LEED v5, Embodied Carbon, and Real Emissions Cuts

What if the biggest barrier to decarbonising buildings isn’t technology, cost, or ambition - but sheer complexity?

The built environment produces nearly 40% of global emissions, yet we still make low-carbon construction harder than it needs to be.

In this episode, I’m joined by Tommy Linstroth, founder of Green Badger, to unpack why construction remains one of the most overlooked climate battlegrounds, and why that’s a mistake. We dig into LEED v5, embodied carbon, and the growing gap between climate ambition and what actually happens on building sites. The stakes are huge: buildings lock in emissions for decades, sometimes centuries.

You’ll hear why builders aren’t resisting sustainability, they’re drowning in shifting standards, paperwork, and fragmented data. We explore how LEED has evolved, why carbon now sits at the centre of green building standards, and how decisions made at the design stage quietly determine emissions for the next 100 years. Tommy also explains why third-party verification matters, how “build to code” often means “barely legal”, and why retrofitting existing buildings may be the hardest climate challenge nobody likes talking about.

We also dig into where genuine momentum is emerging - from falling renewable costs to better data and smarter software, and how climate tech, including AI, could finally make the low-carbon choice the easy choice. If net zero, emissions reduction, and the energy transition are serious goals, then construction can’t stay a side quest.

🎙️ Listen now to hear how Tommy Linstroth and Green Badger are helping turn sustainable building from a compliance headache into real-world climate action.

Kismet: Golf tournaments can book venues out to 2049, yet many organisations still can’t map a credible path to 2040 climate targets. The problem isn’t foresight, it’s priorities.

Sign up to Climate Confident+ for deep dive analysis of the major climate and energy stories of the day.

Transcript

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Tommy Linstroth: 0:03

They already know where the US Open is gonna be played in 2049. They have that golf course identified in, booked 24 years from now. They know where that golf course is gonna be and we have 2040 goals. But we don't know how the heck we're gonna get there We can't say, we don't as humans think that long because we know where the US open in 2049 is gonna be. Let's apply that to our own sustainability efforts.

Tom Raftery: 0:25

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 254 of the Climate Confident Podcast, and the very first episode of 2026. Happy New Year. Hope you had a great break and hope you got a chance to listen to a couple of the crossover episodes from my Resilient Supply Chain podcast. I published those because some of you may not be subscribed to that podcast, and might have missed them first time out. And now we're back to the regular climate Confident programming. Before we get into today's topic, a quick and genuine thank you to Anita Krajnc, who's just signed up as a new subscriber to the podcast. Anita is the global campaign coordinator for the Plant Based Treaty initiative, an organization dedicated to promoting a just transition to a plant-based food system so that we can live within our planetary boundaries and rewild the earth. Support like this genuinely matters. It helps keep this show independent, focused on evidence over hype and able to keep bringing these conversations to a global audience. So Anita, thank you. It's appreciated more than you might realise. Now onto today's topic, and buildings don't usually get top billing in climate conversations, but they should. The built environment is responsible for nearly 40% of global emissions, more than all cars, trucks, ships, and planes combined. Yet when it comes to decarbonising construction, the problem isn't a lack of intent. It's complexity, fragmented teams, ever shifting standards, and asking builders to become material scientists while they're just trying to keep projects on time and on budget. My guest today argues that if you want faster progress, we need to make sustainable building the easy choice. Tommy Linstroth is the founder of Green Badger, a platform helping architects, developers, and contractors automate sustainability compliance, navigate LEED version five, and tackle embodied carbon without drowning in paperwork. If you care about real world decarbonisation, practical adoption, and why simplicity beats good intentions every time, this is a conversation worth starting the year with. Tommy, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Tommy Linstroth: 3:02

Sure Tom, thanks for having me. I am Tommy Linstroth. I am founder of Green Badger, and we are a software solution for the design and construction industry to streamline and automate, sustainable design and construction and really try and simplify the process of figuring out what products and buildings and practices are green and what we can do to make 'em greener.

Tom Raftery: 3:24

And why? As in, what made you decide to set up Green Badger? What was it that kind of struck you one morning you decided, oh, I gotta set up Green Badger. And second part of that question, the name Green Badger. Where did that come from?

Tommy Linstroth: 3:40

Sure, we'll start with the name.'cause it really starts with where all of this came from to begin with. So I'm I'm currently based in Savannah, Georgia, in the United States, but originally from Wisconsin. Grew up there. Went to college there. And Wisconsin is known as the Badger State. And so when I was starting the company, it was hearkening back to my roots of being a Wisconsin badger, and being green. So tied it together, plus badgers are tenacious and we are constantly fighting to make sustainability easier, more affordable, and better for everybody involved in the process.

