Green House Gasbags: Conspicuous conservation is a huge waste of energy

In North Carolina, the owners of a 4,600-square-foot home that cost $1.2 million wanted it to be as "green" as possible, so they spent $120,000 on solar power. In Colorado, using recycled materials, an architecture professor built a 4,700-square-foot home that uses geothermal heating and cooling and was on the market recently for $930,000. And in Southern California, a husband-and-wife architect team who say that they "came of age during the '60s and '70s at U.C. Berkeley" also relied on recycled materials--in building a second home six hours from their primary residence.

By now these environmentally conscious "green" houses are a staple of home design magazines, where they are presented as exemplars of both good taste and good intentions. The Colorado house, for instance, has won awards from the state and the Colorado Renewable Energy Society and has appeared in the Washington Post and on Home and Garden TV.

The question, of course, is what on earth are all these people thinking? How "green" can huge and, in many cases, isolated houses be? Wouldn't it be better to risk traumatizing the children by squeezing into a 3,000-square-foot home, especially one close to shopping, schools and work? How many less affluent, less guilt-ridden Americans can afford to build such environmental show houses?

These houses aren't just ridiculous; they're monuments to sanctimony. If architecture is frozen music, these places are congealed piety, demonstrating with embarrassing concreteness the glaring hypocrisy of upper-class environmentalism. The sad thing is that, by pouring so much money into ostentatious eco-design, the people who built homes like this have purchased status at the cost of doing some real environmental good. Bear in mind that merely building a gigantic house consumes an enormous amount of energy and other resources, which is why it costs so much to do so. Situating a home all by itself on a large piece of land, far from the pre-existing community infrastructure, does not make it a model of environmentally conscious design. And having a second home--which takes nearly a day of driving to reach--is unlikely to make a dent in global warming.

Now, there's nothing wrong with wanting a large house, lots of privacy or a vacation home, but how can we pretend that these places exemplify some standard of eco-design that others should aspire to? In the first place, most people can't remotely afford it. Consider that Sim Van der Ryn, a California architect who pioneered environmentally conscious building, once designed an astonishing 15,000-square-foot "green" residence--a home, in other words, the size of three NBA basketball courts. More recently, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described an "environmentally responsible" house in Pennsylvania that made ample use of recycled materials--but exceeds 4,000 square feet in size, boasts an in-ground pool and sits in a 4.3-acre "woodland setting," where it is presumably nuzzled by squirrels and other grateful wildlife. The house's salient feature: a 45-foot observation tower, which must be useful as a refuge from thinking about the utility bills.

As a regular reader of the design press, I am sadly accustomed to articles about someone who has decided to airlift Brazilian ipe wood onto a remote corner of Tasmania for the construction of an environmentally correct house perched on a hillside in what until that very moment was virgin forest. But I have never seen a story about such a house built for a family of 12. On the contrary, it appears that small families, childless couples or couples whose kids are grown are the main perpetrators of these bloated ecological vanities, whose primary "green" quality is the envy that they must induce in other affluent people who would like to claim that they too live lightly upon the earth.

To put all this in perspective, consider that the average home built last year was roughly 2,400 square feet--that number been increasing year after year even though average household size has been shrinking. In most places, these new homes are erected in accordance with building codes that have grown vastly more environmentally conscious in the past 30 years

Homeowners who want to do even better can spend a little more for thicker walls, high-efficiency appliances, stingy heating and cooling, and advanced windows with energy-saving coatings and argon gas between the panes. Computerized thermostats, compact fluorescent bulbs and fuel-efficient cars also make sense, whether your goal is to save money, save the planet or reduce our dependence on imported oil, with all its geopolitical consequences.

Similarly, in building a house you could decide to spend a lot of time and money on environmental busywork--in the Colorado house, according to the Denver Post, "the cabinets and wall panels are made from sunflower plants and soy adhesives, particleboard is made from wheat straw, and drywall is made from pressed wastepaper." Or you could decide instead to go to Home Depot, which in addition to offering low prices claims to know the provenance of every piece of wood on its shelves. The chain also says that it is America's biggest seller of lumber certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

If you've taken these sensible steps toward living in a truly greenish house--or better yet, a condo, God forbid--you can use some of the ample money you saved in ways that are more likely to do some good. You could give it to a land conservancy, for instance, which will preserve open space by buying it outright. If you're worried about global warming, organizations such as carbonfund.org will use your money to reduce carbon emissions, however modestly, by subsidizing wind power, methane capture from landfills and other such ventures. Or you could simply house another family; just take the cost difference between the 4,500-square-foot enviro-palace and a comfortable house half its size and give the savings to an outfit like Habitat for Humanity.

