here for a second, because I think there's this
misconception that this is just a coastal elite
thing, you know, something you only find in San
Francisco and Brooklyn, but nowhere else. Oh,
that couldn't be further from the truth. If you
look at the numbers, as of 2024, LED is on the
present. We're looking at over 195 ,000 ED certified
buildings worldwide. And 195 ,000. And that's
spread across 186 countries. So while it started
here in the U .S., it is now. for all intents
and purposes, the global lingua franca of sustainable
building. If you go to mainland China, India,
Canada, Brazil, Sweden, you are seeing these
plaques absolutely everywhere. So why those countries
specifically? Is it just that they're building
a lot of new stuff? That's a huge part of it.
China and India are going through this massive
urbanization. They need a framework to ensure
they aren't just building, you know, energy sucking
monsters. So it's a shortcut. It's a shortcut
to... having a standard. It also signals to international
investors that this particular asset is class
A quality. It's a global mark of prestige. So
it's as much a financial signal as it is an environmental
one. Oh, absolutely. Maybe more so. What about
back home in the U .S.? Who's winning the green
race here? If you look at it by square footage
certified per person. Which is really the best
way to normalize for population size. Right,
to make it fair. Yeah, to make it fair. The District
of Columbia just destroys everyone else. D .C.
is the capital of Green Building. But among the
states, you've got the usual suspects. Massachusetts,
Illinois, New York, California. And it's not
just skyscrapers, right? We're not just talking
about office towers. No, and that's the really
interesting part of its reach. It's hospitals,
it's elementary schools, it's those massive Amazon
distribution centers you see everywhere. Oh,
interesting. And even private homes. Although...
To be fair, the residential side of it is a much
smaller piece of the pie. The real sweet spot
for ELEAD is big commercial infrastructure. OK,
so it's everywhere. It's the global standard.
But it had to start somewhere. I'm assuming this
was some kind of government mandate. Did the
EPA cook this up in a basement in the 90s to
force developers to behave? You would think so,
wouldn't you? But no, and this is absolutely
critical to understanding why the system works
the way it does. ILED is, and always has been,
a voluntary market -driven system. Voluntary?
Completely. It wasn't the government, it was
the private sector. So developers essentially
asked to be regulated. That sounds a little uncharacteristic
for the real estate industry. Well, you have
to go back to the vibe of the early 1990s. Specifically...
April 1993. Okay, paint the scene for me. Nirvana
is on the radio, everyone's wearing flannel,
and construction is what? Construction is the
wild west of greenwashing. The term green building
was just starting to float around, but nobody,
and I mean nobody, knew what it meant. It was
just a buzzword. A total buzzword. A developer
could slap a recycling bin in the lobby and say,
hey, we're a green building. Another developer
could install a couple of solar panels. A third
one could just plant some nice oak trees out
front. And they all claim to be green. Exactly.
But if everything is green, then nothing is green.
It was marketing chaos. Okay, so... A problem
in search of a solution. Precisely. So the U
.S. Green Building Council, or USGBC, was formed
to fix this. And the founding trio, it really
sounds like this set up to a bar joke. I'm listening.
You had Rick Vidridzi, who was a marketing guy
at Carrier, the air conditioning giant. Okay,
a marketing guy. You had David Gottfried, a real
estate developer, and Michael Italiano, an environmental
lawyer. Marketing, real estate, and law. That
is not the Captain Planet Squad I was expecting.
Where are all the, you know, the tree huggers?
Oh. They were there. But this leadership group
is very telling. They understood from day one
that for this to work, it couldn't just be about
saving the polar bears. It had to make business
sense. It had to work for the market. It had
to. They first met at the American Institute
of Architects boardroom. It started with about
60 firms. And they needed a rule book, a common
language. They needed a yardstick. And for that,
we have to introduce the George Washington of
this whole movement, a man named Robert K. Watson.
The founding father of LEED. Yes, that's what
he's called. He was a senior scientist at the
Natural Resources Defense Council, the NRDC.
