Wed, Apr 04, 2007

Below I've included a recent email I received from a tough old Jarhead from my active duty days. . .
Semper Fi, Dennis. . . thanks for forwarding.

A couple of comments from the Ecorazzi, Feb 18th post:

• Now what if I told you this home is actually the [home of guy #2]? Yep, that is who owns this eco-friendly home. I found it very interesting that reading the articles about this home, which is environmentally responsible locally and globally, he is constantly criticized . . .
• I can’t wait for you to rail on [guy #1] for his mansions. . .
  -- [guy #1] and his wife [name deleted here] live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in [location deleted here], and a 4,000-square-foot home in [location deleted here]. (He also has a third home in [location deleted here].)
  -- According to the [location deleted here] Electric Service (NES) his [location deleted here] home consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year.

Subject: hypocrisy always stinks--but especially when it emanates from those who claim status as "standard bearer".

TALE OF TWO HOUSES

Here's a tale of two houses. Read the description of each, and then try to guess who its owner must be. Hint: One of the homes was built by one of most hated men alive today. The other belongs to a respected leader in the environmental movement.

Our first home is a great example of conspicuous consumption and wasted resources. It's a mansion in an upper-class suburb, with just under two dozen rooms and 8 bathrooms. Combined with its guest house, the home consumed 16,000 kWh per month in 2005. Then the movie, "An Inconvenient Truth", came out.. so how did this homeowner respond? In 2006 the energy usage rose above 18,000 kWh per month. This is over 20x the national average!

This home consumes more energy in 30 days than most US households do in a year and a half! In total, the owners paid nearly $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for this estate in 2006.

The owners of the home claim they offset their usage by purchasing carbon credits. The overly wealthy can pay a small (for them) fine, and then be allowed to break rules (such as saving energy) the common folk are supposed to obey. It may work, but it sets a bad example, and in the end holds poor people to a different, unfair standard. And it does little to stop pollution, because the person paying the carbon credits is only paying an extra fee -- they're not changing their habits.

By most accounts, this home is an example of how people in this climate-aware era SHOULD NOT be living.

Our second home is the polar opposite. Situated on a 1600 acre plot of hot, dry prairie land, it's a modest home of 4,000 square feet. Below the home is a network of pipes descending 300 feet into the earth, where the dirt and rock keep a constant temperature of 67 degrees. Pumping this water back up into the home helps to cool it during the summer, and to heat it during the winter. It's a closed network, so the water is simply recycled.

"Passively solar," the home is positioned to allow for maximum absorption of the sun's heat in winter. Thanks to the geothermal system, the home operates on a mere 25% of the electricity it might otherwise require. The geothermal system even heats the home's outdoor pool--so efficiently, in fact, that original plans for additional solar paneling were canceled.

Various gardens and grounds on the property are irrigated by a graywater system that channels shower, sink, toilet water and rainwater into enormous underground purifying tanks. And as icing on the cake, the walls of the home were built from cheap Luders limestone scrap material, quarried locally, that other homebuilders had thrown away.

And while conservation was kept in mind, these were also practical and financially-advantageous choices, for a hot and relatively-isolated region where water is scarce. Construction of the home started in 1999 and completed in 2001. It was financed privately -- no taxpayer dollars were spent in its construction.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a more illustrative model for market-driven sustainability. The home is a green utopia, and is so thoroughly off the grid that the green celebrity blog Ecorazzi, Feb 18th and the renewable energy web site Off-Grid, Feb 18th both recently devoted in-depth profiles to it.

The first property is a mansion in an upscale neighborhood. It consumes over twenty times the amount of energy as the average US household. Clearly, this is someone who does not wish to reduce consumption, or to save energy. It must be owned by an oil executive, or an energy-company tycoon. Or a media mogul. Perhaps the CEO of Halliburton - they're all supposed to be evil, right?

The second property, on the other hand, is an example of green building and sustainability. It definitely must be owned by a great environmental leader. A rich scientist, perhaps. Or the chairman of the National Resources Defense Council. Or of the EPA. Greenpeace, maybe.

Who'd you pick? You'd be surprised.

The first mansion, guzzling electricity and paying carbon-credit "indulgences" for it, is in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville, Tennessee. It belongs to Mr. Al Gore.

The second home, an example of green building and reduced energy consumption, is the western White House in Crawford, Texas. It belongs to President George W Bush.

Obviously, this message was NOT brought to you by the drive-by media.

• I’m going to bet it was not Bush who designated these eco-friendly additions but rather an architect. Such a person probably took note of the landscape and climate and designed a system that could efficiently survive drought and heat; without depending on electricity or fuel
  Well, yes, that’s what architects *do*. Had it not occurred to you that the person who hires the architect generally has major input and decision power over the final design (that would be that president guy)? It’s not like it was accidentally designed like that. . .
  Obviously Gore has more money than brains, because otherwise he would have hired an architect to design his place to be 'green' as well. Such a typical situation, though, and I see it from celebrity environmentalists all the time - preaching until they’re blue in the face about how the rest of us "... need to be more environmentally conscious," just so long as those same celebrities don’t actually have to affect their own lifestyle. It’s almost like they’re saying "please reduce your energy usage so I don’t have to."
• As a conservative, President Bush is more concerned with empowering and encouraging and modeling appropriate behavior, along with reducing our personal tax burdens, rather than in endlessly regulating and dictating people’s choices.
• It’s simple really... some people tell others how to live, some people lead by example. Did Al Gore really think nobody would find out about his hypocrisy? To think, someone this naive could’ve been President. Why didn’t he have his homes re-designed or implement simple green systems to "show off" to his friends in the Media. He gets his platform and blows his opportunities. The true environmentalist should be livid with Al Gore, not defending him. Where is their outrage?