The 7 World Trade Center opened in 2006 with LEED Gold certification. That means it passed the most rigorous green building standard in the United States at the time. It has an Energy Star score of 74.
The Empire State Building was built in 1931. It is not LEED certified. It has an Energy Star score of 80.
The Chrysler Building, also not LEED certified, has an Energy Star score of 84.
The difference is not that the old buildings are exceptional. The difference is that LEED measures the wrong things.
The Certification Problem
LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) was created by the US Green Building Council in 1998. It awards points across a range of categories: energy use, water efficiency, materials, indoor air quality, site selection. A building accumulates enough points, it earns a rating: Certified, Silver, Gold, Platinum.
The system made intuitive sense. Buildings consume about 40% of total energy in the United States. Making buildings more efficient should reduce that. And LEED buildings often are more efficient than code minimum.
But "more efficient than code minimum" is a low bar. The pre-war masonry buildings of Midtown Manhattan were built with thick walls, operable windows, and natural ventilation, not because their architects were environmentally conscious but because cheap energy did not yet exist to compensate for bad building form. The result is buildings that perform passively well without trying. The result is the Empire State Building outscoring a LEED Gold tower.
This is not an edge case. It is the structural problem.
The Missing Variable
LEED measures the building. LEED does not measure how people get to the building.
This is not a technicality. Transportation is roughly 28% of US greenhouse gas emissions, making it the single largest sector. Buildings account for approximately 13% when measured by direct emissions, though the total rises significantly when electrical generation is included. But in either accounting, whether a building is located somewhere walkable, transit-accessible, and mixed-use determines more about its real environmental footprint than almost any design choice made inside the building envelope.
Michael Mehaffy's doctoral research at TU Delft found that urban sprawl accounts for more than a third of global CO₂ emissions when transportation, land-use, and infrastructure are all counted together. The figure is larger than the building-efficiency number that LEED targets. We have built a certification system optimizing for 13% while ignoring 35%.
Research published in 2025 in Real Estate Economics found that LEED-certified multifamily properties in California showed 14 to 20 percent higher greenhouse gas emissions than comparable non-LEED buildings in the same areas, once transportation emissions were included. Buildings certified as green were producing more total emissions than uncertified buildings, because the certified buildings were disproportionately located in car-dependent areas.
Green buildings in sprawled locations. Certified buildings that commuters drive to. A rating system that scores the rectangle of glass and steel while treating the surrounding city as irrelevant.
The Bolt-On Problem
There is a deeper version of this argument.
The glass curtain wall tower is not a bad building made worse by poor location. It is a building type that is structurally energy-intensive regardless of the technology attached to it. A fifty-story glass curtain wall requires mechanical ventilation because natural ventilation at that scale and with those facade properties is impossible. It generates enormous solar gain requiring year-round cooling. It produces massive car and transit trips because no street grid accommodates it at ground level. These are not deficiencies that technology can efficiently compensate for. They are the building type.
Adding solar panels and high-efficiency chillers to a glass tower is patching a structural problem. The energy savings are real but bounded. The structural inefficiency of the form remains.
Traditional dense urban fabric, by contrast, tends to perform well passively because it was optimized before cheap energy existed to compensate for bad form. Mixed-use blocks with ground-floor commercial and residential above. Shared party walls reducing heat loss. Walking distances to daily needs eliminating most car trips. All of this happened without any certification requirement because the economics of pre-fossil-fuel urbanism enforced it.
This is the Jevons Paradox applied to cities. More efficient cars let people live further from work, increasing total vehicle miles traveled and erasing efficiency gains. More efficient buildings lower operating costs, encouraging more space per person, partially or fully erasing the gains. The efficiency improvement is real. The system-level impact is ambiguous. Optimizing components while ignoring system behavior produces results that look like progress and aren't.
What Actually Works
Persons living in walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods show measurably lower per-capita carbon footprints than those in car-dependent suburbs, across a range of studies controlling for income and other variables. The mechanism is simple: when daily needs are within walking distance, and when transit reaches destinations that walking doesn't, vehicle ownership becomes optional. When vehicle ownership becomes optional, most people who have the choice reduce or eliminate it.
A 2003 study in the American Journal of Public Health found that walkable neighborhood design correlates with higher social capital as well as lower per-capita energy use. These are connected. The same urban fabric that reduces car dependence also produces the street life that reduces isolation.
The most useful environmental measure for a new building is not its LEED score. It is its Walk Score. It is the number of daily destinations reachable on foot. It is whether the building adds to or subtracts from ground-floor street activity. These variables are not exotic. They were the default building logic for most of urban history. They do not require a certification system to measure. They require looking at the street.
The Scoring of the Wrong Thing
The certification system was built by architects and building product manufacturers, not urban planners. It measures what the building industry controls (the building) and not what the city controls (the location and the street network).
This is not a criticism of LEED's intentions. It is a structural critique of what any building-level certification can accomplish when the problem is urban. A rating system for individual buildings cannot fix a pattern of development that requires car dependence. It can only make individual buildings incrementally better within a pattern that the certification system is not designed to address.
The Seagram Building, by common consensus one of the most influential modernist buildings in New York, has an Energy Star score of 3. The glass curtain wall it pioneered is now the template for global commercial construction and among the least thermally efficient building envelopes in routine use. The building that everyone copied was always a terrible performer. We just didn't notice for sixty years because energy was cheap.
The Empire State Building has a score of 80. It is older, denser, more efficient, more walkable, and more embedded in a city fabric that reduces the total footprint of every person who uses it.
Neither of them is LEED certified.
The certification measures the wrong scale.