He's the one who actually coined the acronym
LED. And more importantly, he shepherded this
thing through what was called the consensus process.
Consensus process sounds like a very polite way
of saying herding cats. Oh, it was brutal. Could
you imagine getting carpet manufacturers, steel
tycoons, architects, and hardcore environmentalists
all in the same room and trying to get them to
agree on how many points a bamboo floor is worth?
It took years. But Watson held it all together
because he knew, fundamentally, the market needed
a standard. Without a standard, you couldn't
prove value. So they built the machine. Let's
talk about how this machine actually works. Because
when I look at that plaque, I really do feel
like I'm looking at a high score on a video game.
That is the perfect analogy. LEED is the gamification
of construction. It turns building a skyscraper
into a role -playing game where you're just grinding
for experience points. Okay, so break down the
scoreboard for me. How do I win this game? The
structure is actually pretty simple. You have
a scorecard with 100 base points available, plus
a few extra bonus points you can get for innovation
or something called regional priority. Right.
And depending on how many of those points you
manage to collect, you unlock a different achievement
level. These are the tiers, the silver, gold,
platinum. Right. So if you just get 40 to 49
points, you are certified. That's the entry level.
It basically means you did a little bit better
than the bare minimum legal code. That's the
participation trophy. Pretty much. Then 50 to
59 points gets you silver. 60 to 79 gets you
gold. And then the big one, the status symbol
that every CEO wants for their global headquarters
is platinum. That requires 80 points or more.
So getting a platinum building is basically like
getting an A minus or maybe a B plus on your
report card. 80 out of 100. In a school setting,
maybe. But in the world of construction, getting
80 points is incredibly difficult. It requires
a really concerted effort across every single
category of the design. And what are those categories?
I'm assuming energy is the big one. Energy and
atmosphere, or EA, is the heavyweight champion
for sure. It has the most points available. But
you also have sustainable sites, which is about
where you build and how you treat the land. Water
efficiency, low -flow toilets, drought -tolerant
landscaping. The usual stuff. The usual stuff.
Then you have materials and resources. Are you
using recycled steel? Is your wood certified
as sustainably harvested? And then a really important
one, indoor environmental quality airflow, low
toxin paints, access to daylight. Now, I have
to ask the cynical question here. Does this cost
money? And I don't just mean the cost of buying
better windows. I mean, does the plaque itself
cost money? Oh, absolutely. You have to pay to
play the game. You pay registration fees and
certification fees to an organization called
the GBCI, the Green Building Certification Institute.
And how much are we talking? For a massive, complex
campus project, these fees alone can run upwards
of a million dollars. Wait, hold on. A million
dollars just for the bureaucratic privilege of
getting the plaque, not for the actual materials
in the building. For the very largest projects,
yes, the administrative fees can get that high.
For a normal office building, it's more like
tens of thousands. But the real cost isn't even
the fee. It's what they call the soft cost. Soft
costs. That sounds like a euphemism for... lawyers,
consultants, energy modelers, commissioning agents.
To get a LEED certification, you almost always
have to hire a specific LEED consultant. And
their whole job is just to manage the paperwork.
Their entire job is to track the paperwork, manage
the point scorecard, and argue with the USGBC
reviewers over every little detail. Studies show
all this administrative and design overhead adds
about 1 % to 6 % to the total project budget.
So if I'm building a $500 million tower, I might
be lighting, what, $10, $20 million on fire just
to manage the paperwork for this plaque? You
might be. But the developer would argue they
aren't lighting it on fire. They would say they're
investing it in an asset that will command higher
rents and attract better tenants. Okay, so there
is a financial logic there. But here is where
I want to pivot to the real controversy. Because
you dropped a bomb on me when we were prepping
for this. You said something that I'm still trying
to wrap my head around. You said LED is a design
tool, not a performance tool. Yes. And if you
take nothing else away from this whole deep dive,
please take this. Historically, that plaque on
the wall is an award for intent, not necessarily
for results. OK, explain that. Because if I buy
a car that says it gets 50 miles per gallon on
the sticker and I drive it off the lot and it
only gets 12. i can sue somebody for false advertising
buildings are different when you submit for led
certification The building usually hasn't even
been occupied yet. It's an empty shell. So how
can you prove it's energy efficient? You can't
show them a utility bill. Right. There is no
utility bill yet. So you show them a computer
model. With simulation. Exactly. You hire a team
of engineers to build a digital twin of your
building and a computer. They input all the specs,
the R value, the insulation, the efficiency of
the chiller, the power density of the lighting.
