You touched on it a little bit with bio fuels where there is an obvious consequence there. The users of bio fuel will see some incremental savings each time they fill up their tank but in the end are we really saving any money at all? If farmers start using their farm land to grow corn and that corn is used for bio fuel, then what’s going to happen to the price of corn that is used for human consumption or to feed livestock? I think we might see a price increase in our food as a direct consequence to saving money at the gas station.

There’s also hybrid and electric cars. I just saw an electric car two weeks ago and the owner told me that he has 21 golf cart batteries inside. I asked him how long do the batteries last? He wasn’t able to tell me a definitive answer. I think that batteries contain all kinds of horrible chemicals. If we all went to his style of electric car, we’d be going from one battery in our traditional car to 21 batteries. Now, I’d love to hear how those batteries are disposed of — battery toxicity would seem to be a major concern for each all electric car that is using golf cart batteries.

So with all things, including green building, we need to do our due diligence and make sure that we are aware of the complete lifecycle. Follow it from cradle to cradle.

SteamboatEcobroker

John T - To clarify, I was speaking with Dan Morris, a 50-year veteran of indoor air quality who does home investigations and specification and testing of indoor air quality for LEED. In general, he thinks LEED needs to put more emphasis on indoor air quality. The specific example above was a home that had won a pretty significant local green building award but the children were getting sick so the parents hired him to do an investigation. Turns out the house was improperly ventilated and the carbon monoxide fumes from the furnace were infiltrating the air. He said this is not an isolated example, though he added that there are also excellent green buildings out there that do great ventilation and indoor air quality work.

That’s a pretty vague but inflammatory statement to dangle in front of the reader without attribution or explanation.

Yes, there are certainly issues that the green building industry will have to face and anecdotal evidence of problems such as the poor air quality stories you mention above, but for the most part, the problems will likely be manageable. For real danger to occur, we’d need to see shoddy construction collapse and kill (God forbid), companies that claim their products are benign but actually cause cancer, or widespread lying in the industry about the “green” attributes of green building in general.

Except for the last, which is highly unlikely to happen, these are not issues faced by green building, but by builders in general, no? Individual cases brought on by the actions of n’er do wells looking to make a quick buck do not spell danger caused by an entire industry, rather, they make the perpetrators look bad.