It’s usually the film stars you hear about, but the majority are simply rich people who have gotten the Green Fever.
They build huge homes with reflectors aimed at water towers and horizontal windmills to power the 10 guest bathroom jacuzis.
On the one hand, if rich people don’t start using these speciality items, nobody will, because the initial adopter price curve is so steep.
On the other hand, of course, if they just settled for an overpriced luxury flat overlooking Central Park then their carbon footprint would be reduced to near-normal.
Another argument in favor is that most of these people would have a regular McMansion if they couldn’t have a green McMansion. They don’t want to live in an overpriced luxury flat overlooking Central Park.
“Going green” isn’t an all-or-nothing thing, and it’s not going to appeal to many people if it is presented as one. If people think you have to live in a tiny walk-up apartment and use a bicycle to get around to be “green”, you’re not going to get many people doing that, and the overall effect on the environment will be small. But if you get lots of people to make some small change, the cumulative effect on the environment can be greater than the effect of a few people going totally green. It’s hard to sell people on the idea of moving into tiny apartments from large houses and giving up their cars. It’s much easier to convince a lot more of them to switch to more energy-efficient light bulbs or hybrid cars.
I’d have to give them the “lesser of evils” grade. We would ALL use less energy if we chose more modestly sized homes, and didn’t have an almost pathological need for more square footage and luxuries. Given human nature, though, this isn’t going to happen, so we’ll have to be satisfied with keeping the luxuries, just trying to make them a bit more Green than in years past.
What I don’t want to hear is smugness about how wonderful someone is because his 5 million dollar mansion uses the same amount of electricity as my home. As if he didn’t use way more energy to build his home as I’m going to use in the next 30 years.
Interesting point… Is the comparison valid? How much energy are you (the average homeowner with an average size home of average efficiency) going to use in the next 30 years? How many Joules are used in the building of a green mcmansion including the earth moving equipment, the cement mixers, pneumatic nail guns, the manufacturing of components (lumber mills, brick kilns), and the delivery of the components from the manufacturer to the build site? Not a straight forward calculation, but if anyone has a SWAG I would love to see it!
I have long had the same question about cars (not a hijack - hopefully a related question):
What is the carbon footprint of a new car? How much bad stuff is done to make a Prius, and how long until that is paid off thanks to the difference in mileage.
That’s not a fair question though because the people who would buy a new Prius because it’s green would just buy some other new car if a Prius wasn’t available.
Don’t forget to factor into these comparisons what it would take to build your ordinary non-eco car or house. As has been noted, the comparison here is not between the McMansion/Prius and nothing.
I’m a regular contributor to Treehugger.com and "Going Green" happens to be what I do for a living. Examining the carbon footprint of different things is very effective on several fronts, most importantly it helps people see what actually goes into EVERYTHING we do. For those of you who have alittle time [3 minutes] check this out: it the carbon footprint of a Cheeseburger. It’s kind of cool, but it illustrates something very poignant relating tho the OP. A simple cheeseburger has a carbon footprint, quite a heafty one, so a house has a carbon footprint that is exceptionally larger.
My wife and I are lucky, we have afforded ourselves a home that runs very efficiently on power from the sun, and we are a testing site for new geothermal heating equipment out behind the house. We live in Connecticut, in a cold winter the frost line doesn’t go much beyond a couple feet into the dirt in the meadow behind the house. The earth happens to be a fairly constant 55F. We signed up through a good friend of mine to be a test site for residential green energy from a new sustainable living cooperative for Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachussets. It’s going really well and we are running at roughly 68% off grid. For Connecticut that’s spectacular.
Back to the house, we opted when building the house to do some green things that would decrease the carbon footprint of the home we constructed. It’s not a small home to me, 5700 sqft with a greatroom with a vaulted ceiling, and before any of you sing fascist pig for the heating space, I have a small wind generator that powers our ceiling fans only. Which helps bring the hot air back down to the floor. [my design :)] Another thing we did, was we used only stone found on our property to construct the hearth. So all the stone is granite of varying grades of char in it. So it is a deep grey with flecks of pink and smoky colored mica. I like it…it took Mrs.P a little longer to like. The concrete we used to build it was from a local vendor, the lumber used was from Vermont 110 miles north of here. We used Cocoon insulation from U.S. GreenFiber it’s made from about 80 percent recycled newsprint plus about 20 percent ammonium sulfate and/or borate flame retardants.