Okay. And then... and this is the absolute key,
they compare that model of your building to something
called a baseline building. What on earth is
a baseline building? It's a hypothetical, totally
imaginary building. It's the same size and shape
as yours, but it's designed to be built to the
bare minimum legal code. It is essentially the
mediocre ghost of your building. So the test
isn't, are you efficient? The test is, are you
better than a piece of junk? In a nutshell, yes.
If your computer model shows that your design
will theoretically use 20 % less energy than
the mediocre ghost baseline, you get the points.
But models are. They're squishy. I mean, you
can make a model say a lot of things depending
on the assumptions you plug in. And welcome to
the wonderful world of modeling gymnastics. Engineers
are very, very good at tweaking the assumptions
to improve the score. For example, the model
might assume that the automated daylight sensors
will perfectly dim the lights every time the
sun comes out. But in reality... In reality,
maybe that sensor's a little finicky. So the
facility manager just puts a piece of duct tape
over it to keep the lights on 100 % of the time.
So the model says savings. But reality says waste.
The LEDD reviewer, however, only ever saw the
model. You get the plaque based on the simulation,
not the reality. That feels like a massive, massive
loophole. If nobody ever comes back to actually
check the meter, you can just game the system
from the start. And that leads us directly to
the concept of Leeds Brain. Lead brain. I love
this term. It sounds like some kind of disease.
It kind of is, in a way. It was coined in a really
scathing 2005 article by two guys, Auden Schendler
and Randy Udell, titled, LED is broken, let's
fix it. And they argued that the point system
causes people to lose their minds. The goal stops
being let's build a good, efficient building,
and it becomes let's get the points. Just point
mongering. Pure point mongering. It's the classic
teaching to the test problem. Imagine you're
a designer. You have limited budget. You could
spend, say, $50 ,000 on a really sophisticated,
high -efficiency HVAC upgrade. That sounds like
it would save a ton of carbon. A ton. But it's
hard, it's expensive, and it might only net you,
say, two points. Right. Or you could spend that
same $50 ,000 installing some bike racks, a shower
for commuters, using some recycled carpet, and
putting in a native plant garden. And those are
cheap and easy. They're cheap, they're easy,
and they might get you five points. So you buy
the bike racks, you skip the hard HVAC upgrade,
and you end up with a gold rating instead of
a silver. But the building is actually worse
for the planet. Precisely. You prioritize the
cheap points. Over the hard points. Schindler
and Udall pointed out all these absurdities,
like the reflective roof debate. Oh, this is
the one about the Rocky Mountains, right? Yes.
So a white reflective roof is great in Miami
or Phoenix. It bounces the sun's heat back into
space and keeps the building cool. LE gives you
a point for that to reduce the heat island effect.
That makes perfect sense. But LE... at least
in its earlier versions, gave you that point
regardless of where your building was located.
So you had designers in the High Rocky Mountains,
in ski towns, seriously debating putting white
roofs on their buildings. Wait a minute. If you're
in a ski town, you want a black roof. You want
to absorb every bit of heat you can get to keep
the building warm. Correct. A white roof in a
heating -dominated climate actually increases
your heating bill. It is environmentally stupid.