Or you can just forget the whole thing and add on to your own place. But if you do, make sure to harvest all the social approbation you can, like the architect in Venice, Calif., who is described as "a staunch proponent of green design" by Alanna Stang and Christopher Hawthorne in an excerpt from their book "The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture." Squeezed like sardines into a mere 2,500 square feet, the architect and his family expanded their home to 4,400. The sustainably harvested wood, solar panels and parabolic collector to focus the sun's rays must have cost a fortune, but perhaps that's why they call it "green."

Source





HOORAY! WIND FARMERS QUITTING AUSTRALIA

Caused by a drought of subsidies

Wind farm projects worth billions of dollars are being scrapped by developers citing the federal Government's refusal to boost renewable energy targets. "We're quitting Australia," Energreen Wind business development director Alan Keller told The Weekend Australian yesterday. "That's the end of it for us." As the inaugural meeting of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate wrapped up in Sydney, industry leaders claimed wind farm projects worth between $10billion and $12billion were being lost to overseas markets. Mr Keller said four Energreen wind farms worth a total of $1.5billion that had state and local government approvals - at Box Hill and Ben Lomond in NSW, Burra in South Australia and Crows Nest in Queensland - were unlikely to proceed. He said his company had slashed staff numbers by 80 per cent in the past four months and he believed the $10million it had invested in preliminary work would be wasted.

Instead, Energreen is expanding projects in China and India - two of Australia's partners in the climate change initiative. "Unlike Australia, these countries are looking at up to 30-fold increases in their use of wind power," Mr Keller said. He said Canberra's refusal to increase its "mandatory renewable energy target" from the current 9500 gigawatt hours of electricity by 2020 meant that there was no future for wind farms in Australia because the target had already been met. He and other renewable energy industry leaders were invited to the Sydney conference, but as observers only - unlike the representatives from coal and other mineral-based companies, who were active participants.

"It is disappointing that the Government does not recognise that renewable energy is a cost-effective, important way of addressing these issues," Mr Keller said. "In Sydney, they were interested only in finding technical ways to reduce emissions. That's important, but it's not enough." Australian Wind Energy Association president Andrew Richards said MRET had only marginally increased Australia's use of renewable energy, with wind farms accounting for less than half of 1 per cent of energy use. "We need a further 5 per cent increase in MRET as a bare minimum," Mr Richards said. He said his company, Pacific Hydro, was reviewing plans for $1billion worth of wind farm projects in Victoria and South Australia. "It is very frustrating that we had the foundations for a really good industry and now it is drying up," he said.

Federal Energy Minister Ian Macfarlane said MRET provided the incentive for the wind energy industry to build a solid foundation after the target was adopted in 2001, adding there had been substantial expansion in the industry since then, and the Government did not believe it was necessary to increase MRET. Instead, it was providing other incentives such as the $25million earmarked for renewable energy projects after the Sydney meeting. "We believe in looking forward, not backwards," Mr Macfarlane said. "We see renewables as every bit as important as fossil fuels in the energy mix."

Wind power critics say although it is cleaner than coal-fired power, it costs twice as much to generate - costs that would be passed on to consumers in power bills - and that its huge turbines are intrusive.

Source




Climate change facts: This week's conference on global warming points to a practical way forward which will not wreck the economy

(An editorial from The Australian newspaper, Australia's national daily)

There was more theology than meteorology in the response of the environmental lobby to this week's inaugural meeting of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. Activists argued the meeting of ministers and business leaders was a talk-fest that will do nothing to force big polluting countries and companies to end their evil emissions of greenhouse gases. They did so in support of their old argument that Australia and the US should have signed the United Nations Kyoto Protocol on climate change and cut their energy use, or paid penalties.