Tom Raftery: 4:11

Gotcha. Nice.

Tommy Linstroth: 4:12

And that is also, where all this came from is like when I was a kid growing up, I grew up playing in farm fields and in woods. And, and when I started going to college, every time I came back, in the summers or for breaks, there was, there was less and less of it and there was just

Tom Raftery: 4:25

hmm.

Tommy Linstroth: 4:25

sprawled cookie cutter developments going up. And so really started saying, Hey, that's not cool. You know, all this natural landscape that, I grew up with is disappearing seemingly, without recourse. And so later in my collegiate career, I was, I was probably a junior at the time, decided, you know what? Taking the environment and sustainability, they didn't, call it sustainability back in the, the late nineties, but taking, taking the environment more serious was really something that was gonna drive a, passion in me and hopefully professional opportunities. So after graduating and working in business for a year, just really decided my, focus, my heart really was in working towards sustainability causes. So, went back to school and got a Master's of Environmental studies, moved out of Wisconsin because at the time it, it got too cold for me. So I moved south to Charleston, South Carolina, where I got my master's really focusing on, climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, and how we can address that from a local perspective. And from there took a job in real estate development as a director of sustainability. So that really started the impetus of the path towards Green Badger, of seeing firsthand, the challenges that we faced as a, as a real estate developer of how do you design, construct, and operate a building in a sustainable manner. And how does that vary if you're building affordable housing units to a shopping mall, to a warehouse or a data center? And there's, obviously huge differences in, all the reason people would keep saying is why they're not doing it is it's too complicated. They're not experts in this. It, it costs too much. It seems too tough. And so really launched Green Badger to try and nip those arguments in the bud and saying, all right, I agree. You know, it is. It's a pain in the butt. Everybody wants to do it. They're just like, tell me how to do it and how do we afford doing it? And so Green Badger was really built to say, look, everyone thinks it costs too much and that it takes too much time. If you can use software to automate it, both of those arguments can go away. And so Green Badger was really born from my own headaches and challenges that I faced, and from what I saw, others in the market facing of saying, how do we just make this process so dead simple that there can't really be an argument against doing it.

Tom Raftery: 6:27

Okay, great. Who are your typical customers?

Tommy Linstroth: 6:32

We work with a variety of people in the design and construction industry. So primarily, and historically our customer has been the builders and the general contractors, focusing mostly on commercial construction. So we haven't really gotten to the level of a single family home, for a home builder. But if you're building multifamily, if you're a building airports, if you're building apartments, condominiums, retail outlets, restaurants, hotels, really anything that falls into that more traditional commercial construction space that's our target audience. And now we're expanding that to start that process earlier, to target the architects and designers that are in those same spaces because they're faced with the same, challenges of, we specify hundreds if not thousands of individual products, whether it's door hinge, or the type of concrete a building's using. Somebody is making a thoughtful decision about what's going into these buildings that's gonna be here for the next 60, 80 years. And if it's really tough and challenging for them to compare and say, well, should I use this door hinge or that door hinge, or this concrete mix design versus that and not be able to quickly and easily see what the sustainability attributes are. They're kind of picking in the dark. And so we think we've got a really good opportunity to not just ensure a building is built sustainably, but hopefully get injected a little bit earlier into that process and take some of the headache and, and hours around making those decisions easier and quicker.

Tom Raftery: 7:58

Okay. And when the building is built, do you walk away?

Tommy Linstroth: 8:01

We've got an operational tracking software as well. I'll admit it's not as robust as I'd like it quite yet, but it is something that you could just turn over. So the challenge we often see is right, the architects design it, that's. one customer group, the contractor builds it, that's another customer group, and then they turn it over to the end owner who may, may or may not be occupying that building. So it's kind of sometimes a weird transition that if somebody's not building that building to occupy it themselves. They're not really interested in tracking or monitoring it because really that, that comes into whoever's leasing that space or taking over that space. So for, for us in our natural workflow we've got the ability to do that, but logistically it's sometimes a bit of a hiccup because it's a completely different audience that we might not have, the inroads into.

Tom Raftery: 8:46

And what do you see is the construction sector's biggest sustainability challenge right now? Is it carbon? Is it complexity? Is it culture? Is it data? Lack of access to data? Lack of digitalization? Something else entirely? All of the above?