But if you're two points away from that coveted
platinum plaque, And the white roof is an easy
point to get. L .E. brain takes over. It takes
over. You do the objectively bad thing to get
the good badge. That is just maddening. It's
putting bureaucratic compliance completely over
common sense engineering. It is. But if you think
that's bad, we really need to talk about the
location paradox. Because this is where the wheels,
in my opinion. really fall off the wagon. This
is the argument that a so -called green building
in the wrong place isn't green at all. That's
the one. This has been championed by critics
like David Owen, who wrote Green Metropolis,
and Jeff Speck, the urban planner. And their
argument is elegantly simple. The transportation
energy associated with a building often completely
dwarfs the energy the building itself uses. It's
the commute. It's always the commute. If you
build a platinum -certified net -zero fortress
of sustainability, but you build it in the middle
of a cornfield 20 miles from where anyone actually
lives, you've failed. Because everyone has to
drive their SUV to get to your eco -fortress.
Exactly. Let's look at the famous Gap Inc. example.
Gap built this stunning green building in San
Bruno, California. It had a grass roof. It had
amazing natural light. It was celebrated everywhere.
Sounds great. But it was located 16 miles from
their headquarters in downtown San Francisco.
So what happened? Well, people couldn't walk
there. They couldn't easily take public transit.
So Gap had to run its own fleet of private shuttle
buses back and forth all day. And David Owen
dropped this just hammer of a quote. No bus is
as green as an elevator. Wow. That hits hard.
No bus is as green as an elevator. Think about
the physics of that. If Gabbitt just leased more
space in an old, supposedly inefficient skyscraper
right there in San Francisco, their employees
would have just taken the elevator or walked
or taken the BART. Right. By moving to the green
campus, the carbon emissions from the shuttle
buses and all the employee cars completely wiped
out any savings from the building's fancy efficiency
features. So it's a net loss for the planet,
but it's wrapped in a pretty green bow. And there's
an even worse example, the EPA itself. Oh, no.
Please don't say the Environmental Protection
Agency. The EPA Region 7 headquarters. For years,
they were located downtown in Kansas City, Missouri.
Then they moved to a suburb called Lenexa, Kansas,
which is about 20 miles away. And they moved
into a shiny new LED building. A shiny new LED
gold certified building. Let me guess. The commute
emissions killed them. It was a massacre. Cade
Benfield from the NRDC actually ran the numbers.
He looked at the total carbon footprint per employee,
including their commute. By moving from the dense
city center to the sprawling suburb, the carbon
emissions per person almost tripled. Tripled?
That's not a rounding error. It went from 0 .39
metric tons per month to 1 .08. The building
itself was efficient. It had great insulation,
great windows. But the simple physics of hundreds
of people driving 40 miles round trip every single
day completely overwhelmed the physics of the
building. Wow. Jeff Speck put it brutally. The
carbon saved by the new building's LED status
will be a small fraction of the carbon wasted
by its location. That is just devastating. It
really suggests that where you build matters
maybe 10 times more than how you build. And for
a very long time, LED did not weight that heavily
enough. you could get a platinum certification
for a building in a totally parking -dependent
suburb. And that, I think, is a fundamental flaw
in the philosophy. Okay, so the location can
ruin it, the gaming of points can ruin it, but
let's zoom back in on the building itself again.
Let's assume, for the sake of this argument,
we have a LE building in a good, walkable location.
Okay. Does the plaque on the wall actually prove
that it's saving energy? We talked about the
models, but what about the actual real -world
data? Ah. Now we enter the data wars, and this
is where things get really nerdy and really,
really contentious. I'm ready. Take me to the
data. Okay. The seminal moment was in 2009. The
USGBC released a big data set, and then a team
led by a scientist named Guy Newsham at the National
Research Council of Canada analyzed it. They
looked at 100 believed buildings to see if they
were actually saving energy compared to conventional
buildings. The moment of truth, and the verdict
was? The headline was positive. On average, the
LE buildings consumed 18 % to 39 % less energy.
The USGVC took a big victory lap. On average,
I can feel a butt coming. A really big butt.
It's a huge butt. Because Newsom found that while
the average was good, the scatter plot of the
data was terrifying. Roughly 28 % to 35 % of
the LED buildings in the study actually used
more energy than their conventional counterparts.
