HER LEED » Green Rush History

San Francisco Greening

Lisa Goddard — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 22:23:03 +0000

On August 4, 2008, San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom signed the groundbreaking Green Building Ordinance. LEED certification and its residential counterpart, GreenPoint Rated (GPR) are the recognized industrial standards the City uses to measure energy efficient requirements under the new rules. The next entry will detail San Francisco’s building practices and the events that have led to this historic mandate. I will detail the actors involved in creating the ordinance, how the industry and citizens of San Francisco reacted to the new codes and the industrial climate since implementation.

U.S.G.B.C.

Lisa Goddard — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:58:57 +0000

In 1993, leaders from across the building industry convened for the first time and created the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). Their objectives were to advance environmentally responsible building while promoting a healthy and profitable society (USGBC, “About”). Since their inception, USGBC has provided educational services and research capabilities to their 18,800+ member companies and organizations. Best known for transforming the built environment through their Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification system, the LEED rating system has become the industrial standard for sustainable building practices across the country (ibid, “LEED”).
What the LEED rating system provides is a toolkit for the building industry to immediately measure the impact of their buildings performance. The LEED rating system designates points for meeting energy and environmental standards. The points determine which level of certification a project meets: Certified (26-32 pts.), Silver (33-38 pts.), Gold (39-51 pts.) or Platinum (52-69 pts.). Through a broad based industrial consensus process, five areas of building performance were identified as key to building efficiency: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality (ibid). The LEED rating system applies to new construction, renovations, interiors, schools, retail, hospitals, commercial and residential buildings. Recognized for its whole system approach to design, construction and operation of buildings, LEED certification grew out of the ideas first explored by Freeman and Lovins and have become the benchmark for sustainable development worldwide.

California

Lisa Goddard — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:20:33 +0000

Since 1974, California has held its per capita energy consumption constant while the rest of the countries individual consumption has increased by 50% (Mufson, p1). With advocates like Freeman, Lovins and Rosenfeld who powered the movement, federal regulation provided the framework, and the California Energy Commission lead conservation and efficiency efforts in buildings and appliances that set the bar for the rest of the country. A legislative mandate issued in 1978, called the Commission to reduce California energy consumption and Title 24 of the California Energy Code was implemented. Title 24 created strict energy efficiency standards for all new commercial and residential buildings. Periodically updated and revised to account for new technology and development, the latest version speaks directly to “greening” California buildings and responding to global warming.

The Innovators…

Lisa Goddard — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:48:51 +0000

Three of the many innovators who changed how we view our shared natural resources are S. David Freeman, Amory Lovins and Arthur Rosenfeld, pioneers of energy efficiency practices, and instrumental in contributing to the conservation movement.
Freeman headed up the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) under President Carter and pushed for technical fixes. He successfully curtailed TVA’s nuclear plant construction and instead promoted energy efficiency as the model solution. In his book, Energy: The New Era, Freeman pressed for “zero energy growth.” His work, among others, demonstrated that economic growth was not contingent on energy growth (Hirsh, p140). Freeman viewed the energy problem as long-term investment where the solutions come “from long debate and hard bargaining at all levels of American political life” (Freeman, p13).
Amory Lovins was received with more fanfare than his colleague Freeman, but they shared the same views. He achieved recognition for his leadership in promoting energy efficiency and was involved in formulating policy in the 1970’s. His article, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” was published in October 1976 and its as relevant today as it was then. What set Lovins apart was how he illustrated the United States energy policy in a two paths scenario. The first, he termed the “hard path,” which was rooted in the idea that energy growth is linked to GDP. The solution employed by this path was to sustain energy consumption, minimize oil imports and grow the coal, oil and gas, and nuclear facilities (Lovins, p66). This “business as usual” approach he argued, was prohibitively expensive and implementation would require greater environmental degradation. The “soft path” endorsed meeting the energy demands with a supply of renewable resources, mainly solar and wind energy. This second option stressed the same technical fixes that Freeman suggested, but Lovins took it a step further by spelling out the capital savings of conservation, making a compelling case for businesses who resisted conservation practices (ibid, p73). The barriers to entry were not technical or economic, they were mainly ideological; professional mindsets created rigidity to solutions that didn’t employ specific science and technology associated with the harder path (ibid, p74). Nuclear engineers for example, seemingly have nothing to gain by promoting photovoltaic or wind turbine technology, and the larger utility monopolies have a shareholder responsibility that rest on a centralized energy platform. Lovins also highlighted that conflicting and obsolete building codes were also an issue, something California’s Title 24 would address and San Francisco would surpass to become a leader of green building in California.
California Energy Commissioner Arthur Rosenfeld has dedicated his professional life to creating energy efficiency measures in buildings, homes and appliances. When the 1973 energy crisis hit, Rosenfeld and colleagues got together and launched the Energy Efficiency Building Program at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. By 1976, the California Residential Building Standards had adopted the “Two-Zone” computer system that modeled the energy performance of buildings. This was later accepted nationally as DOE-2, and is the basis for state and industrial building standards across the country (Hirsh, p149). Further, Rosenfeld and company created the first training program for energy audits by public utilities, they produced energy efficient technologies such as white roofs for buildings, insulated windows and the precursor to compact florescent lighting (ibid). Additionally, the Rosenfeld group investigated how energy consumption could be reduced in our home appliances, i.e. refrigerators, washing machines, etc. His work and preeminence in energy efficiency solutions has resulted in California’s leadership in conservation.

