The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Henry Gifford, founder of Gifford Fuel Saving Inc., also charges the LEED “green” construction standards actually harm the environment by leading consumers away from using proven energy-saving strategies.
The Council has yet to formally respond to the suit, which was filed on 8 October. Contacted at the Council's Washington, D.C. office, Ashley Katz, the spokeswoman for the organisation, declined to comment at length, citing the sensitivity of ongoing litigation. However, she told Renewable Energy magazine, "We are looking into the matter and will respond in due course".
Gifford said the US Green Building Council’s proprietary line of products, including its LEED green building certification program, its courses and workshops, and its annual Greenbuild conference have supplanted building codes in many jurisdictions within the US, undermined marketplace competition, and unfairly obscured other building standards that “are proven – unlike LEED – to reduce energy use and carbon emission[s]”.
These standards include U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Energy Star program, ASHRAE standards, Passivhaus/Passive House USA standards, and Air Barrier Association of America, the complaint said.
In seeking class-certification for the suit, Gifford asked Federal Judge Leonard B. Sand in the Southern District of New York to consider as injured parties consumers who paid to have their properties certified green by the US Green Building Council, taxpayers whose municipalities spent public money on green buildings, and building designers working outside the Council’s purview.
All have been hurt, the lawsuit claims, by the Council’s “monopolization of the market through fraudulent and intentionally misleading representation in the marketing and promotion of LEED product”.
Gifford said the US Green Building Council distorted data about the effectiveness of its standards – which generally assert that LEED buildings are 25 percent to 50 percent more energy-efficient than non-LEED standard buildings – by failing to follow generally-accepted standards for statistical analysis.
Further, the suit said the, “[US Green Building Council] claims that the LEED system is ‘providing third-party verification that a building or community was designed and built using strategies aimed at improving performance across all the metrics that matter most: energy savings… ’
“This claim is false on its face in several ways: 1) LEED certification does not require any verification of the data submitted in certification applications and does not require actual energy use data at any stage; 2) LEED certification is not based on actual building performance data but rather on projected energy use; and 3) [US Green Building Council] does not have the staff or expertise to evaluate these applications.
“Far from providing ‘verification that a building or community was designed and built using strategies aimed at improving performance,’ USGBC essentially allows applicants to self-certify,” the complaint said.
Gifford seeks injunctive relief, compensatory and punitive damages for members of the class. He is represented by attorney Norah Hart in New York.
For additional information:
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