Tommy Linstroth: 9:03

You just, you just covered pretty much every challenge that we see on a daily basis. And I think, you're in Europe and have requirements been around longer and more granular. So I think your market segments, you know, have been dealing with some of this a little bit longer than some of the US markets. So things around carbon tracking and disclosure is new, right? The state of California, which is the largest market in the US just had that go into effect in 2025. The city of Boston is requiring it, but it started just halfway through this year. So I think the biggest complexity is that there's just continuous layers of this onion and they keep getting added. So just as soon as somebody got comfortable with, hey, we're, recycling our construction waste and we're using recycled materials. Great. We know what we're doing finally. Now, then the new update came, and now it's like, well, not only do you need to do that, but now you need to look at material transparency documents. They're like, what the heck are these? Do manufacturers even have these? Then it's like, okay, we just finally started realising. How to read these, 50 page documents. And now it's like, okay, well now you need to have the embodied carbon of everything. And, and how that information comes from a through a subcontractor to a general contractor, to an architect. You have so many hands in the pot, all with very differing levels of understanding of what these requirements are. It's just really complicated. Again, the, the frequency that these standards change and get updated. You know, unless you're thinking sustainability full time, it, it's tough to stay, keep your finger on the pulse. And the fact of the matter is, these guys and girls are here to build buildings and they're out in job sites and they're dealing with, putting out water leaks and they're subcontractors scheduling issues and material delays and trying to get the buildings built on time so that their clients are happy and now you ask them to be material scientists that can read documentation down to a hundred versus a thousand parts per million. And it's just something that, many of them aren't equipped for. If you go to a, a collegiate university construction program, that is not on the list of electives you are selecting and so, it's a complex subject that's getting thrown onto an industry that, that's trying their best to get these, the buildings built, how they're designed, but, might be missing some of that critical information, especially as it changes so quickly and so frequently to be able to, effectively understand and to digest some of those requirements.

Tom Raftery: 11:24

And where is the demand for sustainability or sustainable buildings coming from? Is it the developers? Is it the, it's hardly the construction workers themselves, you know who, who's asking for this?

Tommy Linstroth: 11:38

Sure. So it, it does come down that it is client driven. So at the end of the day, the architects, the contractors, you know, their service providers. If the owner says, I want this building to be a hundred stories tall, they're not gonna say, ah, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not gonna build a hundred. They'll build a hundred stories. If it's a hundred stories and has to be red, they'll do it. And if it's a hundred stories red and has to be sustainable. They will do it and they'll figure out how to get it done. So in the US we see a couple primary drivers. One is the standard, which in the US is called LEED. It stands for Leadership and Energy and Environmental Design. It's an international standard. It's actually used in over 140 countries. It's administered by the US Green Building Council. I think 96% now of Fortune 100 companies in the US use that as their standard baseline order. So if they're building a building, whether it's a new corporate headquarters or, a a 2,500 square foot retail office bank, there's a, a large financial institution that, works with us. And again, it could be a, you know, a retail bank that you walk in there with your debit card to, to withdraw money, or it could be a skyscraper in downtown New York, they apply that same LEED standard to everything. So you've got a lot of drivers from the corporate America side because it's just sort of, Hey, this is our standard of how we're showing commitment to incorporating this as part of our overall businesses. And then you've got a lot of regulatory, components in place where you have states or local governments that are saying, well, we also are using the standard if it's publicly funded. So anything that has any public dollars at a state or local level, whether it's a fire station, a library, and airports all have to incorporate those as well. Or they just say, look, in the city of Boston, anything that's over 10,000 square feet has to meet these requirements. So you have a lot of areas where they've just said. This is how we want development to happen in our communities. And if you wanna build in the city of Boston, you know, you have to comply with these. So it's a two-pronged approach of client demand and corporate demand as that is the right thing to do. And they tend to occupy those buildings, so they are reaping the benefits of better indoor air quality, more worker engagement, more worker contentment, lower energy bills, or it's just the cost of doing business because it's driven by regulation.

Tom Raftery: 13:47

Right. I remember visiting several LEED Platinum buildings in the US over the years. Back in, I think it was 2009, I was in the Adobe headquarters, and then I was in the SAP headquarters in Pennsylvania. Have those requirements to meet LEED standards. Have those standards changed over the years or are they static? You know, would the LEED Platinum from 2009 still be LEED Platinum today?