Now this is not a McMansion in that it’s not 10,000 sqft for 2 people, but it is an efficient model for green building. It’s cost is comparable to the cost of an equal sized home on an equal sized lot…the labor came in when we had to get specialzed workers for almost every job. General Contractors for Green living are hard to find. It’s no suprise to some on the boards that I have a consulting business on the side as a Green Development Consultant. And Questions please feel free to email me. I like this OP, it’s thought provoking, something we all need to have a little more of, especially when we’re about to lose a large portion of an Antarctic Ice Shelf.
5,700 square feet? Holy hell.
I don’t care that you’re married, I’m married and that I’m not gay (and that you’re probably not either), but…
How you doing? 
I just passed my LEED exam last week! Woo-hoo–*#$@ test anyways.
But my sense is that depending upon ‘how green’ you wanted to be you can add a fair amount to the initial cost on a house, but if you look at it longer term it would balance itself out.
Some of the more interesting aspects (at least for me) is the concept of using rainwater or graywater for flushing toilets, etc. This requires initial output for storage tanks and dual piping, etc. But long term it will use less energy. So you would need to run an analysis on the long term vs short terms costs and determine if you have a net savings–ultimately you will though would be my guess.
LEED and being green are not new concepts, but the are gaining momentum and with that momentum comes research and product research and implementation. Many of the concepts have not had many years of implmentation and thus will have higher costs today, but a year or two or three from now those costs will be signficantly lower in my opinion.
Using Gray water is highly recommended! My wife and have one barrel on the downspout from our barn that we use for gardening, this is something I did not consider when floating for the original home design. I regret it! In Arizona we had a dolphin system for gray water that came with the home. it iwas nice.
Well, start with the fact that we’re probably paying for some of it in subsidies so maybe they could send us lowly folk a thank you note. I have no problem with it beyond the inefficiencies of solar cells. It’s just future landfill if it can’t be recycled. I’ve heard some of it is already recycled so maybe it won’t be so bad. I’m holding out for the solar cell paint that is being worked on. I would love the solar technology to be mated to a roof design that is more permanent than shingles (more future landfill).
Many of the items we take for granted for started out as luxury items so I see the trend as a good thing. It provides the financial backing for technology that might otherwise not make it to market.
Reminds me of an observation by Bill McKibben in one of his books (I think The Age of Missing Information) about what you’d have had to do if you were living in the preindustrial wilderness and all of a sudden wanted a hamburger: plant wheat for your bun, buy and walk home a cow, clear her a pasture, build a mill to grind your flour, a forge to make your butchering tools…you’d have basically had to break ground on several different infrastructures if you weren’t happy eating johnnycakes and roast squirrel. Food (snerk) for thought.
<Nitpick> Luxury flats overlook Hyde or Holland Park. Dwellings overlooking Central Park are usually referred to as luxury apartments. </Nitpick>
Re: <nitpick> I guess I was thinking of the one John Lennon had at the end. He called it a flat, but then he wasn’t a native Noo Yawker.
Flat’s = England / Appartment = USA. No?
This isn’t an email, because I thought I might not be the only one to wonder how your geothermal heating works.
Ah, a classic…
Current usage, San Francisco, apartment v. flat:
Walk out the front door.
If you are in a hallway, you just left an apartment.
If you are outside (or in a vestibule, etc.), you just left a flat.
So, at this time and place, they are very different things - not just local terminology.
Residential Loops, are not commonplace but they are gaining traction with-in the heating and cooling industry. Here is a great graphic and explination of what companies like WaterFurnace do. And how a geothermal closed loop system works.
Here’s another cite.
Facinating stuff, I just wish more people got into it. It’s not that* cost prohibative when you are building…however switching to it needs to be perfected I would assume.
Huh. I lived in the Bay Area, in apartments that under this system would be classed as flats, for six years, and I never heard them referred to as flats- they were always called apartments.
I could see a management company for an apartment complex calling the units flats, though. British English does have a certain cachet in the US, and I could see an apartment management company calling their units flats to make them sound more British and therefore classier.
I learned something here. I thought geothermal heating was heating using natural hot springs and things like that, so it could only be done in places like Iceland and Hawaii.