Is the U.S. Green Building Council Too Powerful?

LEED certification is widely recognized today as the central tool in the United States for recognizing sustainability in buildings. But as governmental agencies begin to require it, is too much power being focused in the hands of a "fee generating monopoly", as one critic put it.

Liu writes:

"The issue then is not the LEED rating system, the virtues and shortcomings of which can be separately discussed, but the process of certifying buildings and the creation of a fee-generating bureaucratic structure to do so."