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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Now, we continue our climate week series. By now, you've probably heard me say on this show that the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in New York City is its buildings. The push for a more sustainable city hinges in part on making new and old buildings more energy-efficient, greener.

Maybe you've heard the term LEED-certified. LEED stands for the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, the most widely-used green building certification system in the world. That's the context for the conversation we'll have now with City Limits climate and environment reporter Mariana Simões, who found that many impressively-rated, LEED-certified buildings are still heavy carbon emitters, worth getting into what LEED-certified means in practice, not just on paper.

Mariana's investigation looks specifically at Hudson Yards, whose developers have said that they want the complex to be the most connected, sustainable, responsive, and efficient neighborhood in the US. That's a quote from their literature. Mariana Simões from City Limits joins me now. Also with us, John Scofield. No, not the guitarist, the professor of physics at Oberlin College, and an expert on energy usage in buildings. John Scofield. Hi, Mariana. Hi, Professor Scofield. Welcome to WNYC.

Mariana Simões: Hello, Brian, thank you so much for having me on the show.

Professor John Scofield: Thank you, Brian. Yes, enjoy being here. Thanks.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get into the findings in Mariana's reporting, let's establish some definitions. Professor Scofield first, what is LEED certification?

Professor John Scofield: LEED certification is administered by a nonprofit organization, the US Green Building Council. It's a certification that your building meets certain green standards. It was developed about or began about 20 years ago, 23 years ago, and it has gone through various revisions over that period. Basically, if you want to have a green-certified building under the LEED program, you have to acquire a certain number of points from a checklist of things that you can do to make your building green.

Some of these involve making it energy-efficient. Some involve using materials that are particularly good for the environment. When you achieve a certain number of points, you can submit your building to be certified. It's kind of an ABC flunk system. If you get above a certain high number of points, let's say, one system, it's 80 points out of 120, you're called LEED Platinum. If you get a little bit lower, you might be called LEED Gold. Then the lowest, there's LEED Silver, and then just certified. If you don't meet a minimum level, you can't get certified at all. It's a green rating system.

Brian Lehrer: Do New York City or other municipalities offer certain incentives contingent upon LEED certification in order to encourage developers to build green?

Professor John Scofield: I guess I don't know the answer to that.

Mariana Simões: I don't think that they have incentives per se that the state or the city is pushing, but I think what they get is the PR boost for having this certificate and saying, "Yes, we're energy-efficient. Yes, we are green standard." If you walk around New York City, sometimes you'll see buildings that have a plaque in front of the facade that says, "We have a LEED-certified building here." It draws the attention of the public when they walk by.

Brian Lehrer: Mariana, what did you set out to find in your investigation?

Mariana Simões: Well, that's exactly what happened. I was walking around Hudson Yards, and I had spoken to a source who told me that, "I'm looking at city data, and I'm finding that some buildings aren't as energy-efficient as they set out to be." He cited some in Hudson Yards, and I thought, "Well, that's interesting. Let me go take a look and see if this is true." The reason that I could see this is because, under Local Law 33, the buildings are required to post an energy efficiency rating in the facade as well.

What that means is they get a grade from the city. That grade is like you would get in school. It's from A to D, D being the lowest. If you walk around buildings in New York, you can actually see this. You just look at the facade and there will typically be a grade there. What I was noticing is that the one in Hudson Yards were posting some lower grades that weren't as high as the promise of the LEED certification. The LEED certification promised high-efficiency ratings. What we were seeing in these scores was that some of them were median to low.

Brian Lehrer: Yet, as you report, once it's been LEED-certified, a building can't lose its LEED certification even as governments, including New York, set new and stricter emissions benchmarks to combat the increasing threat of climate change. That's a quote from your story. Do you want to elaborate on this at all?