The media coverage of the conference was something of a propaganda triumph for the environmental movement, mainly because much of it sounded like a Greenpeace press release. But some sensible voices have spoken out in favour of what in reality was a path breaking meeting. And what will puzzle the green lobby, and its mates in the media, who assume that anything involving government and business must be a capitalist conspiracy, is that the conference was endorsed by a Labor Party frontbencher -- a senior left-winger to boot! Yesterday The Australian exclusively reported Labor resources spokesman Martin Ferguson endorsing the Partnership. Demonstrating that at least some members of the Labor left do not take their ideological orders from Bob Brown, Mr Ferguson said the meeting had been a step towards developing cleaner, greener, energy technologies and properly involved business. He is quite right on all counts. The conference brought together Australia, the US, China, India, Japan and Korea. Between them, these countries account for around half the world's energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Australia is not a supporter of the Kyoto Pact because, as a major coal exporter Kyoto discriminates against us. Neither is the US. As developing countries China and India are exempt from its strictures and Japan and South Korea are major energy consumers. For anybody interested in global warming these are the essential six. And the outcome of the meeting, a commitment to invest in cleaner energy without crippling economic growth, makes sense.

But not according to the prophets of doom, for whom it is an article of green faith that the world's climate is changing for the worse, because coal-fired power plants pump greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Environmentalists blame Western consumers for this, especially Americans and Australians who they say are addicted to energy-intensive lifestyles. This is a bit rich given that while Australia's per capita production of greenhouse gasses is large, overall we are only responsible for 1.6 per cent of global emissions. And while environmental activists say science shows fossil fuels are responsible for a global warming crisis, which may be right, they could just as easily be wrong. It seems certain the world is warming, but no one knows how long the trend will continue, or why it is happening. Just this week scientists in Germany announced that plants, not power stations, emit anything up to 30 per cent of the world's methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Nor do green zealots explain how unilaterally reducing the right of nations to produce all the electricity they need from coal-fired power stations will do much overall good.

The skeptical environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg, argues global warming will continue, whatever humanity does, and for the world to comply with the cuts in greenhouse emissions required under Kyoto would cost $200 billion a year - enough to provide the most poor people on the planet with clean water and more education and health care than they have now. And it never appears to occur to those who denounce Australia for not adopting Kyoto that the green credentials of the agreement's European supporters are less doubtful than nonexistent. If there is anything environmental activists hate more than coal-fired power plants, it is nuclear energy. But Europe relies on nuclear power - France draws nearly 80 per cent of its electricity from 58 plants run on uranium. The Europeans like Kyoto because it flicked responsibility for greenhouse gas containment onto the developing world and coal-rich countries such as Australia.

Curiously, none of this is ever mentioned by environmental opportunists in organisations such as Greenpeace who make the running on the need to cut energy outlays. This is because they are in the catastrophe business and use science as a selective source for points to push in their fund raising. Kyoto also meets their ideological preference for bureaucratic solutions imposed on private enterprise. Nor do they offer an alternative, other than cutting power consumption - even though we will not know until 2012 whether the Kyoto protocols have had any effect in signatory countries. Despite all the windy optimism, alternative energy cannot compete with coal-fired power stations, on grounds of either efficiency or economy. The only energy source that comes close to coal is nuclear power.

The reactionary response to the Asia-Pacific Partnership meeting this week demonstrates that support for Kyoto cloaks the green movement's real desire - to see capitalism stop succeeding. Extreme greens cannot bear to accept that our best chance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions will occur when free enterprise has incentives to implement solutions. While power providers and big electricity users will howl, we need a national carbon trading scheme, with permits bought and sold in the free market, as a means of meeting greenhouse reduction targets set by Canberra. And we need tax concessions for industries that develop new technologies to clean up power supplies. In the long term geo-sequestration, which buries carbon dioxide pumped from power plants, may be a solution. And research into technologies to clean the coal burned in electricity generators is already under way, including development of a power plant in Florida designed to deliver much lower emissions.

When the incentives exist business will use technology to find a way. For a century London was plagued by pollution that killed people. No longer. People now fish in the great lakes of North America which were once sludgy industrial swamps. And the idea that cars could emit much less pollution would have seemed impossible to environmental doomsayers 30 years ago. They would not have even conceived that commercial cars could run on batteries, with hydrogen power on the horizon. Whatever the extreme greens say, we can address global warming without adopting a medieval mindset that sees electricity as inimical to the environment. This week's meeting was a practical step forward by six nations whose legitimate energy requires continued use of coal - perhaps with more nuclear energy to follow. It worried environmental activists - because it showed up their messages of doom for what they are - hot air.






JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: FROGS, GLOBAL WARMING AND THE "NATURE" PROPAGANDA RAG

(Excerpts from World Climate Report, 11 January 2006)

I and my apparently few friends have been ragging the review process at Nature for some time, which was once the world's most prestigious science periodical for all subjects. While it still may be the best for certain biochemical and genetic topics, it surely has lost it on global warming.

My antennae went up on this one in 2003 when my colleague, Robert Davis, and I submitted a paper to Nature showing that, as our cities have warmed, heat-related mortality declined significantly as people adapted to the change. They declined to even send it out for review; but after it was accepted in International Journal of Biometeorology it was awarded "paper of the year" by the Climate Section of the Association of American Geographers. Something is clearly amiss.

Nowhere is that more clear than in a paper, "Widespread Amphibian Extinctions from Epidemic Disease Driven by Global Warming," by J. Alan Pounds, that appeared in their January 12 issue. We'll put it simply: with regard to global warming papers, the review process at Nature is dead. Gone. Kaput. As a concrete example, assume that Nature's editors had sent me this manuscript for peer-review. Here's what I would have responded.

"Thank you for asking for my professional opinion of the Pounds et al. manuscript. It suffers from a number of severe analytical problems, scientific overreaching, and clear political bias. Publishing this paper will severely harm the credibility of Nature.

The title of the manuscript, "Widespread Amphibian Extinctions from Epidemic Disease Driven by Global Warming" implies that the authors have proven a pervasive link between a large number of toad and frog extinctions and warming climate. They have done nothing of the sort.

The paper describes extinctions in Central and South America caused by fungal infection caused by a class of organism known as chytrids. The seminal paper describing these extinctions is from 2005, in another journal, Biotropica, published by La Marca et al. La Marca is the seventh author in the list of 14 listed on the Nature paper.

According to La Marca (2005), most of the toad and frog extinctions took place between 1984 and 1996 in the regions studied in the current paper by Pounds. This was shortly after the first discovery of the chytrid fungus in the region, which is described by Lips et al. in 2003 in the Journal of Herpetology. According to Daszak et al. (2003) in the journal Diversity and Distribution , the chytrid fungus was most likely introduced by humans, possibly by ecotourists and/or field researchers (Daszak et al., 1999).

It has been known nearly a half-century (see Charles Elton's 1958 book, The Ecology of Invasion by Animals and Plants) that the introduction of exotic species produces genetic pandemics over a broad range of climates. The concurrence of human introduction of the chytrid fungus and amphibian extinctions cannot be ignored.

Temperature changes observed over the period of disappearance (1984-1996) were on the order of a half-degree....

The climatic hypotheses in this paper are inconsistent, incomplete, and untested. (I presume that other reviewers have noticed this; if they have not, you need to question your selection of reviewers)....

In a previous Nature publication on amphibian extinction, Pounds et al. (1999) argued that warming was decreasing the frequency of mist, and that caused the species loss. They stated that it was a result of an increase in the elevation of the condensation level of local clouds. This would result in an increase in the daily temperature range (the opposite of what was documented in the recent manuscript) and is more likely to be associated with a decrease, rather than an increase, in total cloudiness. The current Pounds et al. (2006) explanation is seemingly in opposition to this initial explanation.

There are several other manifold problems with this manuscript, but I will finish with just one. The "Abstract" of a paper is supposed to succinctly summarize the scientific content of the paper. Here is the last sentence from Pounds et al.'s abstract: "With climate change promoting infections disease and eroding biodiversity, the urgency of reducing greenhouse-gas concentrations is now undeniable."

As you can see from the above, the current Pounds et al. manuscript produces no defense of that hypothesis. Further, there is no policy analysis whatsoever in the manuscript. There is clearly no way that this statement can remain in the abstract.

I presume that you will not publish this paper for the many reasons given above. If it does appear in Nature in anything close to its present form, the credibility of your journal may be damaged beyond repair."

***************************************

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************