This is a good example of how the market can outperform centralized governing councils under certain conditions.
the LEED-certifying body can't possibly hope to know all the 2nd- and 3rd-degree repercussions of different design decisions. But if we just increased the energy tax by 20% (arbitrary number), people would tend to find the global maxima of energy efficiency without having to conform to rigid standards.
The same thing can be seen with cars. I think that raising CAFE standards for gas mileage is great and all, but at least where I'm from the trend toward buying more efficient cars is less about their lower upfront cost as a result of CAFE-induced supply reduction and more about the rising price of gas. A $1.50/gallon federal "negative externalities" tax on gasoline would do wonders for the nation's energy consumption levels.
LEED and CAFE are a bit different: CAFE is a set of government-mandated standards aimed at reducing pollution (whether effectively or not), while LEED is a set of standards that originate with a private-sector trade group, aimed at promoting the brand of "green" architecture (and it's done that quite effectively). I don't see it as distinct from the market: LEED is an example of the market at work. It's just that it's optimizing for what the market optimizes for by default (profits), not optimizing for the actual environment.
That process, where the market treats environmentalist sensibilities as just another niche market to cater to, is sometimes referred to as "green marketing", or more derogatorily as "greenwashing".
Sure, I'm not saying that LEED doesn't work because it's government-run (it's not) nor even going so far as saying that government involvement in the market is necessarily evil. I'm trying to make the distinction between an incentives-based market and a central planning council, not between the government and the private sector. The government can plan things centrally or organize distributed exchanges, as can private companies and trade organizations.
I get your point, but promoting a tax to get the most out of the market is doublespeak. A carrot ("This is better because... and you can use it!") is more "free-market" than a stick ("Don't do that.") - even if I would prefer not to be tempted (or threatened) by either.
It's not doublespeak, it's actually a fairly widely accepted solution to externalities amongst economists.
The basic idea is that some actions you could perform impose costs on people who aren't consenting parties to the transaction. E.g., if Widgets, Inc. dumps the waste from producing widgets into a river, this imposes a cost on everyone downstream.
This would make their widgets cheaper—they're only paying part of the cost of the widget (the folks downstream are paying the rest). With a lower price, they'll sell more widgets.
Markets thus tend to overproduce (vs. what is socially optimal) things with externalities.
There are a couple of ways we take to solve this problem. When the externality is high enough, we prohibit it. E.g., we prohibit murder.
When the externality effects few enough people, and is of a suitable size, they can actually negotiate and resolve it themselves. E.g., if Widgets, Inc. wanted to take water from that river instead of polluting it, thus depriving the downstream farmers of some irrigation, maybe they'd be OK with that for a payment of $X/mo. By making them consenting parties to the transaction, it is no longer an externality, and Widgets, Inc. is now paying the full cost of producing widgets.
Of course, when the externality hits a lot of people, each for a small amount (e.g., air pollution), negotiation is impossible. That leads to the final option:
Do your best to calculate the size of that externality. Then impose that cost as a tax. This is called a Pigovian tax, and also has the effect of making Widgets, Inc. pay the full cost of producing its widgets.
Externalities do not have to be negative; they can be positive as well (e.g., you could clean up a public park). Markets tend to under-produce these, and a similar argument suggests offering a Pigovian subsidy.
Obviously, administering and complying with taxes is not free, and that limits the applicability of Pigovian taxes and subsidies.
Not to disagree with the idea, but I would add that any such tax is at the discretion of the taxing body making it susceptible to difficulties like abuse or negligence. (That makes me wary.)
I would prefer a mechanism without such a centralization of moral authority (ex, Kickstarter rather than taxes). That's the big conflict in free societies: the cohabitation of different moralities. (What is a benefit and what is an externality are decided individually rather than by decree or in the average. I think our desire to average things leads us to think we can work backwards from an average to collective behaviour in cases like these, when not everything is a bijection...)
If we are only interested in punitive measures, Kickstarter is just as able to fund prisons and buy guns and pay for legal offensives as any government program (I don't think most forms of damage need a new law as such). (My point from another comment though was that government actions have a strong tendency to be a punitive, and I do not consider that leadership.) Ideally, governments would see no money whatsoever that people didn't voluntarily commit to specific ends. When record-keeping and communication were slow, the current system made better sense - but now that those things are fast and easy, taxation feels like an anachronism.