Mariana Simões: Yes, I think that the big point here, and I think John alluded to this, we have been talking about LEED being an issue for two decades now. I think a lot of environmentalists have brought this up in the past. I think the reason that this becomes relevant again now is that New York is spearheading efforts to pass laws to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

They have this goal to reduce 80% of large buildings' greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. When you think about that, I think what brought me to the story was this understanding that there's a huge promise of a sustainable neighborhood here that in this day and time is lagging behind on that promise to create a more efficient city. I think that was one of the main points that brings me to why we're dealing with this topic now if that makes sense.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. One of the sources you quote in the story is Richard Lee, found it so interesting. He told you, the problem is that while LEED can accommodate high performance, it doesn't require it. People can build a LEED Platinum building that has a low Energy Star score and high greenhouse gas emissions. Professor Scofield, as the expert on energy usage in buildings, are you surprised by this discrepancy between levels of LEED certification that buildings have earned and the emissions that they're actually producing?

Professor John Scofield: Well, first, I have to say, I'm not really an expert on building energy per se. I know a lot about LEED building energy use, so I want to just clarify that.

Brian Lehrer: Sure.

Professor John Scofield: I'm no longer surprised. When I first began following this, it was really back in 2008. I was working with the American Physical Society on an energy efficiency study. We learned about the first LEED study that had been done showing how much energy they saved. That got me interested in looking at the details of the data. This is an ongoing problem where the aspirations of a design team aren't realized in the final product.

It's like the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. I believe very much in our need to reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emission, but I'm not excited about aspirations. I'm excited about actual results. The problem with LEED is you don't have to demonstrate savings. You just have to check a bunch of lists of things that you've done that might lead to savings.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your calls. Hang on, Mariana. Let me just put out the listener invite. We can take your calls on building energy usage and efficiency ratings, particularly in New York City. Your questions welcome for my guests, City Limits climate and environment reporter Mariana Simões, whose investigative piece in City Limits is headlined, Hudson Yards Calls Itself a Model Neighborhood for Energy Efficiency. City Data Paints a Different Picture. Again, also with us is John Scofield, professor of physics at Oberlin. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Mariana, go ahead.

Mariana Simões: Sorry. I was just going to add a little bit to what John was saying. I think the other key to this is that the city's rating system is also faulty in some ways. I think the point of what the article looks into is that we don't have a really good mechanism to track the energy efficiency of buildings over time. I think the problem with LEED that John pointed out when he said it's a checklist, and then if you meet all these criteria, then you get that beautiful seal in your facade and you can call yourself LEED-certified, the problem with that is that once a building gets LEED certification, it can't lose it.

It's like, as they said, the LEED spokesperson said to me and this is quoted in the article, "It's a stamp that was given for a period in time." Then after that, it doesn't get held accountable if it doesn't meet up to that standard. I think one of the main things that is raised here, and I think it's important to bring into this discussion, is that we really need to be making sure that if we're going to be giving out green certificates, people need to be meeting those standards over a period of time. That's not being tracked in a way that is helping us understand if we are actually going to meet our sustainability goals in the long run.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Brett in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Brett.

Brett: Hi, thank you for taking my call. I was just wondering if those building-efficiency grades on buildings, if that's a form of public shaming, and if that's an effective way to govern at all. Also, the criticism I've heard about LEED is that it's more about satisfying the industry that's grown to accommodate the regulations than actually rating the efficiency of a building over time because, as you said, it's like buying your way to heaven as if it's a tie permanently. That's my question.

Brian Lehrer: Brett, thank you very much. Two questions there. Mariana, do you have an opinion as to--

Mariana Simões: What was the first one?

Brian Lehrer: The first one, really interesting question, I think, whether the letter grades on the buildings are actively serving as incentives to be green.

Mariana Simões: Oh, I see. They say that they are, right? I think the spokesperson that I spoke to at Energy Star said that it's meant to, in a way, encourage people to be able to say, "This is a progress report of how I've been doing in terms of energy consumption." By looking at this progress report, they are supposedly being incentivized to improve and do better, but is it really working?