Tommy Linstroth: 14:19

The standards have changed and that's again, one of the challenges that the industry faces, but it's also what drives it forward. So, you know, building that was certified the first LEED Platinum building in 2001 or whatever it came, I think it was the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. You know, if you built it the exact same way, it would not be a LEED Platinum building today. It's a natural evolution. So as energy codes evolve over the year, the years, you know, LEED adopts the, the more recent code. So you can't say, Hey, we really crushed the code, but it was the 2009 code. Now it's, you know, the 2023 building code that they're using. So the standards evolve and really the focus of the rating systems evolves itself. So the new version which just came out, it's called unsurprisingly LEED Version five. And they've actually built in that every five years it will update. So 2025 is the first year. We already know the next iteration is gonna be 2030 and 2035. And built into that is, you know, now there's a much more significant focus on carbon than there was in LeeD Version four, and certainly in LEED Version three. So the system reflects, what it perceives as growing importance in the built environment and adapts. And then the changes around them evolve with you know, advances in, in technology and where, renewables might not have been nearly as cost effective 20 years ago as they are today. And so now to get Platinum, you have to show, you know, that you've got renewables and that you've got low carbon and that your buildings are electrified, which was, you know, not even concepts 10 years ago in the last rating system. So, it is a natural progression. It's a natural evolution that continues to drive performance of the buildings without letting us just get complacent. And that's the challenge the industry has, which frankly is good for me. If they made it the same and it was really easy, there wouldn't be a need for Green Badger, but it is complex. It does change. And so that is something that the industry constantly is adapting to.

Tom Raftery: 16:06

And which part of version five do you think will surprise people most?

Tommy Linstroth: 16:11

They have three key focus areas and of course now I'm gonna drop the ball. And should have had these, like, burned in my head.'cause I just got back from the Green Build Conference last week. The concepts have been around, but there was a lot of formal, formal releases last week. But carbon is by far and a way, the number one driver of doing, you know, advanced carbon assessments of not just, used to be how much energy do we think this building's gonna use? How do we design it to use less energy from an operational standpoint? So that's been around for a while, but now there's a lot more focus on, well, what about the carbon of the materials itself or the embodied carbon? Right? if we're designing this building to be here for a hundred years, what are the materials we're putting in and are there options that are less energy intensive, that have a lower embodied carbon? Because the decisions we're making are gonna be impactful for a century. So there's a big focus on, carbon really throughout version five. And that's, the preeminent trend you'd see. There's more about the socio society impacts of some of these buildings. So it takes a broader assessment of where we're putting some of these buildings, how does that impact local communities? What's the socioeconomic status of some of these? So that's a bit as well. But really, carbon is, a big, and, necessary driver of the decision making around version five.

Tom Raftery: 17:52

Yeah, interesting. And I read recently that the built environment generates more CO2 annually than every car, truck, plane and ship combined, which I think is a wild reminder of how much leverage this sector actually has.

Tommy Linstroth: 18:08

It's huge. I think it's 39% or something like that. I mean, it's, it's, it's pretty substantial and the, it's not getting any smaller. Right. It's crazy because we're just adding more buildings. Right. I think there's, 300,000 new construction projects typically in the US every year, but there's six and a half million existing buildings. So again, we're, we're trying to address some of the issue through the construction, but really

Tom Raftery: 18:31

Hmm.

Tommy Linstroth: 18:31

there's a huge existing building stock that's. That's an issue. And I wish I had a magic wand for that because, you know, I live in Savannah, Georgia, historic city founded in seven. I should know this, they make me take this to get to, to move here, I think 1787. But it's been around for a while and not, you know, not as long as some of the European cities you guys are, are in. But, it's been around for a while and obviously buildings have changed quite a bit, but it's, I'll come now and see somebody's renovating, you know, a duplex around the corner. So you can see they're taking some of the siding off because it rotted and they're replacing it. But you'll look right and it's, they take the siding off and there's some smooshed in insulation, and that's it. So the only thing that is stopping 90 degree hot, humid air from getting into this building is this, you know, piece of wood siding. There's no sheathing, there's no air or vapor barrier, and the city is filled with hundreds, if not thousands of these homes that you know, they think, Hey, I might have an efficient air conditioner, but you better because it's running constantly, because your house literally has zero ability to stop air from just leaking in all day long, all summer long. Not to mention the mold and moisture issues that come along with that. So it's like, my God, I can build a, an off grid house covered in solar panels as, as the one new house that's built, but there's literally thousands of existing homes that have no sheathing or vapor barriers or air barriers that are just, gonna be paying an exorbitant amount of utility bills. And you can't easily fix that. Or you can't just throw in some LED lights and say, Hey, I hope, our house is gonna be a little bit more efficient. So, we gotta get construction new buildings, right? A hundred percent. That's where my expertise and focus is. But there's, you know, there's a lot of smart people fortunately looking at how do we renovate the existing building stock. But I do think as it gets down to the smaller you go, the more challenging it is, right? If you're a, if you're a real estate owner and you own a, a big real estate portfolio, again, it, yeah, it makes sense. You're trying to lease these out. It's hyper competitive. You need to renovate your space. It needs to be class A office. It needs to be energy efficient. I know in Europe, they rank the buildings. In New York, you can go in and get an energy score in your building, right? So if you're not renovating these. And you're a an F on your energy score and somebody's looking to lease space, right? They're gonna want to go to one that's an A, if not a B. We don't have that on a house. We don't have that on all these existing homes. And if you're a renter these are things you can't fix. Or even if you own your home, right? The ability to just rip off all of your, siding to put up a sheathing and, and air barrier, That's not realistic. So I think there's a huge opportunity to try and figure out solutions here. A, a necessary opportunity because there's an awful lot of, homes that were built without any of these, what are now basic, construction practices in place.

