The latest dust up over green building rating systems, especially their efficacy relative to each other, highlights the danger of mixing the ideals of environmentalism with the self-interest of running an environmentalist organization.
Katie Weeks reports that Greenwash Action, a new nonprofit, joint initiative of the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, has gone on the offensive against the Green Globes rating system of the Green Building Initiative. "Today the organization released a report that critiques the stringency of Green Globes—which states 'Green Globes is greenwash'—and issued an open letter to GBI's board of directors asking them to stop marketing Green Globes as an equivalent green building rating system to LEED and the Living Building Challenge, and to cease its underwriting of negative attacks on LEED and the USGBC."
"The letter came one day after GBI released a study from Drexel University that states that Green Globes is significantly cheaper and faster to use than LEED, and roughly two months after the launch of LEED Exposed, a website from a group called the Environmental Policy Alliance that claims that LEED is a failed rating system. LEED Exposed is not directly related to GBI."
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