roger platt usgbc

Roger Platt, president of the U.S. Green Building Council, listens during a tour of the Green Building Research Laboratory at Portland State University on Thursday, June 25, 2015.

(Elliot Njus/The Oregonian)

In April, the Portland City Council voted to require owners of commercial buildings to report their annual energy usage. And just last week, the council updated the city's Climate Action Plan, which aims to reduce the city's greenhouse emissions.

But Roger Platt worries the city, a leader in green construction, could fall behind in efficient buildings.

Platt is president of the U.S. Green Building Council, best known for its LEED certifications. He visited Portland as the City Council was voting on its climate plan and spoke to The Oregonian/OregonLive on Thursday.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You met with Portland Mayor Charlie Hales and other officials about the city's newly adopted Climate Action Plan. What did you tell them?

How they implement this plan and the strategies they take will be something that the world will be watching.

Portland has a great reputation, and one way to ensure it remains globally relevant as a leader in green building is to make sure that the way they implement this plan and its very, very, very, very aggressive goals is commensurate with the goals themselves.

We also want to encourage Portland to be leaders in demonstrating that there is no zero-sum game between affordable housing and making Portland the greenest city in the world.

Is there anything you've seen in your visit that makes you think Portland is in danger of falling behind?

One of the issues that city officials were finding challenging was the tremendous pressure there is, appropriately, to increase the number of affordable housing.

But there's a -- disproven, I think -- notion that the green aspect of it should be cut out for cost saving purposes when that's not what they're doing in Sao Paulo or Mexico City. We would expect Portland to be ahead of, not behind, those cities.

I'm just not sure if Portland is ready to be Portland. Can they demonstrate the kind of green building they've historically done, or are they beginning to get sort of beaten down and exhausted by all the challenges that face modern cities?

What have you seen here that's encouraging?

I'm a little bit struck by just how much expertise there is. I met with some people from Earth Advantage, and I was very impressed with the work they were doing. The New Buildings Institute moved to Portland very recently. (Editor's note: The energy-efficiency nonprofit moved to downtown Portland from Vancouver, Washington.) They're doing a tremendous amount of research in green building. There's a lot of really forward-thinking expertise here.

The U.S. Green Building Council is best known for its LEED program.

Right, it's this product that you see in buildings from churches and police stations to office buildings and stadiums. Unlike almost any other product that's very popular -- and it is very popular -- every four years we make it a little harder. We just announced recently version 4.0 of LEED.

But we are now also certifying to a whole range of standards, some of which are infrastructure related or healthy buildings related. Over time we think those sorts of standards will sort of organically create a LEED for cities or LEED for communities.

Globally, particularly in India or China, when we talk about LEED certification, they laugh a little bit. They're not thinking in units of 'buildings.' They're looking for LEED for the giant cities they're building.

We're talking outside a green-building laboratory at Portland State University. A criticism of LEED (and other sustainability ratings) is that it is inflexible and doesn't allow for innovation. Can that be addressed?

That's something that we're thinking about 24/7. There's no question that whenever you try to scale something, there's a risk of cookie cutter activity being certified.

But what we've done with the LEED system is make it increasingly performance oriented, so the exact way you accomplish the goal is more flexible. But the goals themselves and the requirement that you demonstrate continuing performance have been increased.

We've recently released this sort of dynamic plaque that shows in real time whether your building certified to Platinum is actually performing as a Platinum building. It shows how well you're doing with water conservation right now, how well you're doing with energy, with indoor air, with recycling.

They're not kind of relying on a restaurant review from the 1990s that's still sitting in the restaurant saying it's the best restaurant 12 years ago.

-- Elliot Njus

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