Seven and a half years ago, The New Yorker's Hendrick Hertzberg greeted the arrival of the short-lived, pretty thoroughly noxious neoconservative broadsheet The New York Sun with a gracious invocation of an E.B. White quote on the old (and equally noxious) New York Sun's demise. White bemoaned the loss of "a voice in the choir," Hertzberg welcomed the addition of another one. What that notional voice was saying -- or, in the case of the short-lived Sun reboot, sneeringly insinuating -- was less important than the fact that said voice was there to be heard. It's unfair to compare Building Energy Quotient, the new green building rating system devised by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), to the New York Sun. This because The Sun was terrible, and Building EQ looks, on its face, to be pretty good.