To your comment below:
> Those 100 people have nowhere near the resources required to take on the company.
I don't see a big difference between appealing to the public for the resources to mount a legal offense and lobbying campaign to revise the law to better support a cause, vs appealing to the government for the same ends. In the former, the individuals affected retain the moral authority and in the latter, the government is cast as a parent figure which I find patronizing and undesirable (not to mention highly susceptible to corruption and self-interest of officials, with access to a bottomless purse). While we may need the latter in times of extreme duress (war), I wouldn't recommend using it that way unless we actually want government interference to be the norm. (IMHO governments should not even have the capacity for selfish behaviour, so I am trying to think of ways to minimize it.)
Oh, well I jumped to conclusions then. The stuff about dramatically reducing taxes (and thus government) and privately funded prisons and gun ownership and individual control over public money is basically economic libertarianism. I was assuming by that point that you believed in private police forces too. Another key feature is the primacy of property rights (which you didn't mention), although that also gets you into social libertarianism.
You made a remark about the government being like a parent figure. For me it was always too easy to focus on government waste and abuse because I grew up with abusive parents. As I learned to separate myself from them as much as possible and heal from the damage, it was easier for me to make some kind of limited peace with the current system, as non-ideal as it is. I now see it as the least bad viable option.
I don't know if that makes sense, but I guess that's why I personally don't really want to go down the road of debating highly alternative societies, libertarian or not. I guess I'm just tired of it.
Weird. Most free market folks say the problem with air quality is no one owns it, so there's no incentive to protect it. A tax like this is about as close as you can get to saying, ok, we collectively own the air, and there's a $1.50 fee/gallon of gas for use of the air in your combustion engine.
Collective ownership might be an uncomfortable topic, so i'll go further and say, you're using my air in your car, and I expect to be paid for it. I suspect any feasible plan would look a lot like some large organization charging use fees. But maybe there's some simpler structure I'm overlooking.
While I think it's somewhat natural for society to talk about "collective ownership," since the ownership model is what we use for individual transactions, the idea of "public goods" implies that they are "owned/managed by the public" - and that degenerates into "stewardship" by the government "for the public good" (for my/our benefit, even if I disagree, for my part). I definitely don't enjoy the "for my own good"/parental logic - so I don't like the "collective ownership" language we seem to be working with.
I think it would be better if individuals (and governments, to the limited degree I can rationalize them) acted pro-actively/responsibly, rather than defensively (tax, tax, tax...). IMHO, a better model would be to grow (to "invest" not "subsidize") what the public deems worthwhile, driven by intelligence and creativity ("leadership"), rather than perpetually trying to put out fires through punitive intervention (tax, tax, tax...). (Why centralize decision-making if not to aid leadership?) Bringing something to the market through collective action doesn't diminish the market - it is the market. I'm not saying punitive measures are ever off the table, but they should be the last act of a desperate will.
This could be as simple as using approaches like Kickstarter more (instead of taxes), but that depends on people keeping the money they already have.
IMHO government is mostly the sum of our negative/fear-based responses (digging in our heals against "threats" leading us to tax, and inspect, and...). That governments are as large as they are - and that we are taxed as much as we are - reflects a culture of fear.
I have a working solution for getting to work - i drive my car. Over the life of that car, i expect to pay about 25 cents a mile.
The investment approach assumes there is some technology that either can be added to my car, or replace my car. This technology would need to lower the cost of ownership, and do so at a profit. In my specific case, you've only got about $10k left to work with over the remaining life of the car, and that's coming from gas, insurance, maintenance and repairs budgets.
I'm just skeptical that that much room for improvement exists. Cars are a very mature technology. They have an (unfair?) advantage that a whole bunch of infrastructure is in place to support them. I would guess at least a trillion dollars has been spent optimizing cars and car manufacture. An alternative would need to overcome some pretty big obstacles.
Self driving cars provide enormous potential for underutilization of existing cars, but it's really hard to get around the problem of requiring millions of cars from 8-9 AM and 5-6 PM. There are gains to be had, and all those incremental 1-2% improvements over a hundred years have improved efficiency greatly. The point here, you can use fewer self driving cars to serve the transportion needs - just as much gas would be used, but the environmental savings come from less metal and glass and energy to shape the materials.