I think that's the big question here because what we've seen is, yes, they're required to put it on their facade, but how much of this is really taken seriously as a measurement that needs to set a marker for us to reach better sustainability, better energy efficiency? I don't know. One of the buildings that I went to when I was walking around Hudson Yards was a hotel that had its rating at the door and it was like a D score. In the background, they had a mechanical arm that was like sorting through people's luggage.

I just thought, "Well I'm seeing this--" I asked somebody who worked there and I said, "What is this mechanical arm?" They said, "Oh, it's just a cool, fun, technological perk that the luggage is being sorted by a machine, and people like it." I thought, "Wow, do we really need a mechanical arm to sort people's luggage? Because that probably wastes a lot of energy." I think at some point, it's like, is this really working to the extent that it's supposed to? I don't know.

Brian Lehrer: We don't know yet. Professor Scofield, to the LEED part of the caller's question, is there evidence yet to suggest that LEED certification has actually contributed to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from buildings?

Professor John Scofield: Well, what I would say is LEED was one of the first organizations, the U.S. Green Building Council, to shine light on this problem that we could really improve buildings. To their credit, they have got a lot of people excited about the idea of making more energy-efficient buildings. Now, in practice, there's just a disconnect. It's not really achieving the goal that's required despite the good intentions. I will have to say one other thing about the building grades in New York City. The Energy Star score on which they're based is itself problematic as well. I think what Mariana said that we really don't have a good metric for measuring how energy-efficient buildings are.

Brian Lehrer: El in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, El.

El: Hi, how are you doing? I just wanted to bring attention. I'm glad this subject has come up because I've been talking to colleagues of mine for many years about this. They work in the energy field. There's a map that was put out by NYU a few years back. If you want to look it up, it's energy.cusp.nyu.edu. You can also search NYC Mayor's Office of Sustainability Energy Map, Water Performance Map.

It shows that from 7th Avenue to 5th Avenue between about 35th Street and 58th Street, the buildings that are in that area are predominantly LEED-certified, but yet their energy use intensity is the most drastic in comparison to the rest of the city. If you were to look at that map, you would actually get a really great snapshot of everything that you're discussing today. It pretty much clarifies the fact that, yes, LEED is this certification that stands for something, but yet look at the buildings. Mostly, the buildings in the middle of the city that have the certification are producing extreme amounts of energy.

Brian Lehrer: You're saying that that map shows that particular buildings with LEED certification are using a lot of energy and therefore emitting a lot of emissions? You're not saying this is just because Seventh Avenue is in Midtown, and so there's a concentration of buildings there. You're saying it's the buildings in that area that aren't so great?

El: Yes, it's a map. It's by building. It is based on the benchmarking data of each building. Every building in New York City that's 25,000 square feet or larger has to submit to the city data each year on its energy consumption. Each building is on this map. The benchmarking data is provided by the city of New York. It is color-coded based on that energy use consumption. If it's darker blue on the map, it's more energy-intensive, and that's based on the reporting that's been done to the city.

Brian Lehrer: Mariana, anything on this?

Mariana Simões: Well, I think that's interesting. I hadn't seen that map. I will check it out. I think that the more that we can map this, the better. The benchmarking data that you mentioned is the basis for the article and for John Scofield's work as well. It is important to note that that is public and anybody can access that. Also, the energy scores are public, so you can look them up online on the New York City Accelerator's website. Any concerned citizen, anybody who wants to take a look at what their building's energy efficiency is, they can look that up.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Now, Neil, I should say, in Plainfield, New Jersey, seems to have an interesting story of building something in the suburbs and deciding not even to go for LEED certification because of the environment there. Neil, hi. You're on WNYC. Do I have that right?

