Green Building During Our Current Political Catastrophe – GreenBuildingAdvisor

By Martin Holladay | November 7, 2025

There are builders who specialize in starter homes, or luxury homes, or log homes, or adobe homes. These categories are fairly easy to define, and there’s rarely a debate about whether these builders have met their goal. Any realtor can look at a log builder’s work and say, “Yup. That’s a log home.”

The same cannot be said about green builders. We don’t really have a national consensus on the definition of a green home. Even if we can choose a standard definition—for example, “a green home is built in a way that minimizes negative impacts on the natural environment”—it’s always been hard to know whether a green builder successfully achieves that goal.

Clearly, most green builders want to protect the natural environment and address our current climate crisis. But are we succeeding?

• We don’t have a consensus on the definition of green building.
• Even builders who sincerely want to minimize damage to the environment find it hard to know if our efforts have been effective.
• Calculations of the carbon emissions associated with manufacturing construction materials fundamentally challenge the very idea of green building.

A shifting definition

There’s been a progression in our view of green building. When I started building in the early 1970s, green builders were hippies fashioning homes out of stones, logs, sticks, and mud. I was one of them. Those of us who lived in these houses didn’t use much energy because (a) many of us lived off the grid, and (b) we were poor.

In the 1980s, climate scientists began sharing data showing that carbon emissions were linked to global warming. This information was a challenge to every green builder; the challenge was addressed by focusing on building practices that resulted in lower residential energy…