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The problem is a buildings, “greenness” is typically measured based on how many green elements are implemented into the design. Triple pane glass? Check. Green

The problem is a buildings, “greenness” is typically measured based on how many green elements are implemented into the design. Triple pane glass? Check. Green materials? Check. High efficiency heat pump? Check. Etc. Etc. If you check as many boxes as possible your building is labeled green and everyone applauds. The real way to measure this would be energy used to construct the building, factoring in supply chain and then ongoing energy usage per square foot. You would also need to factor in what the building was being used for and perhaps, depending on the building, the output and production of said building. All of this is to say, it is complicated. I suspect many modern buildings are space inefficient leading to less production per square foot. Therefore even if it is a green building that is well designed there is a certain level of inefficiency in that it is a larger than needed building that has to be lit, heated, cooled, etc.

freshpots 5y ago
You seem to be operating old information and/or bad assumptions about the typical standard (LEED). It very much covers the criticisms you claim it does not include. It isn't simply a bunch of check boxes for no reason. https://www.usgbc.org/leed/v4 https://www.usgbc.org/leed/v4
- etempleton 5y ago
  Interesting! Yes, I am not familiar with LEED v4, but am reading through it now. My experience is based on older models of LEED. V4 does appear to address some of my criticisms or at least move in the right direction. And to clarify, I don’t believe the “check boxes” are completely meaningless, rather the issue is that it provides room for gaming of the system to achieve a rating. This of course will probably always occur to some extent. Thank you for edifying me.
  - xyzzy21 5y ago
    I think you still have a point however. What is objectively true vs. what is subjectively understood and expected from "Green" as an ideology, are generation two completely different things. Expectations are unreasonable in the latter. So that causes the judgement of "success" to be unreasonable. Most people do not have an objective understand or perspective of what being Green under LEED would mean. Most people think and act as though you can throw up a few solar panels and then run an iron blast furnace with the Green energy. The numbers simply don't work. Most people do not understand how much energy is required to provide their current lifestyle! The level innumeracy and its universality of that innumeracy is that Epic Fail. It's the worst in places that are the most religiously strident places like California. In general, you'd need land for solar panels equivalent to your entire neighborhood to merely duplicate and provide your current energy use just from your own home. And that doesn't even cover EVs being charged! So how much did that house cost you? And now you need 10x that much land just to be Green? And what about the energy inputs to build and keep the Grid going so you can use cheap land for that? It's a lot more than anyone typically is aware of! Try 20x-500x depending on specifics of things like thermodynamic efficiency and resulting impact on supply chains! And a 10x-20x puts you into fossil fuel, nuclear power territory being optimal.
    - danans 5y ago
      > In general, you'd need land for solar panels equivalent to your entire neighborhood to merely duplicate and provide your current energy use just from your own home. That's false because it is based on the assumption that you should convert the input BTUs of your natural gas heater directly to hypothetical kWH consumed if substituted with electricity, which is silly because if you are trying to generate 100% of your energy consumption locally (a goal of questionable value itself), you would change your mechanical systems to electrical ones that are 3-5x more efficient at delivering space heating than natural gas furnaces. The most efficient nat gas furnaces are 96% efficient, but heat pumps routinely achieve 300-400% efficiency. That works out to far lower energy input for space heating. A far more sensible approach to local electricity generation is to move to more efficient building and mechanical systems and only generate enough electricity via solar+storage to power critical loads during a grid outage. > And that doesn't even cover EVs being charged! Given, the average American commute distance, EVs will always be a grid coupled technology due to their huge energy requirements. This is a good thing because they will needed to provide buffers for grid and home resiliency to less predictable power supply and demand patterns.
    - marcinzm 5y ago
