Defining Green Building: Emerging Standards at the Intersection of Sustainable Development and the Law
By Paul C. Levin
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the Virginia Environmental Law Journal's symposium, “Defining Green Building: Emerging Standards at the Intersection Between Sustainable Development and the Law.” Green building is still in its initial stages of development in response to the increased demand and need for energy-efficient and sustainable buildings. Much of the development in green building in this country has been at the state and local levels, with California just this past July becoming the first state to approve a green building code at the state level.
We know that, in this age of environmental awareness, anything that emits energy should be conserving it, but buildings have more of an effect on our environment than we generally realize. While much of the public's attention is focused on emissions from cars and trucks, buildings account for almost half of Green House Gasses (GHG) emissions annually and for the use of 70% of the electricity produced by American power plants. While these numbers should be significant enough to set off alarm bells, they do not even start to address the sheer volume of materials used in these buildings that could instead come from recycled or more environmentally-friendly sources. And talk about opportunity for change, it's predicted that 15 million new buildings will be constructed in *120 the next five years.5 However, in a recent study by the American Institute of Architects, only 7% of respondents said they believed that buildings were a significant source of GHG emissions or a cause of global warming. This important topic is still under the public's radar.
Writings in the field of green building are similarly sparse, as few people have commented on these issues, and even fewer have engaged several different perspectives to truly address the multi-disciplinary nature of this problem. Most commentators in fact have not pushed past the level of news articles and blog commentaries to get to a full discourse as we have in so many other fields. That's why we're sitting here today.
This symposium sets out to answer two main questions about green building, drawing on the diverse and multi-disciplinary backgrounds of our participants and our audience.
The first question is: How do we define green building in a standard way that will better promote environmentally-friendly development across fields and get us away from a vague buzzword? The second question is: How can we promote green building to improve the way we use resources and allow for cost-savings from that efficiency?
Welcome to the Virginia Environmental Law Journal's symposium, “Defining Green Building: Emerging Standards at the Intersection Between Sustainable Development and the Law.” Green building is still in its initial stages of development in response to the increased demand and need for energy-efficient and sustainable buildings. Much of the development in green building in this country has been at the state and local levels, with California just this past July becoming the first state to approve a green building code at the state level.
We know that, in this age of environmental awareness, anything that emits energy should be conserving it, but buildings have more of an effect on our environment than we generally realize. While much of the public's attention is focused on emissions from cars and trucks, buildings account for almost half of Green House Gasses (GHG) emissions annually and for the use of 70% of the electricity produced by American power plants. While these numbers should be significant enough to set off alarm bells, they do not even start to address the sheer volume of materials used in these buildings that could instead come from recycled or more environmentally-friendly sources. And talk about opportunity for change, it's predicted that 15 million new buildings will be constructed in *120 the next five years.5 However, in a recent study by the American Institute of Architects, only 7% of respondents said they believed that buildings were a significant source of GHG emissions or a cause of global warming. This important topic is still under the public's radar.
Writings in the field of green building are similarly sparse, as few people have commented on these issues, and even fewer have engaged several different perspectives to truly address the multi-disciplinary nature of this problem. Most commentators in fact have not pushed past the level of news articles and blog commentaries to get to a full discourse as we have in so many other fields. That's why we're sitting here today.
This symposium sets out to answer two main questions about green building, drawing on the diverse and multi-disciplinary backgrounds of our participants and our audience.
The first question is: How do we define green building in a standard way that will better promote environmentally-friendly development across fields and get us away from a vague buzzword? The second question is: How can we promote green building to improve the way we use resources and allow for cost-savings from that efficiency?