Tom Raftery: 21:14

Yeah. And does this new standard, does it create a big bureaucratic burden for the developers? Have they, lots of forms they've gotta fill in, or data they've gotta collect or, you know, things that they've gotta answer.

Tommy Linstroth: 21:28

They do. And I, and that's, again, it's the double-edged sword of this, right? It's a third party verified rating system, right? So the credibility you get for doing this is saying, look, I'm not just Mr. Developer. And I said, Hey, of course, yeah, that's a green building come lease from me. I've got one energy efficient light bulb in here, right? So, you know, to get that credibility, that third party verification, you've gotta, demonstrate that you have actually done these things and we're, unless you embed somebody within the project for three years and have them sitting there walking around with a clipboard, which is not gonna be a very inexpensive proposition. There's gotta be just a necessary level of, of validation and verification of what's going on on a job site and, and the design of the building and the construction of the building. So there are those types of hoops you gotta jump through, but I don't know how else you would validate what's actually going on so that people can say, this is a credible claim I'm making about my building. Because the worst thing that would happen would, you know, again, you have everybody saying different things. You can't compare, there's no apples to apples comparison, and you don't know who you can trust or who you can't. So the same as we look at, rankings on vehicles and on on appliances we buy because we don't want them to catch on fire, so they have to be UL listed. As a society, we take comfort in third party standards that we trust and know there's validity to, and it's the same for construction, right? I wouldn't get a UL listed vacuum if it hadn't actually been reviewed and tested and inspected to ensure that it wouldn't just catch on fire the next time it turned it on. And with buildings, it's the same thing, but as mentioned, you can't just send inspectors to like be on site the whole time. So you've gotta have a process in place that requires teams to provide you that type of information to give everybody peace of mind that what is said they're being done is actually being done. And to me, again, that goes into the value of getting a certification, whether it's LEED, whether it's BREAM, whether it's, you know, any of the others that are actually third party verified. Because the alternative is people just say they're doing stuff and you, you gotta take it at face value, which, as much as I'd love to say we, we could I've been involved in a lot of projects and they'd say, Hey, we're gonna get LEED certified. And that it's then, okay, well we had budget changes, so we're gonna build to LEED standards, but not actually get certified. Then all of a sudden, nobody cares if this paint is toxic. Nobody cares if the the toilets are low flow or dual flush. All of those things just start to, to fall off the scope as soon as you take that third party verification away from it.

Tom Raftery: 23:53

So obviously we're getting close now to 2030. How do you see the industry doing on its sustainability goals for 2030? Are we behind? Are we ahead? Are we kind of patchy or somewhere in the middle?

Tommy Linstroth: 24:08

I'd say we're somewhere in the middle. I think you've got some, some leaders out there who are making strides and are fully committed to this. I think we've got a lot more people who have are still taking those first steps and that, you know, sometimes you can be overwhelmed with the perceived complexity around this and so to say we're gonna get to, a 2030 goal or a 2040 goal if you don't know where you are today. So I think there's still an awful lot of benchmarking that's required to start that journey. And I think there's just a lot of paralysis by analysis and saying like, oh my gosh, I have to review all of these things, I just, I can't even get started. And so our guidance is always take that first step. Like, don't compare yourself to what somebody who's been doing this for 20 years, you, you gotta do. Anything is better than nothing. Let's start identifying what some of those things are. I was just looking at I can't remember which golf tournament it was like the US Open. They already know where the US Open is gonna be played in 2049. They have that golf course identified in, booked 24 years from now. They know where that golf course is gonna be and we have 2040 goals. But we don't know how the heck we're gonna get there because we're not taking that time to, to, to start to plan and to measure. So, you know, we can't say, we don't as humans think that long because we know where the US open in 2049 is gonna be like, let's apply that to our own sustainability efforts. Where do we want to be in 2040? And then what does it take to get there? Where are we today? What's the delta? And then you build an incremental roadmap. And none of this is gonna happen overnight. But if you don't start somewhere. The perfect is the enemy of the good. If you wanna say, well, we need to have a hundred out of a hundred things lined up before we want to get going, you're gonna be here a while, so let's now get three things lined up. Let's just get going

