Going Soft on Green Buildings
by Tony Chavira
(Soft City is a cool animation of a plushie cityspace that's... well, just look for yourself)
Attorney and LEED-accredited Professional Shari Shapiro's super-green blog "Green Building Law" has a pretty direct article about The USGBC's Top 10 Green Building Legislation List, essentially a list of the most affective bit of green building legislation ever made. Ever. Check it:
Top of the list were the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the Stimulus Bill, and the American Clean Energy and Security Act, better known as Waxman Markey. I have posted about these pieces of legislation extensively--here for Waxman-Markey posts and here for ARRA posts. So I was interested to see what the rest of the list had to offer in terms of overall perspective on Federal regulation of green buildings:
1. It's all about incentives.
Heaven forbid that Congress should force anyone to do anything. With the exception of Waxman-Markey, the bills selected by the USGBC are all incentive based, providing funds for energy efficiency, water savings, etc.
2. It's not very innovative.
There are only two bills on the list which I consider to be innovative or interesting. The Federal Personnel Training Act of 2010 (yet to be introduced) which focuses on training federal personnel to operate and maintain high performance buildings, and S. 1619, the Livable Communities Act of 2009 which seeks to establish an Interagency Council on Sustainable Communities and provides $4 billion in grants to incentivize integrated community planning and implementation of sustainable projects. I like the first bill because it recognizes the need to raise the skills of implementing federal employees to realize the benefits of high performance buildings, and I like the second because it recognizes the linkage between planning and sustainability.
3. Building Codes are not addressed.
Waxman-Markey, and its Senate counterpart The American Clean Energy And Leadership Act, both have some provision for creating a national energy efficient building code. The other bills, however, do not attempt to address the key policy lever of building codes to enhance sustainable construction and save resources. This is probably because of the enormous political fight involved, both in wresting control of building codes away from states and local governments, and with the private interests involved in the building industry.
Believe it or not, I've actually written about the inefficient system of integrating building codes into our planning efforts (especially in a time when planning is trying to adjust for more integrative uses and lifestyles). Think about it this way (to shamefully try to integrate the two topics here): if we suddenlly started making buildings out of yarn, how exactly would the change in style and material affect policy and safety standards? We can't act like it wouldn't, but we can't just make amendments for concrete/wood/steel construction standards to integrate yarn. It's just a different thing altogether. So we'd actually have to re-contextualize how we use space as we try and work and live in a building where everything's made of yarn.
The process of switching up how building codes function would be sorta similar, in that in order to make sweeping changes to big chunks of the code book, the whole thing will have to be revamped. That's clearly going to cause problems on state and local levels, where some places are more lax or more strict than others. For example, California has more green building code stuff (Title 24 included) than some other states, where they might have codes that best fit climates where they're hit hard with ice and snow. To each, their own.
So approaching the revamp of building codes in general is going to be a messy process, and clearly I have no real answers or else I'd have given them by now.
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