I'm just skeptical of even a billion dollar kickstarter moving the needle very much. Your optimism is commendable, but the only solution available to us today is using that billion dollars to somehow discount the purchase of slightly more fuel efficient cars. Even that is only a few percent improvement. Cities like Huston need to move the needle a lot, if they want kids to be able to play outside.
I was specifically trying to counter "promoting a tax to get the most out of the market itself seems like doublespeak."
The parent is being Mr. weasel word with "seems like" but I'm guessing that's just sloppy writing.
Also, I agree with you. Tax on pollution is probably the best solution. I couldn't think of a way to put pollution tax into a short argument. Fee for "storing your waste" doesn't have quite the same punch as "using my air"
Part of the issue here is that to describe such entities there needs to be a means of standardization.
We saw 'carbon credits' devolve in to specific-exchange linked, unique entities that were not interchangeable across borders. That made meaningfully adopting them as environmental units to stake a claim for the value of environment in the present-era systems very difficult. That situation perhaps evolved partly because nobody could otherwise agree on an appropriate level of auditing, and partly because .. well .. established interests. (Without nationalizing and centralizing these things, their potential for decentralized issue versus centralized government fiat issue poses a threat to both sovereign currencies worldwide and the vast profits of connected financial services industries.)
Historically, part of the control effected against change within the financial environment is that SIX in Switzerland on behalf of the ISO has controlled the major ISO4217 global currency and commodity registry, locking out innovation and essentially refusing to issue new codes. People have been avoiding that gridlock by making up unofficial codes like 'BTC' for Bitcoin and such. I recently proposed registry of these values via the IETF at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-stanish-x-iso4217-a3/ however it's expired pending a new release at the moment (adding Litecoin, etc.)
(On the off chance anyone's hitting OHM2013 later this month in Holland, I'm planning to give a talk there on this subject and related matters at the intersection of politics, finance and technology.)
A tax isn't really central planning (except in a very blunt way, which governments aren't horrible at doing). It's when governments get into the nitty-gritty (put wind turbines on buildings, because it looks good, despite any turbine with blades smaller than a jumbo jet is inefficient due to the quadratic relationship between blade length and power) that they screw up.
Do you have a bigger problem with central planning, or with taxes? Because taxes aren't going away any time soon, and at least "sin taxes" can reduce bad behavior (while not discouraging hard work and investment). And industry standards are arguably a form of central planning.
I have a bigger problem with taxes. Central planning is fine IMHO assuming everyone involved is onboard - otherwise the ship should stay in the dock to the degree people still want off. For what it's worth, I am fond of industry standards when they are documentary in nature and not prescriptive (the difference between designing something to be perfect and picking a winning technology to distill).
It's not an incentive or a threat; it's a change in the rules of the game. When they patch Starcraft to increase the damage that a spore crawler does to biological units, that's not an incentive or a threat; it's a change in the rules of the game.
I can't think of any rules that aren't enforced by threat. (The equivalent of patching Starcraft in the real world makes you rich or lands you in jail for tax evasion. The government's patch is only accepted because of the threat of force behind it.)
Even if we all believe taxation is theft, we can still talk about which taxes and which expenditures are better than others. Given the choice between the state coercing you using the threat of violence and the state coercing you using the threat of violence in such a way that some public good is achieved, it seems natural to prefer the latter.
> The government's patch is only accepted because of the threat of force behind it.
Uh, some of us accept the government's patch because we agree with it, or because we want to play the same game that everyone else is and the government happens to be a conveniently centralized entity for deciding which patches go in and which do not. Like Blizzard. We also accept that hacking your own patch in either means you can't play on the ladder with everyone else or that it's an action worth of receiving a ban in response.
I'm sorry - I used "accepted" when I should have used "chosen," since self-determination was implicitly my end. With that in mind: eagerness does not mean you had a choice (though perhaps that's unimportant to you).
There is only a choice if the alternative was actually an option. When the government can force you to eat cake, it hardly matters if you may have enjoyed that first piece. What matters is that you will be eating it one way or another. (That is not what I would call "establishing a free market" - that's not even a free lunch.)
If not having choice is scary (your word), which I would say is a synonym for "undesirable", I cannot be said to have the right to pursue happiness without it (choice).
