The normally thoughtful Sightline Institute has a silly response to my recent piece applying the lessons of green buildings to the legislative proposal for a $3 billion tax and spending package to upgrade state buildings with "green" elements. The proposal claims that a portion of the cost of the package would be paid by energy savings.
Their first critique is that our report is off base because it doesn't address the proposal directly. This is true. The proposal was unveiled on a Monday and the first hearing was Tuesday at 8 am. So, our piece is an attempt to draw lessons from Washington's experience with spending on "green" buildings. History never repeats itself exactly, but that doesn't mean we ignore it. Ironically, in one of the author's previous posts about the "green" bonds legislation, he cites data from "green" buildings studies to support the legislation. So he argues that our methodology isn't applicable after he previously used the exact same comparison to support the legislation.
Incidentally, we did, subsequently, write a short piece directly addressing the bill itself. You can read it on our blog asking "Are Green Bonds Worth It?"
They go on to say that "There is nothing in the legislation that mandates particular kinds of retrofits or LEED certification." This isn't quite right. There is a great deal of talk about "green jobs" and "green" elements. In fact, they call the spending proposal "green" bonds. To pretend that certain types of projects won't be favored ignores all the rhetoric used to justify it. Sightline's own support of the legislation is based on that very expectation.
The next critique shows how fast-and-loose some play with facts when they want something. Advocates of green buildings produced a report saying that those buildings perform better than the "standard stock" of American buildings. Our study notes that the "standard stock" of buildings averages 40-years old. Noting that a new "green" building is more efficient than a 40-year old building is a pretty attenuated claim. But green building advocates misuse the study, implying that it shows new "green" buildings are better than simply new buildings. It shows no such thing.
Sightline, however, says I make their point since the green bonds bill would update those buildings. They say "But that’s precisely the point: many of the school buildings eligible for retrofits really are 40 years old, or are built to minimum standards, or both." Really? Show me the data. Does the author know that are are they simply saying it because they want to believe it?
That leads to the more important point. The author notes the bill "doesn’t force districts to make improvements if they don’t pencil out." No, it doesn't force but it does actively encourage districts to make improvements that don't pencil out. Since schools pay none or only a small part of the cost, virtually any energy saving pencils out. Spending $10 to save $1 makes sense as long as someone else is spending the $10. That's what this does. The sponsor himself was very clear in his testimony that the purpose of this spending is to create jobs and energy saved is a positive side effect. The primary goal, however, is to spend the money.
The next section is the most muddled. The author uses the metaphor of a pitcher throwing strikes, so it seems like he added this last part because he needed a third. I quote a piece by the Superintendent of Public Instruction's office (SPI) from last December that savings are uncertain. My comments are a response to some who claim that that report shows a 24 percent energy savings. But the report says those savings are "projected," not actual. Our research shows those projections to be inaccurate.
Sightline quotes the SPI report saying that schools weren't asked to report those savings, but that some schools had reported "immediate and anticipated future cost savings." He goes on to say:
In other words, WPC uses the SPI report to criticize Dunshee’s legislation but ignores the fact that the districts weren’t asked to report about their energy savings. What’s more, some of the districts chose to report their energy savings anyway found just what you might expect: energy efficiency investments pay for themselves over time.
It is too early to tell, on the whole, whether buildings constructed following the WSSP protocol will produce enough savings to offset the up front investment. But many schools are reporting savings -- and the lessons we learn from the program’s ongoing data collection should inform investment decisions on retrofits.
In the first sentence he says savings are uncertain because they didn't offer data. The second sentence says that some schools reported savings, although he portrays them as real when they are actually only projected. The third sentence is back to uncertain. The fourth sentence is back to saying "many" schools are reporting savings. So, the data are uncertain, except where they point to his desired conclusion. That's called cherry-picking the data and it is evidence of a lack of rigor.
Ironically, he then accuses us of cherry picking. He argues:
The only other empirical evidence WPC offers to criticize the WSSP is that they claim to have found at least one non-green building that outperformed a green building in the same district. However, they don’t share the age, location, square footage or energy use at the schools being compared, so we can’t know if WPC’s comparison is fair or not.
This critique indicates that it is unlikely that the author read our piece very carefully. Not only do I give more than one example, I name some of the schools we looked at. I wrote, in the eighth paragraph of my piece, that:
In Tacoma, where supporters touted the energy savings of Giaudrone Middle School, the building has consistently used about 30 percent more energy per square foot than another Tacoma middle school built the same year but without mandated green standards. In Spokane, none of the three “green” elementary schools are as energy efficient as Browne Elementary, built in 2002, prior to passage of the “High Performance Buildings” law.
Also, he didn't look at our web page to see if I'd mentioned other schools. I should have footnoted our work, but he can look at Should the State Follow "LEED" or Get Out of the Way?, WPC's comments on Residential/Commercial/Industrial option 3 (RCI-3), Suspending Failed “Green” Building Rules Can Save Schools Millions, "Green" Building Standards Not Improving Student Learning But Are Reducing Funding for Necessary Education Programs, among others. We've looked at all of the districts included in the State's green building pilot project and many others highlighted by the environmental community. Some are better than others, but none of the "green" schools live up to their promises, a fact now acknowledged, begrudgingly, by both the SPI and the Department of Ecology.
As for the "green" bonds proposal itself, our research is demonstrating that the savings claimed by advocates are amorphous. The data only include projected savings and actual savings are rarely audited. Further, the total amount spent on the types of projects highlighted by advocates has been about $160 million over ten years. This proposal increases that to $200 million, of the total $3 billion spent, over two years. Given the lack of clear data, hoping that this dramatic increase in the program will produce the projected savings seems hopeful in the extreme.
One thing we can agree on is Sightline's call for a cost-benefit analysis of energy saving projects. Now if we could just get the legislature to consider that approach, we'd be getting somewhere.
