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Response to “A critical look at ‘Energy savings, emissions reductions, and health co-benefits of the green building movement’”

Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology volume 29, pages 594–596 (2019)Cite this article

A Correction to this article was published on 20 January 2020

This article has been updated

We appreciate the opportunity to respond to the commentary on our paper “Energy savings, emissions reductions, and health co-benefits of the green building movement” by John Scofield and Jakob Cornell [1, 2]. Our research has three main analytical components that we join to estimate the health and climate co-benefits of energy-efficiency measures in buildings: (1) analysis of energy utilization in buildings, (2) calculation of air pollutant emissions from that energy use in buildings, and (3) quantification of the resulting public health and economic impact of those emissions. The commentary by Scofield and Cornell focuses on the first component—energy utilization in buildings. (Scofield and Cornell acknowledge that our methodology in estimating emissions and health co-benefits is reasonable.) We will show here that the commentary by Scofield and Cornell related to the first component suffers from serious shortcomings and, as a result, does not impact our conclusions as originally written; our findings stand.

The crux of Scofield and Cornell’s argument is their assertion that our analysis did not account for source energy production losses, but rather only site energy. This assertion is incorrect. Our analysis relies on emission factors for electricity from the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Emissions & Generation Resource Integrated Database (eGRID) database. This database reports average emission rates for the main pollutants emitted from electricity generating power plants in each of the sub-regions in the United States, inclusive of losses during generation. Thus, the vast majority of the energy losses associated with electricity use are already included in our estimate of pollutant emissions.

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References

  1. MacNaughton P, Cao X, Buonocore J, Cedeno-Laurant J, Sprengle J, Bernstein A, et al. Energy savings, emission reductions, and health co-benefits of the green building movement. J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol. 2018;28:307–18.

  2. Scofield J, Cornell J. A critical look at “Energy savings, emissions reductions, and health co-benefits of the green building movement”. J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41370-018-0078-1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Environmental Health Department, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

    Piers MacNaughton, Xiaodong Cao, Jonathan Buonocore, Jose Guillermo Cedeno-Laurent, John D. Spengler, Aaron Bernstein & Joseph G. Allen

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  1. Piers MacNaughton
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  2. Xiaodong Cao
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  3. Jonathan Buonocore
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  4. Jose Guillermo Cedeno-Laurent
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  5. John D. Spengler
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  6. Aaron Bernstein
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  7. Joseph G. Allen
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Correspondence to Joseph G. Allen.

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MacNaughton, P., Cao, X., Buonocore, J. et al. Response to “A critical look at ‘Energy savings, emissions reductions, and health co-benefits of the green building movement’”. J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol 29, 594–596 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41370-019-0118-5

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