Neil: Yes, you are, Brian. Thank you. It's good to talk to you again. I was one of the chairs of the building committee building a temple in Scotch Plains. Even though we are very environmentally conscious, we decided not to go for LEED certification. This addresses the issues that you're talking about, in that we were not able to really go forward because the rules are written in such a way that, for example, you need to be near public transportation. You get a lot of points for that.

Well, Scotch Plains is a pretty suburban district with not a lot of public transportation. No matter where we put the temple, we weren't going to get those points. On the other hand, we get a lot of things that save a lot of energy. First of all, we reduced our footprint. Every room in that building has multiple purposes. We have one huge multipurpose room that serves as both classrooms, religious space for services, social space for whatever we want to use it for.

Brian Lehrer: Right, so let me just summarize because our time is running short. You're saying that LEED certification, even if it's good for reflecting the energy usage of urban buildings, which we've been questioning in this segment if it's even that, doesn't really reflect the questions that suburban construction would find relevant because it's designed for urban areas like if you're close to mass transit?

Neil: Well, that's just one issue, one example, but yes, it's really written much more for urban situations than anywhere else and doesn't take certain considerations into effect. We built a smaller building that required a smaller footprint in every way in clean energy because it was smaller and got no points for that.

Brian Lehrer: Neil, thank you. Professor Scofield, any comment on that?

Professor John Scofield: Neil raises a really good point. This gets back to what metric do we use. The metric we use is annual energy divided by the size of the building. If I have a building that's a certain size, uses a certain energy, if I replace it with a building that's twice as big but uses the same energy, it looks like it's more efficient because it's the same energy divided by a bigger square foot.

What Neil did is replace a building with a smaller building, which is exactly what we ought to do. We ought to use less space and the energy per square foot might be bigger. In fact, the whole process uses less energy. We need to somehow get a metric that moves in that direction. Nationally, our building stock keeps growing. Our energy intensity goes down, but only because we have more space for the same energy.

Brian Lehrer: I was going to give caller Deborah in Brooklyn the last shot on the phones here, but Deborah hung up. Mariana, I'm going to ask you her question to wrap this up, which is, if the buildings in New York City are rated for their energy efficiency with a letter grade system, does that do anything to change it? She's suggesting that there be a requirement that buildings that get anything less than an A at one point upgrade to an A.

Otherwise, some consequences. I think this ties into something you write in the article. One way to get developers to change how they design buildings is to rethink the certification systems that encourage people to go green in the first place. Give us a last thought, including on whether there can be consequences imposed by the city for low energy-efficient grades.

Mariana Simões: Well, I think there's a couple of things there. I think it would be interesting to rethink the system. In the article, there is one suggestion that an architect makes where he says there's a system over in Australia called the NABERS system. The way that it works is that after the building makes a promise of sustainability, they go back two years later, and they compare that energy use of the building now to what it was pre-construction, so what they promised that they were going to do.

Then that's a way of holding people accountable in a better way because it says, "This is what you promised and this is how you're doing in terms of your progress." I think that there are ways that we could rethink the system to improve it. I think another point that I really want to make is in talking to architects, and the person I spoke with for the article, Andrew Waugh, who's an architect in England, he said we should just start thinking about better ways to build from the get-go.

He suggests using passive house standards, which instead of putting all these complicated mechanical systems into the building that are going to drive up the energy consumption, he says, "Let's just make a smarter building that has what is called 'passive elements'." In the way that it was built, it's keeping that energy from escaping the building with a tighter envelope. It's doing other things that don't need large mechanical systems to make it work. I guess I just want to leave off with that note that we could just be building more efficiently from the get-go as well.

Brian Lehrer: That's our Earth Week segment for today with City Limits climate and environment reporter Mariana Simões, whose investigative piece in City Limits is headlined, Hudson Yards Calls Itself a Model Neighborhood for Energy Efficiency. City Data Paints a Different Picture, and John Scofield, professor of physics at Oberlin. Thank you so much for joining us.

Professor John Scofield: Thank you.

Mariana Simões: Thank you.

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