> "I find it foolish to base a worldview off fear."
The only sense in which I'm basing my worldview "off of" fear is by asserting the right not to live in it. (In that sense, I am also basing my worldview off of starvation - as I am eating breakfast.)
The issue particular to buildings is, as opposed to manufactured goods etc, buildings tend to stick around for quite a while and cost a lot of money for the build and a lot of money to operate. More than that, large capital outlays are required to reduce the operating costs by marginal amounts over the life of the building.
Whenever you have a substantial delay between the outlay and the payback, market forces tend to be ineffective. Also, if we are talking energy costs, something like half the energy costs in buildings are in embodied energy - in the steel and concrete and materials used to build it. A broad scale energy tax would encourage reduction of upfront energy usage at the expense of long term operation. Any at the same time, may trigger the demolition of existing stock.
Add to that most - something like 60-70% - building stock in the US is between 20-70 years old. If we take the example of making more efficient cars which started in the 80's, where the average age is less than ten years, we might expect to see the market delivering some real gains in building efficiency in 100 years or so..
Like it not, sometimes inefficient rigid standards are all we have. The standards are there to account for deficiencies in client requirements (or knowledge). There may be much better mechanisms to do this - one which better targets both the technical and motivational factors in energy reduction. But at the end of the day in an uninformed and long delay market, a blunt market mechanism is not it.
This article is analogous to a Why the Automobile hardly ever deserves the appellation 'Horse Replacement' witten in 1903.
We are in the first 25 years of architectural interest in Green Building - it began among professional architects following the Rio Summit. It took more than a decade to get the first big projects, such as Foster's built. The buildings coming online today tend to reflect designs four or more years old - buildings have long incubation periods.
That's not to say that LEED hasn't been mostly bullshit. But HN'ers of all people should understand why. They [USGBC] have been focused on creating and growing a user base. During the boom, they credentialed anyone who could pass the exam as Certified. You just needed to answer questions about processing paperwork, you didn't need to know squat about buildings. Then they sold agencies on the idea of specifying LEED certification.
Now that they have buildings to measure, they can actually look at post occupancy analysis and make it a criterion.
What bothers me about the article itself is that it juxtaposes historic landmarks - Lever House and Segrams - with the image of a bucolic residence which concludes the article. Seagram was designed with the intent that all its lights would blaze all night for aesthetic effect. Then again, it does help clarify that the real purpose of the article is not criticism of Green Building but an attack on modernism.
Everyone in Seoul or Mexico or Rio or Helsinki will not be served by a house designed for the Bayous of Louisiana.
I see a lot of "checklist green" projects. Green construction ultimately requires a highly holistic approach, considering far more than just the parts going into the building.
There are a lot of modern (style) homes being built in Austin. They usually have expensive multi-pane glass windows for energy efficiency, which are required to get LEED, Energy-Star, and City of Austin certifications. But they lack any sort of exterior shade on them, so the sunlight just beams straight in. If they had sheltered the glass under an overhang or put an awning over it, they probably would have cut their A/C costs by a third or more. They meet the requirements to get the certificate and be sold as "green", but fail to achieve the real purpose -- reducing monthly energy costs.
You typically want the long dimension of the house to be facing east/west, so that fewer windows are facing directly into the sun. Passive solar (prevention or gain, depending on climate) is something that should be taken into consideration. For Austin's climate, it's fairly important. I saw 113F temperatures last year, and 103F so far this year, with the hottest part of the year still to come.
You actually want buildings oriented west/east, facing north/south. Why? Because you can control the sun with horizontal shading devices. In the summertime you can block insolation with shading devices while allowing insolation during the colder months for free heat gain. This also allows all-day indirect daylighting from the north.
The sun is also low in the east and west, so it's difficult to control and often glares into inhabitants. Shading the east and west faces of buildings often requires vertical shading devices or operable shading devices if you don't want to block the view.
Finally, remember that the face of the building that receives the most solar insolation is the roof.
I know the article says east/west, but that doesn't apply if you have shading devices.
I think you and the article are in agreement - they said: "If possible, the longer axis of the building, also known as the ridge line, should be oriented east/west." And you said facing north/south.