Enter policy…

Lisa Goddard — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:15:04 +0000

Environmental awareness grew with the smog in California in the 1940’s. The first federal regulation that addressed the link between energy use and environmental damage was the 1963 Clean Air Act, which established air quality standards and reduced emissions of carbon and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere (Hirsh, p 64). In 1969, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) became the enforcement body responsible for further amendments to the Clean Air Act. Energy conservation entered conventional society with the first “Earth Day” initiated by Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson in 1970. While American was enjoying the benefits afforded them through the mass production and consumption of goods, Nelson coordinated the “teach-in” to educate our citizens about humanity’s contribution to environmental degradation (Hirsh, p65). Paradoxically, while Earth Day marked the beginning of the modern environmental movement, a counter argument was made that conservation infringed on those conveniences and comforts that had become an American way of life. Resistance, mainly by those industries that had monopolistic interests in maintaining the status quo, stressed that energy growth was necessary for economic growth (Sovacool, p353). This argument persists to this day, even with sufficient evidence to refute it.
The stark realization of our finite amount of natural resources was made evident to Americans during the 1973 oil embargo. The fear of lifestyle changes that conservation required was addressed through energy efficiency, a more user friendly alternative. The idea that we would waste less of the energy we use by employing “technical fixes” such as building insulation, double-pain windows and simply turning off the lights when leaving a room were promoted (Hirsh, p140). Less wasteful use of energy did not require lifestyle changes, but mindsets did begin to change for some of citizens who waited in the gas lines for hours just to fill up their tanks.

A touch of history

Lisa Goddard — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:10:33 +0000

The industrial revolution marked a pivotal point in history when natural resource extraction for financial gain and the ideology of progress through technological advancement fueled American’s economic growth. Since the mid 18th century more of nature has been destroyed than in all prior history (Hawken, et al., p 2). Industrialization created economic prosperity, lead to vast material development and permanently changed the landscape of human kind. Capitalism expanded its reach; by employing human labor to extract natural resources that were later manufactured for the creation of goods, wealth and reinvestment were generated for the capitalist. The ideology of the industrial system essentially used finance capital, human capital and manufacturing capital, to transform natural capital (defined by our resources in nature), to create consumables that we have learned to equate with progress, accomplishment and later, status (Hawken, et.al., p 4). Through utilizing what at the time were abundant resources; water, trees, minerals and those more labor intensive supplies such as coal, copper and oil; railroads, highways and bridges were built to transport goods across the nation. Cities, the modern hubs of commerce, grew to accommodate more industries. Suburbs sprung up as the population increased and more homes, schools and hospitals were built to services the American dream. All the while extraction of natural resources went unabated, yet it was only a matter of time before the pendulum swung from an abundance of resources to scarcity. Having equated economic growth with energy use, the capitalist system was forced to examine their consumption and reluctantly modify their production techniques to save what was left of our scare natural resources.

Natural Capital

Lisa Goddard — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:57:44 +0000

Development and natural resource extraction go hand in hand. Historically, the capitalist system failed to assign value to our formally abundant natural resources, an oversight that brought conservation reluctantly into the mainstream. Participatory democracy and progressive policies supporting conservation led to national regulations. California was an early adopter in the environmental movement and the testing ground for energy efficiency pioneers to begin the process of de-linking economic growth to energy consumption. Conservation was worked into our capitalist system along with the mindset that building green can enhance our environment without degrading the natural one; a value that explicitly preserves American society.