Wait, wait, say that again? One third of the
green buildings were actually brown buildings.
That's what the data showed, yes. If you walked
into a random LED building back in 2009, there
was about a one in three chance it was performing
worse than a standard code -compliant box. That's
shocking. And it gets worse. Newsham found absolutely
no correlation between the number of energy points
a building earned in its LED scorecard and its
actual measured performance. So getting a gold
or platinum for your energy design didn't actually
mean you saved more energy in the real world.
Zero correlation. The points, as a predictor
of performance, were meaningless. But then a
physicist named John Schofield entered the chat
and he basically flipped the whole table over.
I love when a physicist shows up to an architecture
party. They always ruin everything with math.
Schofield looked at the very same data, but he
said, you guys are all measuring the wrong thing.
He argued that Lade was obsessed with site energy,
but the planet only cares about source energy.
Okay, we need to stop and unpack this. This sounds
technical, but it also sounds like it might be
the whole ballgame. Site versus source. Explain
it like I'm five. Okay. Site energy is simple.
It's what your electric meter on the side of
the building reads. If your building uses 10
,000 kilowatt hours in a month, That's your side
energy. That seems fair. That's what I pay the
utility company for. It is. But where did that
electricity come from? That is source energy.
Let's say you have a building in Seattle. It's
mostly powered by clean, efficient hydroelectric
dams. Now take that exact same building and magically
move it to West Virginia, where the grid is powered
mostly by burning coal. Same building, same lights,
same meter reading. Same side energy. But in
West Virginia, to get that 10 ,000 kilowatt hours
to your meter, the power plant had to burn a
massive amount of coal. And a huge amount of
that energy was lost as waste heat during generation,
and then more was lost during transmission over
the power lines. The source energy, the raw fuel
burned at the power plant, is maybe three times
higher in West Virginia. than it is in Seattle
to deliver the same amount of power to the building.
So the environment cares about the coal burned
at the source, but the building owner only sees
the meter reading at the site. Exactly. And Schofield
found that Lato was awarding all its points based
on site efficiency. This led to some real perversities.
For example, electric heating is very efficient
at the site. But if that electricity comes from
a coal plant, it is absolutely terrible at the
source. So he re -ran the numbers. You re -crunch
the numbers using source energy, and he found...
Nothing. Nothing. No statistically significant
reduction in source energy or the associated
greenhouse gas emissions for LE buildings compared
to conventional ones. From his perspective, the
plaque meant absolutely nothing for the climate.
That is a bombshell. The physicist basically
says the emperor has no clothes. It was a massive,
massive controversy. And subsequent studies have
kind of confirmed pieces of this. A 2013 study
of office buildings in New York City showed that
while the gold rated buildings were OK, the silver
and certified buildings actually used 11 percent
to 15 percent more source energy than conventional
buildings. So the lower tier L .A. buildings
were actively part of the problem. Why? I mean,
how is the modeling failing this badly? Aside
from the whole site versus source issue, I think
the biggest culprit is us, the humans inside
the building. The technical term is plug loads.
The stuff we plug in. All the stuff we plug in.
Models are great at predicting the things that
are fixed, like lights and pumps and fans. They're
terrible at predicting what you and I are going
to do. Right. We bring in mini fridges for our
lunch. We plug in space heaters under our desks
because the AC is always too cold. We set up
entire server racks and closets that were never
designed to handle that heat load. The secret
space heater under the desk. The silent killer
of sustainability. It's the enemy. A study by
Fortes and Chavon showed that these plug loads
are like the dark matter of building energy use.
The model assumes a standard office worker who
behaves perfectly. But real people are mussy.
They leave windows open while the heat is on.
