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One thing that President Obama can’t claim a mandate for is action on climate change. Obama never made the topic a high-enough profile issue in his re-election campaign to claim broad popular support for his ideas on climate change. But the push for U.S. action on climate change is far from dead...

No one really wants to say this out loud, but the fact is that a LEED design alone won’t give you an energy-efficient building. Architects don’t want to say it because it sounds like they’re not doing their jobs when they design LEED buildings. The U.S. Green Building Council doesn’t...

We didn’t plan it this way, but it just so happens that the 2011 FMXcellence honorees provide a pretty good picture of how FM departments are using sustainability to meet organizational goals. The FMXcellence program isn’t limited to green efforts. The ultimate test is adding value —...

I recently heard top executives talk about the facility managers at their companies. One of the FMs took a lead role in the company’s sustainability efforts. In fact, his efforts had produced significant energy savings. About this facility manager, the CEO couldn’t say enough good things...

The rationale for commissioning is pretty straightforward. Invest a modest amount of money to find things wrong with a building, fix those problems, and get the investment paid back in a short period of time. Sounds logical. But top management often sees things differently. The executive viewpoint may...

At the heart of the House and Senate climate-change bills is cap-and-trade, a complex system that, put very simply, requires companies to pay for their greenhouse gas emissions. Opponents of cap-and-trade like to call the idea cap-and-tax. But the preferred alternative to cap-and-trade, in the eyes of...

Not long ago, any time you got an X-ray, the doctor would pull out a big floppy rectangle of film. Now, there’s a good chance the doctor will call up the images on a computer screen. In the not too distant future, the old approach to X-rays will seem as antiquated as mercury thermometers. On the...

Justifying an energy efficiency project requires facility executives to walk the fine line between salesmanship and exaggeration, said Richard Lubinski, president of Think Energy Management , at the Facility Decisions conference and exposition in Las Vegas. (For more on his session, click here .) To...

Want to improve your chances of convincing bean counters that investments in energy projects are worthwhile? Stop talking about payback periods and start talking about return on investment, said speakers at the Facility Decisions conference and exposition in Las Vegas. Alan Whitson, president, The Corporate...

Utilities have long offered rebates and other incentives for energy efficiency. In the early and mide-90s, for example, rebates helped drive a market shift from T12 lamps and magnetic ballasts to T8s and electronic ballasts. By the end of that decade, the amount of rebates had dropped. But the tide has...

YouTube probably isn’t the first place you’d think to look for information about new data center designs. But Allstate is proud enough of a recently opened data center that it made a video about the facility and posted it on YouTube. The video covers some of the green measures adopted by...

We’ve all heard the benefits of green buildings so often it gets kind of boring to mention them — good for the environment, good for occupants, good for the corporate image, good for the bottom line. Yawn. Well, here’s another advantage to consider: Green buildings may be good for your...

In a word, top management wants to have its cake and eat it too, suggests a report from CoreNet Global . Is the recession goes on, senior managers want corporate real estate execs to cut costs while simultaneously adding value. The key to doing that is to focus on corporate outcomes, not on real estate...