Tom Raftery: 25:47

Hmm.

Tommy Linstroth: 25:47

let's just start making progress.'Cause it's really, you know, it's the, it's the only way we're gonna get to any of those goals.

Tom Raftery: 25:53

Sure. And where do you see genuine momentum taking place?

Tommy Linstroth: 25:57

I see just a lot of continued momentum in the building sector. You know, I think we work with the contractors, and they wanna do this, they just don't wanna have to figure it out. I think I see a lot of positivity around this. We've spent 20 years making it just too challenging. Like, nobody I've ever talked to would say, nah, I don't want to, I don't want to do that. If we just tell 'em, just tell me what to do. Right? Like, don't make me me be the, material scientist that has to discern again, a hundred parts per billion versus a million for the ceiling tile. Like, just tell me what ceiling tile to use. And I will happily procure that with our subs and we'll, we will use the best that we can use. But it goes back to the, the designers and the amount of time that they need to spend to slog through this. And are their clients paying them to do that? Or are their clients saying, you know, we need to do this as, as fast and as cheap as possible. So there's a bit of a breakdown in the processes we need to ultimately get there. But I do see just, I continue to see positivity and, with the falling costs of renewables, it's like, it makes me happier to see when I put solar on my house, you know, when I built it 15 years ago versus when I can see what some people are putting it up for today. I'm like. Darn it. I kind of missed that. But I've also had, you know, clean energy for the last 12 years. But it, that, that, that is driving, driving hope in from the innovation side of things. And I think as this information just becomes more digestible, I mean, we look at, you know, again, the embodied carbon of, the concrete. Great. It's a huge impact in construction. But wouldn't it be great if I was walking into the mall and I'm gonna decide between shirt A and shirt B, and I have the consumer transparency that now I can make that educated choice. To me that's a huge thing, whether people do it or not, right? That's still tough. But when LEED Version four came out, they introduced environmental product declarations and everybody was like, what the heck are these things? These massive 30 page documents. Manufacturers didn't have 'em. Nobody had 'em. Now there's tens of thousands of 'em. And you can look at them and you can say, well, here's what it takes to make this product. And here, and again, nobody's gonna go read the 30 page document before they buy that t-shirt, but if there's a little eco label that said. Same as our buildings. This is grade A, this is grade F. So that consumers can make those choices. I think it's the same as contractors. They, they wanna do the right thing. Like they would love to pick the lower carbon option, but are they gonna go spend hours researching it when they just want to go buy a shirt that looks nice? No. So how do we continue to just democratise this information so that we can make the right choice by making it the easy choice? And to me, that is, what we're trying to solve and that's how we really continue to accelerate moving this forward.

Tom Raftery: 28:31

And what are the big things that construction companies need to do to make a building LEED Five compliant?

Tommy Linstroth: 28:40

It used to be you could just design it and you could build it and you could kind of fall your way into it. It really does take a much more integrated approach now. Just the, the requirements are so intense. Again, if you're a builder and they say, Hey, we need to reduce embodied carbon by 20%. Great. Well, were you involved in the design of that building? Like did you have input into, are we using mass timber versus structural steel because hey, that's a, big difference, right? So I think it's gotten more challenging to make decisions in isolation, for the better. Like you need to have everybody at the table because you can't just, you know, make these decisions at the end. Or it becomes just a, a hope, a wishful thinking and an accounting of saying, Hey, how do we go back and we try and count our kilograms of carbon. So to me it drives more collaboration to really come up with ultimately. What are gonna be better solutions? And it's, again, carbon is interwoven through so many facets of the new rating system that again, you can't just, stumble into it. And you, you might right, but if you really, if you wanna ensure you're hitting those goals especially Platinum, they, they've now elevated. To get to LEED Platinum, you've really gotta drive sustainability into the building. There are certain, you know, you, there's gotta be super energy efficient, it's gotta have renewables, it's gotta have really low embodied carbon. So you don't just luck into that. You don't just say, Hey, we're gonna get clo. Oh, we're at gold. Let's try and get a couple more points. You know, it's too late in that process. So it just requires a little bit more upfront planning, which is a good thing and a more integrated approach, which is also a good thing. Because the, table stakes have just gotten raised.

