[First off, a disclaimer: The firm for which I work is on this list of top "green" design firms, and I have the highly dubious distinction of being the only programmer in the office to be LEED-certified. (Stupid me, letting myself be talked into that...)]
Anyhoo, I'm certainly not knocking the whole idea of "green" building--if nothing else, because I'm hard-wired to look for efficiencies. But what I think is lost in the political wrangling over green jobs and how much of your gas tank is financing terrorists is the fact that the greenest option of all is to not use stuff in the first place.
To hear the firm elders tell the story, the Golden Age of their careers was the 1960s and 1970s when, quote, "Companies built monuments to themselves." In 2009, commercial real estate is going begging for buyers/renters to the point where the economic talking heads are making loud rumblings about a second foreclosure meltdown. Yet, as the linked TPM statistic indicates, the green design trade is seeing a huge uptick in business. If the frugality enforced by a glut in commercial real estate puts paid to hubris writ in steel and brick, I have a difficult time seeing how it would be a bad thing. Or even if strip malls (and their parking lots) are finally built the smart way (i.e. more than one story) in lieu of paving over more of the planet.
The essential block to "green" building is, I suspect, twofold: First, there's an upfront cost to the builder, particularly because when you can build an office complex or strip mall just like you built the last dozen, economies of scale encourage McBuilding. Second, of course, is the basic human tendency to repeat what's already known, even in the face of change. However, the long-term costs of decreased energy/water/etc. efficiencies are passed on to the buyers/tenants. A seller's market gives no incentive to change. Except now it's become a buyer's market, and likely will be for years to come. Buyers/Renters in a down economy would much rather invest in their business' growth than pay for wasted energy or eat the cost of extra sick days because an open building was subdivided without the HVAC system being upgraded to compensate for the lost "natural" circulation.
I'm certainly not hoping for a second foreclosure crisis--don't get me wrong. I am hoping that the laws of supply and demand plus a greater awareness of the alternatives will inject some intelligence and longer-range thinking into the building process. Because as Will Rogers said, "They're making more people every day, but they aren't making any more dirt." The same can be said for the sources of energy that we're mining or pumping from the ground every day.
