Welcome Stephen Muzzy to the USGBC MA Chapter as our new "Green Schools Program Manager"

As recently announced at our Earth Day Celebration, our advocacy work for green buildings has recently become amplified. The Chapter thanks the USGBC for supporting the position with a strategic investment grant. Stephen Muzzy will start in early May, focusing on three things:

• Facilitating a Green School Buildings coalition 
• Implementing LEED Study Groups 
• Creating a LEED Project Assistance Matching Service 

Steve comes to the Chapter having served for 5 years as a program manger at Second Nature, a campus sustainability consulting organization. He most recently has managed the American Colleges & Universities Presidents' Climate Challenge program, helping campuses implement carbon mitigation strategies. He brings green campus experience, program design & delivery skills, and an extensive network at higher ed institutions in Massachusetts.

You are welcome to attend a Green Schools Committee meeting on 5/9/13 where we will be welcoming Steve and making introductions. We are looking forward to promoting green buildings on campuses throughout Massachusetts in the coming months and years!

(Excerpted from USGBC MA's April 2013 Newsletter)

Celebrating Earth Day and Innovation in Green Design

Stunning! Fabulous! Classy!

We held a very impressive Earth Day celebration on the night of Wednesday April 10th. Over 120 guests attended from a wide swath of the green building industry. We had six table sponsors: Vidaris, NStar, The Green Engineer, Robinson & Cole, Bergmeyer and National Grid.

The program started with a bit of networking. One of the great things about the USGBC is it connects people from all parts of the real estate industry - from architects & engineers to facility managers and product manufacturers. Energy modelers, sustainability consultants, even lawyers! It's always a great mix and you never know who you might run in to!

Special thanks to Rachel Zsembery and the Special Events Committee for putting it all together. Much applause to Rachel (below, with Carlos Alonso-Neimeyer) and the entire Committee! GE sponsored our table settings: a mix between spring flowers and LED lightbulbs (guests could take home!) More photos are available through our media sponsor, New England Real Estate Journal NEREJ's facebook page.

We were very thankful to our venue sponsor, the Chiofaro Companies, for letting us hold the event on the main floor of Two International Place in downtown Boston. We heard from Don Chiofaro, Jr., as the owner, and from Bob Andrews, of AHA Consulting Engineers, one of our Chapter Sponsoring Partners, who discussed how the building had recently achieved LEED EB O&M Silver - a real achievement for a building that was designed and constructed in the go-go 80's.

A few of the members of the Chapter spoke, including myself, to give an overview of where we are as an organization.  People were in a good mood. I got the crowd to shout out "GREEN BUILDINGS!" whenever they heard something good from the stage. 

I'm happy to report we did indeed attain the goal of our membership drive: to bring in 100 new members by Earth Day. We have 108 new since the beginning of the year. GREEN BUILDINGS!

I also announced that we have hired a new staffer: Stephen Muzzy will start on May 6th as our Green Schools Program Manager, to faciliate green building project creation and completion at campuses across Massachusetts. GREEN BUILDINGS!

Dinner was a really good time - here we have the Green Engineer table (above) and the NStar table (below). Though many people found themselves not at the tables they were assigned to! 

Later, during the dessert, we convened the Awards Committee to present our Massachusetts Green Building of the Year award and our Innovation in Green Design awards. National Grid served as the Award Sponsor with Mark Stafford presiding. The awards were organized by Paul Brown, Carrie Havey, and Chris Liston (not pictured below). The judges were: Holly Wasilowski Samuelson of Harvard GSD, Mark Webster of SGH and Susan Buchanan of VFA. Jess Halvorson of Bank of America served as an alternate.

And the winners included: Homeowners Rehab, Inc. for the Massachusetts Green Building of the Year: their 95-97 Pine Street, Cambridge, LEED Platinum project. The judges saw this as an important model for other affordable housing projects.

Bergmeyer Associates also won for an Innovation in Green Design Award in the Building Category for their work on the Hosteling International Building on Stuart St. in Boston.

Other winners inlcuded:



Special Recognition:

Sherman Fairchild Laboratory Renovation for Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, Harvard University

Submitted by Payette. Notes: This project is an example of stellar energy performance in a lab.



Special Recognition:

One Boston Place

Submitted by CBRE.  Notes: The judges praised this project for its enthusiastic spirit of the approach to recertification under EB O&M.



Award Winning Entries – Innovation in Green Design

Winner - Product, System or Technology Category

Shady Hill School in Cambridge, MA

Submitted by Richard Burck Associates, Inc. Notes: This project skillfully handled water absorption and discharge to the aquifer.

It was a fun evening full of GREEN BUILDINGS!

-Grey Lee

Energy Disclosure Laws Gaining National Popularity

by Chris Liston

As the debate continues over Boston’s proposed energy disclosure ordinance it has understandably shifted attention to those cities and states that have already enacted similar legislation.