      >It's the worst in places that are the most religiously strident places like California. In general, you'd need land for solar panels equivalent to your entire neighborhood to merely duplicate and provide your current energy use just from your own home. And that doesn't even cover EVs being charged! Math please. A 100 square foot solar panel would generate around 150 kWh per month given around 5 hours of sunlight a day. The average household uses under 1000 kWh per month. So you'd need around 700 sqft of solar panels to cover that which fits on the roof of a single story house easily. edit: And plenty of people sell electricity back to the grid on average while having rooftop solar panels.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > Most people think and act as though you can throw up a few solar panels and then run an iron blast furnace with the Green energy. Which people? > It's the worst in places that are the most religiously strident places like California. Like the prior quote, this characterizes and denigrates a different set of people. It tells us nothing but your willingness to insult and ignore them. Let's stop dismissing people (probably not coincidentally, a certain political grouping being dismissed using the language common to another political grouping) and use genuine curiosity about the world - and other people - to further our knowledge. Maybe some people in CA know something important; maybe they should be treated with respect and listened to, being other genuine people.
  - freshpots 5y ago
    YW, older LEED standards have really left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths so to speak. We have a building at work that is LEED and it has some issues so it is LEED's fault. That kind of thing spreads and then those average people start to believe 'eco-friendly' buildings are useless and don't help the environment. I hope LEED developers focus more on the human aspect and the implications of biases when 'checking boxes'.
- lukeschlather 5y ago
  I went to a talk that specifically said LEED is a terrible standard and contrasted it with other standards that actually work. The LEEDv4 marketing materials don't have the tone I would expect if LEED has actually evolved into something more useful than a greenwashing marketing program. Maybe they've improved it but I would need to have some third party say "earlier versions of LEED didn't actually mean any of the things you would expect, and LEEDv4 has corrected that in a meaningful way."
agumonkey 5y ago
I get the feeling that society in the large is all about vague implementations and vague evaluations models that are vaguely good enough to not be cancelled. Society is extremely inefficient
- ironmagma 5y ago
  Inefficient when compared to what alternative though? To actually get anything perfect would require an infinite amount of time, so any requirements are a balancing act.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    fair enough, in the context of energy savings you'd have a point, but I was mentioning this as a general problem even for non pressing issues it seems to me that we could still provide more with less (resources and time), without going in analysis paralysis
- Meandering 5y ago
  Yes, yes, and yes. The problem is "virtue signaling" and the ideological capture of politics. People know what they want at the end of the day. "I don't want to destroy the earth" or "I don't want to poison the well" are common enough goals for most environmental people. The problem is a society where worker specialization has ostrated people from function knowledge and the time to understand the full scope of any given issue. We are now dependent on public sentiment towards possible solutions which is normally pushed via politics. We are pushing extremes to break through into action which diminishes the effectiveness of any resulting system. We gather around buzz words or a sentence from some academic article to justify the righteousness and effectiveness of one piece of a complex system. Since people can't be honest in a political environment, we cannot identify the cons or initiate substantial dissent within an approach. We are unified by the common denominator of our intelligence and access to information in order to roar through legislation. We are left with an ineffective system at an unreasonable cost resulting in a poor ROI. *steps off soapbox
  - 5y ago
mogadsheu 5y ago
This! The process you’re describing is called lifecycle analysis and it’s complicated. The greenest building is something like a giant tent, high on total resource efficiency but lower on comfort. There are tradeoffs to consider and a lot of them are lifestyle choices, like wearing a sweater indoors.
jandrewrogers 5y ago
I used to live in a 19th century building that was simultaneously LEED certified and a registered historic landmark. These two statuses were very much in conflict with each other, because the latter status often prohibits necessary changes to the building in pursuit of the former. In the case of the building where I lived, they were required to retain the original windows for historicity: rickety, drafty, single-pane affairs that leaked prodigious quantities of heat. These windows were very large and the ceilings high, so in winter you essentially needed to run the heater non-stop. To offset that, they unnecessarily and often quite uselessly over-engineered other parts of the building construction for green-ness, which I presume helped with whatever scoring system made the building "green". None of which changed the fact that the building fundamentally leaked energy like a sieve. It was always a mystery to me how they managed to LEED certify one of the most poorly insulated buildings in which I've ever lived. Nothing else you do to a building should be able to offset that fact.