They work 18 hours a day instead of eight. The
building is designed like a Ferrari, but it's
being driven by a teenager who leaves the parking
brake on. OK, so on energy, the verdict is shaky,
shaky at best. But we don't just measure buildings
by their carbon footprint. We also measure them
by how it feels to be inside them. Is there a
bright side to this story? There is a very bright
side. While the energy data is a complete war
zone of conflicting studies, the data on indoor
environmental quality, or IEQ, is much, much
clearer. LE buildings are objectively healthier
for humans. This is the air quality stuff you
mentioned. Right. LED has very strict credits
for ventilation rates, for using low -emitting
materials like paints and glues and carpets that
don't off -gas toxic chemicals, and for high
-quality air filtration. And does that actually
matter, or is it just that it, you know, smells
nicer? Oh, it matters for your brain. There was
a famous study at Harvard by Joseph Allen called
the COGFIX study, and it looked at cognitive
function. They put people in controlled environments
and found that in high -performing green building
conditions with low CO2 and low VOCs, cognitive
scores were significantly higher. So you're literally
smarter in a LEED building. You're less dumb,
potentially. High CO2 levels from poor ventilation
make you sluggish and sleepy. Sick building syndrome
is a real thing. Headaches, fatigue, dry eyes.
And the data clearly shows that occupants in
LEED buildings report far fewer of these symptoms.
Now that is a real return on investment. If your
employees are even 5 % more productive because
the air is clean, that pays for the entire building
pretty fast. Exactly. People forget that the
salary cost to the people inside the building
is about 100 times higher than the energy cost
of running the building. So even if the energy
savings are a complete wash, the human health
and productivity benefits alone might justify
the certification. But are people happier? What
do the satisfaction surveys say? Mostly, yes.
Although, there is a funny little detail on the
data. People in LE buildings are often slightly
less satisfied with the acoustics and the lighting.
The lighting? Why the lighting? I thought they
were all about daylight. They are. But energy
efficiency often means automated controls. You
know those motion sensors that turn the lights
off and you sit too still for five minutes? Oh,
I hate those sensors. I'm always waving my arms
around in the dark like an idiot trying to get
the lights back on. Exactly. Or the automated
blinds that close on their own when the sun gets
too bright. People hate giving up control. They
hate the nanny building turning off their lights
for them. And that frustration shows up in the
satisfaction surveys. Interesting. And actually,
there's a new rival in town on this front called
the Well Building Standard. Well. Yes. It's a
certification that focuses only on human health
and wellness. And a 2024 study compared them.
and found that occupant satisfaction in well
-certified buildings was around 94 % compared
to only 73 % in LEED buildings. So a big gap.
A big gap. The EEG is good for health, but because
it has to split its focus between energy and
materials and water and health, It's not the
ultimate wellness experience. Okay, so we've
dragged LE through the mud a little bit here.
We've bashed the energy data. We've mocked the
bike racks. But we have to acknowledge that the
USGBC isn't deaf. They hear these criticisms.
The system has evolved over time. That's only
fair to say. I mean, we aren't using Windows
95 anymore, and we aren't using LE version 1
.0. It's gone through multiple iterations, and
we are now moving into the era of bleed V5. What's
the big headline for V5? Is it just more points
for bike racks? No. The headline is one word.
Decarbonization. The USGBC has finally realized
that energy cost savings is a bad and misleading
metric. They are pivoting hard to carbon. So
they are finally trying to fix that whole source
energy problem. Yes. The new drafts are being
written to align with the goals of the Paris
Agreement. They are putting a huge emphasis on
operational carbon, which means looking at the
actual utility bills, looking at the grid mix
of the local utility. They are finally moving
from... rewarding design intent to rewarding
verified performance. So the participation trophy
is finally becoming a performance review. That's
the hope. They're also adding new categories
for resilience. Can the building survive a flood
or a heat wave? And equity. Does the building
actually help the surrounding community? It's
a much more mature, much more holistic system
than that simple checklist from 2005. I want
to wrap up here by looking at some specific examples.
We talked about the bad ones, the gap building,
the EPA disaster. Let's talk about some of the
icons, the buildings that really got it right.
We have to start with the Empire State Building.
The King Kong Building, an icon of the 1930s.
