greenHo.ws

Right now the general building industry is seeing a lot of red, not green. With the housing markets in free fall, homeowners finding out that their mortgage debt exceeds the value of their house and with the foreclosure crisis continuing to grow it doesn’t look good. But even with all this bad news there is one bright spot in the building world, green homes. A recent survey by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), new home buyers would spend almost an additional $9,000 on a home with effective energy efficient features. Another consumer study that indicated that 85% of recent home buyers would choose one home over another because of energy efficiency features. The study also reported that buyers are willing to pay an average of $19,000 more for a green home.

Recently the NAHB marked the 10th anniversary of its National Green Building Conference before a record crowd of more than 1,200 attendees. At the meeting some of the pioneering green builders reflected on how they have gone from being “the people no one wanted to sit next to” to being “the most popular guys in the room.”

Given these signs it looks like more builders will be focusing on building “greener” new homes which should help everyone.

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It has been offered up that biofuels like ethanol will help create jobs and reduce the overall problem of global warming. While this may be true it could come at a cost greater then the help it offers.

A number of countries have jumped on the biofuels bandwagon in the past few years. The US Congress is developing a proposal that would grow biofuel production to 36 billion gallons by 2022 from the current 2012 mandate of 7.5 billion gallons. The European leaders are requiring that a minimum of 10% of fuels will have to come from biofuels by the year 2020. The trend is obvious.

This past Tuesday the United Nations released a major report on bioenergy. Among the positive statements about the benefits of biofuels there were also alarms raised about the negative impacts of biofuels. The report said “Unless new policies are enacted to protect threatened lands, secure socially acceptable land use, and steer bioenergy development in a sustainable direction overall, the environmental and social damage could in some cases outweigh the benefits,”

It also says that bioenergy represents an “extraordinary opportunity” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it warned that “rapid growth in liquid biofuel production will make substantial demands on the world’s land and water resources at a time when demand for both food and forest products is also rising rapidly.”

Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations’ World Food Program, said on the agency’s Web site Tuesday that the rising prices are “threatening to plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger,”

In addition to the UN report there was also an excellent paper written by the National Center for Public Policy Research titled “Thanks to Congress, Ethanol and Biofuel Mandates Cause Food Prices to Soar”. In the paper the author, Dana Joel Gattuso, writes that the redirection of food crops to biofuels is causing food prices to soar. It also stated that this is “drawing us into an ugly “food-versus-fuel” battle: “Any diversion of land from food or feed production to production of energy biomass will influence food prices from the start, as both compete for the same inputs.”

Does it come down to a fight between clean “renewable” fuel versus food? Do we lose either way? Let us know what you think.

The full UN report is available at esa.un.org/un-energy/pdf/susdev.Biofuels.FAO.pdf

The National Center for Public Policy Research paper is available at http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA564.html

April 22 is Earth Day (depending on which Earth Day you observe!).  I’m sure you have seen a number of news items about Earth Day and they go all across the board.  While I tend to question some of the articles due to their heavy doses of “green washing”, the overall trend is a good one.  Any time that we can get people to think about how to better the environment and reduce our consumption of resources it’s a good thing.  So please take some time out to talk to your friends and neighbors about green issues and see if you can help spread the work.

Have a Happy Earth Day!

I was reading back through some “old” green articles and came across one in the Wall Street Journal.  It was “Going ‘Green’ at Home Doesn’t Have to Cost a Fortune”.  The article by Lauren Baier Kim talks (minimally) about low cost ways to go green at home and cut your energy costs.  If the Wall Street Journal reading crowd is looking to save a few dollars by improving their energy efficiency, you know it must be impacting people across the board.  It’s a real quick read at Going ‘Green’ at Home Doesn’t Have to Cost a Fortune.

There is a very intriguing article in this week’s issue of Time magazine. The article by Michael Grunwald has a tagline of “Politicians and Big Business are pushing biofuels like corn-based ethanol as alternatives to oil. All they’re really doing is driving up food prices and making global warming worse – and you’re paying for it. Mr. Grunwald makes the argument that while ethanol is being hyped as the eco-friendly answer to our energy problems it really is increasing global warming, destroying forests and pushing food prices up.

Give it a read at Time and let us know what you think.

There are three paths we can follow to a greener country.  One of based on the "where have you been?" and "why haven’t you done more?" philosophy.  Another follows the path of denial by saying "what problem?"  And the third falls somewhere in between.

