A critical look at “Energy savings, emissions reductions, and health co-benefits of the green building movement”

MacNaughton et al. recently published an article entitled, “Energy savings, emissions reductions, and health co-benefits of the green building movement” in which they claim to calculate the environmental co-benefits associated with the (assumed) reduced energy use of green buildings. They consider only LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) commercial buildings and make two fundamental assumptions: (1) that each LEED building, year after year, achieves the energy savings projected by its design team, and (2) that the fuel mix of LEED buildings is the same as the average mix for other buildings in the same geographic region.