Slate has an article today about how to game the LEED environmental accreditation for buildings.

It’s better to have a world with the LEED system than a world without, and we simply don’t have time to do nothing while we wait for a perfect system to come along (like Kyoto around 2003, before we ignored it until became ridiculously unachievable). I suppose it’s a valid point that the dominance of LEED might crowd out embryonic alternative rating systems.

One problem not mentioned in the article is that the original intent of the system was to be a voluntary performance “floor,” and that builders were encouraged to exceed it. By making LEED mandatory, it becomes psychologically more like the building code and becomes the hard ceiling to all performance, ie. the maximum that anyone will do. For some reason no one treats legislated measures as the absolute bare minimum that you can do without breaking the law.

Still, better a mandatory minimum than nothing…