Tom Raftery: 30:17

And if we're looking at two very similar buildings side by side that you want to construct one to LEED Five Platinum and one without, what's cost differential Are we looking at between the two?

Tommy Linstroth: 30:32

It's a little bit new, so I can't tell you that offhand. I mean, typically, you know, would, I would go and say, you can build a LEED or a LEED Silver building for whatever you're building. A common, you know, a code compliant building for, to me, it always came down to trade-offs, right? It's like, well, do you have to have marble floors and gold, tiled ceilings or can you put that into energy efficiency? So for LEED, LEED silver, it, to me it has always come down to trade-offs. Like we built the first LEED affordable housing in the state of Georgia and we'd really used that with the development company I worked for Malaver back, back 20 years ago. And it was really demonstrating if we can build what is the most cost effective housing you can possibly build, and we can get LEED gold and LEED Platinum, which we did, right? Why could you not be doing this on every single house? And so I still feel that that same way, if you put the thought in the planning and you're not just trying to build the cheapest, barely legal thing that you could get approved, you could still do so and get some energy efficiency. I think with the new version because you do need to have things like hyper efficiency and renewables, which no code would make you do, that you are saying yes. I mean, that costs more, it costs more to put solar panels on the building than to not put 'em on. Right? Like, that's not, nobody can argue that fact. But you're choosing to do those obviously because you see an ROI down the road, so there are things you have to do above and beyond to, to hit Platinum and higher levels of sustainability that, pay dividends down the road. But again, you're comparing that to the cheapest code compliant. And code compliant means barely legal like you ought be on that. Like, oh my gosh, this building was constructed to the point where like it just got approved. You know, that's kind of building you wanna go in and occupy and, you know, bring your family to live in, that's the decision you make. Or do you want to be in a high performance, healthy building that's, perhaps another decision you can make.

Tom Raftery: 32:23

Okay. And looking forward then, what trends or shifts do you expect to define the next phase of green building? Let's say version six in 2030, or version seven in 2035? Would it be materials, data, policy, culture, something else entirely?

Tommy Linstroth: 32:41

Sure. Tough to know in five years. This world changes so quickly, but what I would see is this, again, this first iteration of LEED Version Five has a big focus on embodied carbon. How it always starts with a lot of these is really, it's an assessment of what are we actually putting in our buildings today. And yes, there's goals to reduce it, but it takes manufacturers having data available on all of these products, and right now it's a small subset of these products that have it. So what I see is that this is driving the market much like I said, we didn't have environmental product declarations 15 years ago when LEED Version four came out. Now we've got tens of thousands. I think by 2030 we'll have hundreds of thousands, and in then it really allows us to start making those informed decisions of can we be doing with the design and construction of these buildings? Because if we're handicapped by a limited dataset, again, better than nothing, let's start going, let's start auditing, let's start accounting for what materials are going to our building and start seeing some low hanging fruit. But it's like if we have that tag for every product and every material coming into our building in the next five years, which we certainly could. And it's in a format that designers and builders can make those decisions easily without having to spend hundreds of hours of research. And I think with AI we will definitely start to get there, you know, within that five years. So to me, we'll really start seeing the advanced decarbonisation of buildings and embodied carbon because that data will be commonly available. You won't need to have some super complex modeling software. You're not gonna have to go through eight layers of bureaucracy to try and discern, that data point from this 50 page scientific document. You'll just have it and it'll be built in and we'll be able to really quickly and easily drive low carbon strategies into our buildings.

Tom Raftery: 34:24

And you mentioned AI and tech there. Do you, how do you see tech shaping how, I dunno, project teams meet sustainability requirements over the next decade, for example, or not just for LEED, but for all emerging certifications?