Exactly. Around 2010, the ownership decided to
do a massive energy retrofit. Now, usually when
people think green building, they think of some
new shiny glass spaceship. But the greenest building
is the one that's already built. Right, because
all the carbon to make the bricks and the steel
was already spent 80 years ago. The embodied
carbon is sunk. But the Empire State Building
was an absolute energy hog. It had 6 ,500 original
single -pane, incredibly drafty windows. So what
do you do? I mean, you can't just go to Home
Depot and buy 6 ,500 windows for a historic landmark.
No, and you can't just throw them all in a landfill
either. So they did something just incredible.
They built a window factory on the fifth floor
of the building. They built a factory inside
the skyscraper. A mini factory. They would remove
the windows a few at a time, bring them up to
the fifth floor, strip them down, reuse the original
glass panes and frames, add a super insulating
film between the panes, fill the cavity with
gas. and then reinstall them. They reused 96
% of the original materials. That is insanely
cool. Just brilliant problem solving. It is.
It cut the energy use of the building by close
to 40%. The project achieved willied gold, and
it proved that you don't always need high -tech
gadgets. You just need really smart, common -sense
engineering. What about new construction? What's
the gold standard, or I guess the platinum standard,
of what's possible? For me, I love the crystal
in London. It's a building dedicated entirely
to the topic of sustainable cities. And it achieved
both LEED Platinum and BREEM. Outstanding BREEM
is the very strict British rival system. So it
won the double crown. It's a living machine.
It generates its own energy with solar panels
and ground source heat pumps. It collects and
recycles rainwater. It's fully automated. It
is what all those computer models promise, but
actually brought to life in reality. And just
for the sports fans out there, I saw that stadiums
are getting in on this, too. It's a huge trend.
Levi's Stadium, where the 49ers play, was the
first NFL stadium to get lead gold. And then
U .S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, home of the
Vikings, got platinum. Wow, platinum. And that's
incredibly impressive because stadiums are energy
nightmares. You have the massive floodlights,
the giant scoreboards, and thousands of toilets
all flushing at halftime. If a stadium can be
green, anything can be green. That is absolutely
the message. So we've arrived at the end of our
deep dive. We've seen the plaque. We've analyzed
the data. We've exposed the loopholes. What is
the final verdict? When the listener walks into
that lobby tomorrow and sees that silver plaque
on the wall, what should they think? They should
think with nuance. Levy is not a magic wand.
A plaque does not guarantee that the building
is saving the planet, especially if that building
is sitting in a car -dependent suburb or if all
the tenants are plugging in space heaters under
their desks. It's not a guarantee of perfection.
Not at all. But, and this is a really big but,
it has been a transformative force. You cannot
deny the levy changed the entire conversation
in the construction industry. Okay. It forced
a very slow... very conservative industry, to
learn a whole new language. It made sustainability
a boardroom topic. It pushed entire supply chains
to make non -toxic paints and recycled carpets
standard, not specialty items. So it raised the
floor for everyone, even if the ceiling is still
a little bit messy. That's a perfect way to put
it. It made the average building built today
much better than the average building from 20
years ago. And financially, the data is crystal
clear. LE buildings command higher rents. and
have higher occupancy rates. The market values
the plaque, even if the physics are still debatable.
So the plaque means we tried. And maybe more
importantly, we did better than the other guy
would have. It means intention. And here's the
thought I want to leave you with. As we look
at LED V5, and as we stare down the barrel of
the climate crisis, maybe we don't have time
for intention anymore. Maybe we only have time
for results. We need proven performance. Should
we stop awarding points for effort? And maybe
more pointedly, should a building ever get a
platinum plaque if it requires every single person
to drive an SUV to get there? Maybe the definition
of a green building shouldn't just be about the
building anymore. Maybe it should be about the
life it forces all of us to live. That is the
uncomfortable question that the next generation
of architects and planners has to answer. Something
to chew on the next time you're standing there
waiting for that elevator. Thanks for diving
deep with us. It's always a pleasure.