It’s surprising that the AIA still does not endorse LEED standards for green buildings. There has been some progress in forming some kind of strategic alliance, but that is only in the area of advocacy, education and research. There is still nothing concrete. Nevertheless, the Architecture 2030 Bulletin and the AIA 2030 Commitment story are very interesting. The AIA website has many downloadable forms that comprise their own version of building performance measurement. It’s likely that the AIA will step up to form their own rating system to compete with the United States Green Building Council (USGBC), which is a very lucrative non-profit organization that the government chose to use for their own needs to employ green strategies — and when the government chooses a program, everyone else follows.
I hope the AIA will offer an alternative form of measurement to the USGBC. The USGBC’s process requires too many consultants and specialty firms to work independently on hundreds of credit applications. Ideally, the architect and his/her engineering consultants should be able to perform all of the analysis as part of their basic services. As of now, we get huge additional fee requests for the architect/engineers to help fill out LEED forms, and separate fee requests for energy models, LEED consulting, and commissioning services. It costs more than $100,000 in miscellaneous fees just to fill out and upload credit point applications. Many think that $100,000 could be used to improve the building’s performance.
The end may be in sight to phase out CO2-emitting coal by 2030, according to Architecture 2030 a non-profit, non-partisan and independent organization established in response to the global-warming crisis. That conclusion comes from researchers at leading institutions such as NASA, NREL, Architecture 2030 and Columbia University.
President Barack Obama is well aware that private sector investment creates the majority of sustainable jobs, even though it goes against human nature to invest during hard economic times. Federal stimulus money has saved/created between 600,000 and 1,500,000 jobs, according to the Congressional Budget Office – a faction of the 7,500,000 million jobs lost. Lest we fault the Obama administration, remember that we generated one-third as many jobs during this decade as the 1990s.