This piece offers some interesting commentary on the social impact of green building standards, especially in the way they seem to be encouraging re-centralisation of commercial space.

However, the key question is avoided. How well are green buildings achieving the fundamental objective of these so-called sustainability measures? Surely that objective is to lower the energy and other resource requirements of a structure, measured over its total life span.

To start with, one can see estimates in this article that green buildings cost more to put up, 3% to 11% more. Presumably this higher capital cost does produce lower ongoing energy usage requirements, seeing as this is the whole point of the exercise. But are they low enough to compensate for the higher energy and other inputs implied by the initial higher asset investment? This is a complex and thorny matter and we have to rely on the experts for full life cycle assessments. However I suspect that they do not take all impacts into account. Some of the unintended consequences of green construction in this article provide examples of where life cycle analysis will fall short. Ultimately the only way to make sure that all impacts are included is to go to national accounts and look at how, for example, national energy inputs are travelling. Not much evidence there of a revolution brought about by ‘green’ office space.

However my real target is the naïve, almost ignorant, faith that green advocates express in the value of ‘sustainable’ building. The default assumption ought to be that higher construction costs mean higher energy inputs, so there is a major onus on green proponents to show that the extra costs are worthwhile in terms of total resource usage. I wonder if the Clover Moores of the world ever give this a second’s thought.

Tombee

You make some excellent points. I know that the question of total energy input and whole of life emissions and energy cost have been explored (including the cost of tearing the building down and recycling the materials), but the cost an an indicator of energy/emission use I'd not considered before.

I have seen this issue taken further into energy/emissions calculations for the furniture. Perhaps they could do the same for the office workers? Only recruit people with a minimum carbon footprint.

Thank you Curmudgeon. On the connection between cost and energy, we know that there is a tight arithmetical link between monetary values (at constant purchasing power) and energy consumption at the GDP level of many economies, including Australia – it’s around $150 GDP per gigajoule (primary energy). Energy creates prosperity at that rate. So the question here is, how far can we sub-divide a national GDP and still maintain that quantitative wealth/energy connection for each unit of the sub-division?

My view is that it is in the first instance prudent to assume that the relationship holds at least down to the level of a multi-million dollar construction project. That’s the default assumption. And if someone wishes to assume otherwise they ought to be able to justify their case.

The energy contribution of labour is very important in life cycle analysis but as I understand it is often ignored. I have seen some very recent literature on attempts to account for labour energy costs previously ignored.

Labour and infrastructure must be included within the boundaries for calculating life cycle energy costs. To do otherwise is nonsense. Everything is interconnected and interdependent.