In many ways, the first two may do more harm than good.

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If you have ever been in a grocery store, I’m sure you have heard the question, “Paper or plastic?” Which one is the right choice? Well the short answer is neither! A better choice is a reusable bag. But that is not always possible or practical so if you have to choose, it appears that most evaluations prefer plastic over paper. To that end, there was a very good overview of the “bag war” on the MSNBC website today.  There covered, pretty fairly, both sides of the issue - paper or plastic. 

It’s worth a look, but remember – a reusable bag is the best choice!

Last week six homes were set on fire with three of them being destroyed in a new neighborhood in Woodinville Washington by what appears to be the Earth Liberation Front group. A sign with their initials was found at the scene, an official said. The 5-foot by 5-foot sign found at the scene read “Built Green? Nope BLACK! McMansions + RCD’s r not green. ELF” RCD means rural cluster development. The homes that were burned used “Built Green” standards such as water-pervious sidewalks, super-insulated walls and windows and products made with recycled materials, such as carpet pads.

The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) group, is a loosely organized collection of radical environmentalists that authorities say is responsible for other arsons in the Northwest.

ELF has been implicated in a string of arsons that investigators say were perpetrated from the mid-1990s to 2001. This included the Center for Urban Horticulture that was destroyed because the ELF activists mistakenly believed researchers there were genetically engineering trees.

To me, this is a gigantic perversion of environmentalism and the green movement. There were explosive devices found inside the four homes that were burned, presumably put there to injure any firefighters trying to battle the blazes. Kind of strange given that part of The ELF’s guidelines require that individuals or groups acting on its behalf “take all necessary precautions against harming any animal — human and nonhuman”^, it sure doesn’t sound like that to me.

Basically, their approach appears to be, destroy items that have already consumed resources and then release large amounts of pollutants into the environment all while endangering lives. Not really my idea of a green organization or even one I want associated with the word green.

Let us know what you think!

Global warming is “the greatest scam in history”! You may remember when John Coleman, the founder of The Weather Channel, made that comment a few months ago. Well, this week he was speaking at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change.

Coleman’s strategy for exposing what he calls “the fraud of global warming” is to sue those who sell carbon credits. This includes the firm, Generation Investment Management, that Al Gore helped found.  Coleman points out that this would make them prove in court the impacts and effects of carbon on global warming

Coleman said. “as the experts went to the witness stand and testified, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming.”

Coleman also claims that the Weather Channel is now a proponent of the global warming alarmism. In late 2006, The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen wrote in her blog that weathercasters that believe global warming can be explained by cyclical weather patterns and not human activity should be de-certification by the American Meteorological Society.

Let us hear what you think about this one!

After many weeks of encouragement, cajoling and even a little harassing from EcoDaddy, I have decided to finally give blogging a shot. This morning while commuting to work with my two EcoBoys in tow, I watched a well-groomed, twenty-something gentleman zoom passed us in his brand new BMW. The boys were excited by this sleek, speed machine. As they argued about whether the car more closely resembled Lightening McQueen or the Batmobile, we watched a plastic wrapper come flying from the driver’s side window. It was followed by a cigarette, a second and then third piece of plastic.

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This is a short post to offer an opinion on something that surprised me a lot today.  While wandering through Costco (buying in bulk to save time and energy getting to and from stores), I spotted a magazine with “Green” in the title.

I was surprised when it turned out to be Green Guide from National Geographic. 

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BusinessWeek posted an article today titled “The Greening of the U.S. Consumer.”  The premise of the article was interesting, given our focus at greenho.ws.  From this opinion leading magazine, I expected a positive analysis of how American consumers are changing their buying habits to purchase more environmentally friendly products.

I was surprised to find instead that the article instead suggested that going green is responsible for tanking the economy.

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The Energy Independence and Security Act was signed into law on 12/19/07. There are a couple of key items in that bill that should benefit all of us. Probably the biggest news item was the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standard being raised. The law sets the new target at 35 miles per gallon for the combined fleet of cars and light trucks by model and it has to be reached by the year 2020. Also included in the bill were provisions to raise the energy efficiency standards for a broad range of lights and appliances. This includes regular light bulbs and fluorescent lamps additionally efficiency standards were set for external power supplies, and the majority of major home appliances.

A somewhat controversial piece was the Renewable Fuel Standard.

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