To date, energy disclosure laws have been approved by lawmakers in Austin, California, the District of Columbia, Minneapolis, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington.  Lawmakers in Boston, Boulder, Cambridge, Chicago and Portland have expressed interest in energy disclosure legislation but have not yet formalized their programs.

Three commonalities in these laws are 1) the use of ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager as a benchmarking tool 2) a focus on large buildings and 3) mandatory reporting with fines and/or penalties for those buildings that fail to disclose their data.  The definition of a “large” building differs by jurisdiction, but generally speaking the laws are focused on buildings with a minimum size of 10,000 SF to 50,000 SF.

Like the proposed Boston ordinance, most local energy disclosure laws have been phased in over a period of time.  The District of Columbia’s program was introduced in 2008, but per the District’s timeline the only buildings to have their data disclosed have thus far been District-owned buildings.  New York City’s program was introduced in 2009; energy data for NYC-owned buildings was first published in 2011 while energy data for privately-owned NYC buildings was first published in 2012.  Philadelphia’s law was just passed in 2012 and as such no energy data has yet been submitted or published.

The 2011 New York City Benchmarking Report, published in August 2012, was a groundbreaking study of private sector energy use spanning 1.7 billion square feet of space. The report found that energy use varies widely within the same category of building type – for example the least efficient NYC hotels use 3.2x as much energy as the most efficient NYC hotels, the least efficient NYC office buildings use 4.5x as much energy as the most efficient NYC office buildings, and the least efficient NYC retail buildings use 7.9x as much energy as the most efficient NYC retail buildings.  In addition to the PDF report NYC also released an Excel spreadsheet containing the name, address, energy utilization index, carbon emissions and ENERGY STAR rating for more than 4,000 privately-owned buildings.

You can download the 2011 New York City Benchmarking Report athttp://www.nyc.gov/html/gbee/downloads/pdf/nyc_ll84_benchmarking_report_2012.pdf.

You can download CBRE’s US guide to energy efficiency disclosure requirements at 

http://marketing.cbre.com/Sustainability/CBRE.com/Guide_GuidetoStateandLocalEnergyPerformanceRegulations.pdf

(Excerpted from USGBC MA's April 2013 Newsletter)

Institutionalizing Ignorance

Ignorance: state of being ignorant, lack of knowledge , education, or awareness.

I felt that I needed to get that definition in place right our front, before I start throwing bombs. My first few posts have been on items that have been rather mundane such as, groundskeeping and maintenance plans.  However, over the last couple of weeks several things have come to my attention that both angered me and made my wonder about the long term viability of the sustainability movement.

The children are the future

The first thing that got may attention was a concerted effort to pollute the minds of school children by requiring, under force of law, the teaching of climate denial in schools. Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona are all debating bills that refer to global warming as a "theory" that is "controversial" and riddled with scientific weaknesses. This, despite the fact the National Academy of Sciences, as well as major national academies of science around the world and every other authoritative body of scientists active in climate research have stated that the science is unequivocal: the world is warming and its primary cause is human activity.  The veracity of climate change is unshaken despite the fact that this spring has been ice bound and last winter was virtually snow less. These variations are explainable.  The trend line of the data has been verified, despite the claims of climate change deniers.

These bills are being advanced under the canard that students need a "balanced" perspective " to develop critical thinking skills they need in order to become intelligent, productive and scientifically informed citizens." (These efforts have been crafted and honed over decades, if you want to learn more, an excellent PBS documentary is here.) This is the latest approach to arguing for an idea you can't possibly support with evidence - the false equivalency.  The powerful interests behind climate denial are well aware that the vast weight of evidence is against them so they propose that , for the sake of balance and fairness, both sides need to be considered equally.  This is bunk.  This is the same argument that was made between creationism and evolution.  One side has the vast weight of the generations greatest subject matter experts all reaching some form of accord, the other has....nothing. The best support that they muster is a selective interpretation of the data.  Sure they can point to a scientist or two - often not even a climate scientist - to support their position.  The tobacco industry would occasionally find a scientist who did not believe that smoking damaged your health, it did not mean that those scientists opinions should receive the same weight as the avalanche of opposing colleagues. 

While these laws seem laughable on their face, this is not something to be trivialized. While the above referenced law is up for debate in 3 states, it has been raised in 10.  The forces that propose these laws are very very well organized and heavily subsidized.  They are also expert at influencing the political process to gain a built in, legislatively mandated, advantage.  Kudo's for them.  If you care about something, you need to fight for it.  I fear that the pro-sustainability constituents may not be up for the fight.  Examples of their efforts include efforts to prevent the disclosure of fracking fluids, efforts to blockade renewable energy, and even developing a "Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms." 

Now, we get to the part that worries me.