In The LEED House MHM chronicled the history of the United States Green Building Council’s green building program called LEED. Though slow to catch-on in the beginning LEED is now considered the industry de facto standard for building green housing that is both measurable and verifiable.

Recently the National Association of Home Builders launched their own green building program in an apparent attempt to take some of the wind out of LEED’s sails. While green building can be beneficial it’s also proving to be very profitable for the USGBC and it doesn’t take much mental projection to see why the NAHB would want a piece of the pie.

After all, if you’re the leading voice for the building industry and aren’t involved in setting the standards for the most talked about topic in building today one could start to question what you’ve been up to instead.

In a coming feature article MHM will take an in-depth view of NAHB’s competing green standard and see how it compares to the already established LEED system. And just the fact that there will be two green building standards competing should be good news for house buyers - unless of course green standards degrade into marketing ploys for builders to exploit rather than a measure of better built sustainable houses for everyone.