freshpots 5y ago

You seem to be operating old information and/or bad assumptions about the typical standard (LEED). It very much covers the criticisms you claim it does not include. It isn't simply a bunch of check boxes for no reason. https://www.usgbc.org/leed/v4 https://www.usgbc.org/leed/v4

etempleton 5y ago
Interesting! Yes, I am not familiar with LEED v4, but am reading through it now. My experience is based on older models of LEED. V4 does appear to address some of my criticisms or at least move in the right direction. And to clarify, I don’t believe the “check boxes” are completely meaningless, rather the issue is that it provides room for gaming of the system to achieve a rating. This of course will probably always occur to some extent. Thank you for edifying me.
- xyzzy21 5y ago
  I think you still have a point however. What is objectively true vs. what is subjectively understood and expected from "Green" as an ideology, are generation two completely different things. Expectations are unreasonable in the latter. So that causes the judgement of "success" to be unreasonable. Most people do not have an objective understand or perspective of what being Green under LEED would mean. Most people think and act as though you can throw up a few solar panels and then run an iron blast furnace with the Green energy. The numbers simply don't work. Most people do not understand how much energy is required to provide their current lifestyle! The level innumeracy and its universality of that innumeracy is that Epic Fail. It's the worst in places that are the most religiously strident places like California. In general, you'd need land for solar panels equivalent to your entire neighborhood to merely duplicate and provide your current energy use just from your own home. And that doesn't even cover EVs being charged! So how much did that house cost you? And now you need 10x that much land just to be Green? And what about the energy inputs to build and keep the Grid going so you can use cheap land for that? It's a lot more than anyone typically is aware of! Try 20x-500x depending on specifics of things like thermodynamic efficiency and resulting impact on supply chains! And a 10x-20x puts you into fossil fuel, nuclear power territory being optimal.
  - danans 5y ago
    > In general, you'd need land for solar panels equivalent to your entire neighborhood to merely duplicate and provide your current energy use just from your own home. That's false because it is based on the assumption that you should convert the input BTUs of your natural gas heater directly to hypothetical kWH consumed if substituted with electricity, which is silly because if you are trying to generate 100% of your energy consumption locally (a goal of questionable value itself), you would change your mechanical systems to electrical ones that are 3-5x more efficient at delivering space heating than natural gas furnaces. The most efficient nat gas furnaces are 96% efficient, but heat pumps routinely achieve 300-400% efficiency. That works out to far lower energy input for space heating. A far more sensible approach to local electricity generation is to move to more efficient building and mechanical systems and only generate enough electricity via solar+storage to power critical loads during a grid outage. > And that doesn't even cover EVs being charged! Given, the average American commute distance, EVs will always be a grid coupled technology due to their huge energy requirements. This is a good thing because they will needed to provide buffers for grid and home resiliency to less predictable power supply and demand patterns.
  - marcinzm 5y ago
    >It's the worst in places that are the most religiously strident places like California. In general, you'd need land for solar panels equivalent to your entire neighborhood to merely duplicate and provide your current energy use just from your own home. And that doesn't even cover EVs being charged! Math please. A 100 square foot solar panel would generate around 150 kWh per month given around 5 hours of sunlight a day. The average household uses under 1000 kWh per month. So you'd need around 700 sqft of solar panels to cover that which fits on the roof of a single story house easily. edit: And plenty of people sell electricity back to the grid on average while having rooftop solar panels.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > Most people think and act as though you can throw up a few solar panels and then run an iron blast furnace with the Green energy. Which people? > It's the worst in places that are the most religiously strident places like California. Like the prior quote, this characterizes and denigrates a different set of people. It tells us nothing but your willingness to insult and ignore them. Let's stop dismissing people (probably not coincidentally, a certain political grouping being dismissed using the language common to another political grouping) and use genuine curiosity about the world - and other people - to further our knowledge. Maybe some people in CA know something important; maybe they should be treated with respect and listened to, being other genuine people.
- freshpots 5y ago
  YW, older LEED standards have really left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths so to speak. We have a building at work that is LEED and it has some issues so it is LEED's fault. That kind of thing spreads and then those average people start to believe 'eco-friendly' buildings are useless and don't help the environment. I hope LEED developers focus more on the human aspect and the implications of biases when 'checking boxes'.
lukeschlather 5y ago
I went to a talk that specifically said LEED is a terrible standard and contrasted it with other standards that actually work. The LEEDv4 marketing materials don't have the tone I would expect if LEED has actually evolved into something more useful than a greenwashing marketing program. Maybe they've improved it but I would need to have some third party say "earlier versions of LEED didn't actually mean any of the things you would expect, and LEEDv4 has corrected that in a meaningful way."

agumonkey 5y ago

I get the feeling that society in the large is all about vague implementations and vague evaluations models that are vaguely good enough to not be cancelled. Society is extremely inefficient

ironmagma 5y ago
Inefficient when compared to what alternative though? To actually get anything perfect would require an infinite amount of time, so any requirements are a balancing act.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  fair enough, in the context of energy savings you'd have a point, but I was mentioning this as a general problem even for non pressing issues it seems to me that we could still provide more with less (resources and time), without going in analysis paralysis
Meandering 5y ago
Yes, yes, and yes. The problem is "virtue signaling" and the ideological capture of politics. People know what they want at the end of the day. "I don't want to destroy the earth" or "I don't want to poison the well" are common enough goals for most environmental people. The problem is a society where worker specialization has ostrated people from function knowledge and the time to understand the full scope of any given issue. We are now dependent on public sentiment towards possible solutions which is normally pushed via politics. We are pushing extremes to break through into action which diminishes the effectiveness of any resulting system. We gather around buzz words or a sentence from some academic article to justify the righteousness and effectiveness of one piece of a complex system. Since people can't be honest in a political environment, we cannot identify the cons or initiate substantial dissent within an approach. We are unified by the common denominator of our intelligence and access to information in order to roar through legislation. We are left with an ineffective system at an unreasonable cost resulting in a poor ROI. *steps off soapbox
- 5y ago

mogadsheu 5y ago

This! The process you’re describing is called lifecycle analysis and it’s complicated. The greenest building is something like a giant tent, high on total resource efficiency but lower on comfort. There are tradeoffs to consider and a lot of them are lifestyle choices, like wearing a sweater indoors.

jandrewrogers 5y ago

I used to live in a 19th century building that was simultaneously LEED certified and a registered historic landmark. These two statuses were very much in conflict with each other, because the latter status often prohibits necessary changes to the building in pursuit of the former. In the case of the building where I lived, they were required to retain the original windows for historicity: rickety, drafty, single-pane affairs that leaked prodigious quantities of heat. These windows were very large and the ceilings high, so in winter you essentially needed to run the heater non-stop. To offset that, they unnecessarily and often quite uselessly over-engineered other parts of the building construction for green-ness, which I presume helped with whatever scoring system made the building "green". None of which changed the fact that the building fundamentally leaked energy like a sieve. It was always a mystery to me how they managed to LEED certify one of the most poorly insulated buildings in which I've ever lived. Nothing else you do to a building should be able to offset that fact.