I agree about the roof. Reflective metal roofs are gaining popularity here, and last a long time (50 year guarantee), but also cost more. Something that is found in high-end/custom homes is a conditioned attic space, with the majority of the insulation under the roof, and not directly above the ceiling of the living space. If you can keep the inside of attic below 100F, the relatively thin insulation on the air conditioning ducts will be more effective. Again, it costs more to get this benefit...
The LEED rating system isn't all-encompassing, but it is a good way for clients to buy into "sustainability". It's "less bad" and not truly "good", as William McDonough would say.
As building information modeling becomes more sophisticated, computer models could potentially reliably calculate a building's entire embodied energy over its expected lifetime. It would be amazing if a project's BIM model was submitted to a rating agency an was given an all-encompassing environmental impact rating.
A simulation is not a building. Before I was licensed, I did a fair number of small residential additions in Florida. For a building permit, a Manual-J calculation in accordance with the Florida Energy Code was required.
At that time, do to market conditions, 1.5 ton (18k BTU) heat-pumps were about 1/3 less than 1 ton (12k BTU) units. However, oversizing the unit to the cheaper size would cause the calculation to fail and permit to be denied.
These were small projects and the difference in up front costs could be relatively substantial and the likelihood of long term payback minimal because the zoning assumptions upon which the calculations were based did not exist in the real world.
So, instead of the default of one occupant for the addition, I would enter two, or three to get the result that was needed.
I was not implying that there was a problem with the software at all. Nor with the market. Or even with the permitting process.
A competent designer gets the results they want within whatever constraints are created by the system.
I made a design decision to use three occupants based on the design decision to use a 1.5 ton (18k BTU) HVAC system based on a cost benefit analysis based on the Owner's goals. A permit for construction being among the Owner's goals.
LEED has basically been working the same way. The Owner specifies a Gold Rating. The designer designs the documentation for a Gold Rating. They design the building based on other criteria in addition to the Gold Rating.
To be clear, it was not as if my goal was to subvert the system. I could have specified a 1 ton (12k BTU) unit. Inevitably, I would receive a call from my client because the AC subcontractor bid a 1.5 ton unit and that was what was on site and at least partially installed and had been red tagged by the inspector just because it was his job to red tag it.
Then we would all spend a lot of time back and forth and the end result would be that the inspector would be a little pissed off because the 1.5 ton unit got approved by his boss based upon common sense over the fact that it didn't really matter and that energy calcs for a small addition are meaningless and the energy code was really designed for larger projects and all we were really doing was shuffling paper.
And shuffling paper is largely what LEED is all about - at least up until now.
Energy efficient architecture is much easier on the residential level if properly applied. Unfortunately many of the better concepts run afoul of over zealous city regs and development restrictions. Plus residential developers have no monetary incentives for changing their crappy processes.
Many things people say are better are often worse. Proving something as complex as one large building design is better than another is hard to calculate as long as unpredictable people are using it.
Great article! Sending to all the (conventional) architects I know. Best quote, IMHO:
Architectural critic Peter Buchanan, writing recently in the UK magazine, The Architectural Review, placed the blame for these failures squarely at the feet of the Modernist design model itself, and called for a “big rethink” about many of its unquestioned assumptions. Modernism is inherently unsustainable, he argued, because it evolved in the beginning of the era of abundant and cheap fossil fuels. This cheap energy powered the weekend commute to the early Modernist villas, and kept their large open spaces warm, in spite of large expanses of glass and thin wall sections. Petrochemicals created their complex sealants and fueled the production of their exotic extrusions. “Modern architecture is thus an energy-profligate, petrochemical architecture, only possible when fossil fuels are abundant and affordable”, he said. “Like the sprawling cities it spawned, it belongs to that waning era historians are already calling ‘the oil interval’.”
the LEED-certifying body can't possibly hope to know all the 2nd- and 3rd-degree repercussions of different design decisions. But if we just increased the energy tax by 20% (arbitrary number), people would tend to find the global maxima of energy efficiency without having to conform to rigid standards.
The same thing can be seen with cars. I think that raising CAFE standards for gas mileage is great and all, but at least where I'm from the trend toward buying more efficient cars is less about their lower upfront cost as a result of CAFE-induced supply reduction and more about the rising price of gas. A $1.50/gallon federal "negative externalities" tax on gasoline would do wonders for the nation's energy consumption levels.