Tommy Linstroth: 34:38

I think it just, again, democratises it where you don't have to be an expert and you can just ask ChatGPt, right? Like, how do I do this where, what do I do for this? And it's gonna just make that information so much more readily available. I mean, we started the conversation with, everybody wants to do this, they just don't know how. With some of this AI stuff, it can transfer that information really quickly and that it's learning what we see interesting on the design side is it, it's learning from previous designs that you're, if you're implementing it as an architecture firm, it's like, all right, I don't have to redo this every time. What really worked from thousands of past designs and how do we incorporate that into our new design? So I think it'll allow us to more efficiently and effectively design and construct these buildings with information that is super readily available. Now, hopefully that offsets, you know, the huge negative impact that all these data centers and the energy and water that they're taking up here. So hopefully we can, work to solve that problem too.'cause you know, obviously the, the more we're adopting and incorporating AI there's a very real environmental impact to that as we're throwing up these million square foot data centers in, the US water scarce areas, and some other challenges that we're gonna have. But hopefully, that's a mean to an end and that we'll get a lot more positive outcome than some of these perhaps very localised negative impacts might be.

Tom Raftery: 35:57

And for people listening who want to accelerate decarbonisation in the built environment, what's the first meaningful step that they can take?

Tommy Linstroth: 36:06

The first meaningful step they can take. Well, I'd say continue to, educate yourself. And we've got a ton of free resources on all of this on our website, which is get green badger.com. But again, back to, you know, we need to make it easy for consumers and people that aren't, living, breathing this. How do, how do we make it easy? And so let's start thinking of the low hanging fruit that we can incorporate into our own homes and our own lives, whether it's as anytime a light goes out, we can put in a more efficient light, right? It's, it's pretty easy. You can go buy a ream of paper and make sure you're picking the one that's 50% recycled versus virgin material. So there's a lot of low hanging fruit just in our own day-to-day life. Some of my employees, they do some easy things like, Hey, I'm gonna set a shower timer, so I'm not, trying to do what my kids do, which is take a 20 minute shower, I gotta go in there and like, you know, turn the water to cold to get 'em outta there. So, there's a ton of things we can incorporate into our, own life to make sure we're not just, you know, trying to pass the buck and, wait for somebody else to come up with a solution.

Tom Raftery: 37:03

And I'm curious, is there any kind of part of sustainable construction that you think is still underrated or misunderstood and maybe even where there's a big upside if we get it right.

Tommy Linstroth: 37:15

A lot of the prefabrication and mobile modular construction, it just, it's cuts waste so significantly and it allows you to get it just right versus, trying to do things 30 feet tall up on a, job site. So I think there's a lot of opportunity in that and the, just the advances we're seeing in some of the renewable energy options and alternatives that are out there. You combine those efficient modular systems with some high efficiency mechanical equipment and renewables, and it's like you can start just cranking out sustainable buildings here faster, more efficiently, less wastefully.

Tom Raftery: 37:52

Makes sense. Makes sense. Left field question for you so Tommy, if you could have any person or character, alive or dead, real or fictional as a champion for sustainable buildings, who would it be and why?

Tommy Linstroth: 38:08

Oof. That is a tough question. And without, without being able to think about this, the one that'll come to the top of my head, I'm gonna go with Liverpool's former manager, Jurgen Klopp, because Jurgen Klopp has the ability to communicate, to show empathy, to unite people, to bring people together, and to again, message very well. And if I could, you know, if I could rope Jurgen into being an ambassador of sustainability. Like he's an ambassador for so many other positive outcomes in the communities that he impacts. You know, I, I'd sign him up today. Now, if you gave me a little more time of anybody living or dead, I'd prob I might have a different answer, but I'd, I'd also be very happy to have Mr. Klopp as the ambassador for sustainability.

Tom Raftery: 38:50

It was also real or fictional, so you could have gone for Ted Lasso, but I'll take Jurgen Klopp!.

Tommy Linstroth: 38:54

That is true.

Tom Raftery: 38:57

Great. Great. Okay, Tommy we are coming towards the end of the podcast now. Is there any question that I didn't ask that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't covered that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Tommy Linstroth: 39:09

I don't think so. I mean, I, I appreciate the questions and the dialogue. I mean, we've covered a lot of what's out there, what people can do with themselves. Like, again, if the, of the lay person can understand this a little bit better, the industry people, I think I've, I've appreciated the opportunity here.

Tom Raftery: 39:24

Great. Fantastic. Okay. If people would like to know more about yourself, Tommy, or any things that we discussed on the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Tommy Linstroth: 39:33

Sure the best place would just start with our website, get green badger.com or they can find us on the usual socials. And the LinkedIn is Green Badger. Get Green Badger on most of the other socials.

Tom Raftery: 39:46

Fantastic. Great. Tommy, that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Tommy Linstroth: 39:50

Thank you Tom, so much for having me.

Tom Raftery: 39:53

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.