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Scott Adams On the Difficulty of Building a 'Green' Home
An anonymous reader writes "Scott Adams built himself a new house with the goal of making it as 'green' as possible, and detailed his experience for those interested in following in his missteps. Quoting: '... So the architect — and later your building engineer, too — each asks you to sign a document saying you won't sue them when beavers eat a load-bearing wall and your entire family is crushed by forest debris. You make the mistake of mentioning this arrangement to your family, and they leave you. But you are not deterred because you're saving the planet, damn it. You'll get a new family. A greener one. Your next hurdle is the local planning commission. They like to approve things that are similar to things they've approved before. To do otherwise is to risk unemployment. And the neighbors don't want to live next to a house that looks like a compost pile. But let's say, for the sake of this fascinating story, that everyone in the planning commission is heavily medicated with medical marijuana and they approve your project over the objections of all of your neighbors, except for the beavers, who are suspiciously flexible. Now you need a contractor who is willing to risk his career to build this cutting-edge structure. Good luck with that.'"
"Pioneers usually end up with arrows in their backs" I wish you all the best.
Aren't there better articles that aren't written by a litigious, unfunny cocksmack who fags up the comics world...
Apparently not. I found it quite humorous. It's nice to see some insight into a process like this from someone with a sense of humor and the ability to laugh at things that make him angry.
Now, go get a nice cup of cocoa, take off those grumpy pants and have a nap. Looks like someone needs a little downtime.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
You don't need a perfect high tech green house.
We could get a lot of bang......for very FEW bucks just using power strips, replacing incandescent light bulbs, drinking tap water and shopping with resuable backs.
Those things aren't enough, but if you could get large numbers of people doing them......and these things are cheap enough to get people to do them, it would be a huge impact
The natural conclusion being that we need to stop listening to the showman and start listening to the guy with the green home and the environmentally unsound public policy?
Must everything be partisan?
-josh
There was a TED talk that outlined recently why building from scratch is rarely "green". Especially when you're talking about building a big, opulent "green" mansion out in the middle of a posh suburb with a huge acreage.
People (especially the wealthy) may not want to hear it, but the greenest option is to renovate an existing structure in an urban center. Just like buying a used 1992 Honda is more "green" than buying a brand new Prius.
Building new may make you feel better about yourself, but it's definitely not the best option for the environment, by far.
The real travesty here is not recapturing all the hot air in Wash DC and heating much of the Eastern Seaboard with it.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Most people waste inordinate amounts of water, which takes resources to purify both before and after it's used, since any that isn't absorbed goes to run-off to the sewers, which needs to be treated in most areas. Then you get pesticide use, herbicide use, chemical fertilizers, gas-powered lawnmowers, etc. How the hell can you possibly think a conventional lawn is good for the environment? A properly cared-for garden? Kick-ass. Your average suburban lawn? Fucks up the environment.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
Both are easily avoided with a little forethought as to location and distance from main roads
Of course, if you build your green house out in the boonies, and then have to commute 50 miles to get to work every day, you probably haven't done the environment any favors.
Clearly the trick is to be a cartoonist, so you can work at home and send in your work product by email each day.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The absolute worst part here in Southern California is all of this lawn we've got. They use some Norman Rockwell grade grass that looks exactly like what you expect grass to look like, but is a bitchass to maintain. It has to be watered literally every day, and if the Santa Ana winds (dry and hot and fast) blow in unexpectedly, whole swathes of that stuff just go brown overnight and die. They replace it within a week most times, but the waste! Oh my God, the waste! And nobody ever walks on it, so all of that is useless.
What they really should do is plant those gorgeous native grasses everywhere - hillocks of green, literally shining (for some reason parts of it are silver from certain angles), doesn't need much watering (because it's native grass, it's used to how often it rains down here), doesn't die off if the weather changes unexpectedly, and grows in uneven little hills so people won't walk on it as much.
Basically, if companies didn't insist on having Norman Rockwell style lawns, we could use a shitload less water and things would look a lot nicer too.
The frustrating thing about reading Scott Adams' article, though, is just how many mistakes he made. Siting his house without planning for solar gain. Not hiring an experienced energy consultant. Not hiring people who knew what they were doing, basically. Building a green house is difficult--you have to do a lot of research. Unfortunately, very few builders know how to build one. But there are builders who do it for a living. So if you want a green house, and you don't want to build it yourself, hire one of *them*, not some builder who doesn't know anything about it and thinks it's a bad idea.
The whole sad saga of the attic fan was the worst of it. Has he never heard of a vented roof? A cupola to draw wind up, or a peak vent that does the same? Most green building techniques are just what everybody did before air conditioning was invented. Back when you couldn't cool a house with refrigeration, you *had* to make it energy-efficient, because the only thing cooling the house was going to be whatever passive environmental system you were able to come up with.
According to this Wired article, it takes 113 million BTUs to make a Prius: http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-06/ff_heresies_09usedcars
They claim that is about 1000 gallons of gasoline (not really willing to do the math myself, I'll accept it). They also argue that the smelting of the 30 lbs of nickel used for the batteries is very bad for the environment. Also, don't know one way or another, but it wouldn't surprise me.
For some reason you chose to compare a 1992 Honda wagon to a Prius. Well, when I say "for some reason" I meant, because it makes your argument look good. Since the parent just said 1992 Honda, I'll go with the Civic hatchback with manual transmission that gets 33/42 mpg for similar reasons.
So now the Honda is using 2790 gallons of fuel and the Prius (taking into consideration production costs) is using 3800.
Buying a used car (and not being stupid about it) *is* more energy efficient than buying a new car.
you're claiming that Obama set up the regulatory structure that lead to (I presume) the disaster in the Gulf?
I'm saying that he let the regulatory structure that was there wither
How? What did he do to reduce the quality of the regulation covering offshore drilling? Perhaps you believe that by not improving the regulation that this constitutes a whithering effect.
It's as much about what you don't do as what you do.
Are yes, you do. In that case, why make this a partisan argument against Barack Obama? Surely then you should attribute eight times more blame to the previous administration, given that they had eight years compared to Obama's one.
Actually George W Bush was more responsible for the incident because his administration had the opportunity to avert this problem and actively decided against implementing additional safety features. In 2003 the Minerals Management Service considered requiring remote controlled shut-off switches for drilling rigs. They decided against forcing them to install the devices because they cost too much.
Perhaps if they had gone the other way (against the wishes of big business) then this would have been just a workplace accident rather than a major environmental catastrophe.
As for Obama, he didn't have much time to think much about offshore drilling operations because he came into the presidency in the middle of the GFC. Or do you think he somehow caused that too?
People who tend to tell others how to live rarely live as such. Those who live right tend to not brag about it. You have the cynical conclusion. The natural conclusion is to live like the guy with the green home and ignore the guy in the mansion.
I would love to see a President with a sound environmental policy, however what one person declares as sound another dismisses as not enough. Bush did fine considering the history of our past Presidents. Some areas are flash points for one group or another and both will use such to disclaim any leader.
No, given what we know about the two men in question, I would invite the guy from Crawford over to dinner, more than likely the other guy wouldn't even deem to acknowledge the request.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
This has to be one of the stupidest things I've ever read. It's comparable in stupidity to the equally stupid far left commentators who blamed Bush for 9/11. I'm no fan of GWB, but blaming a man for a disaster than happened within a year or two of his taking office is just insane. It takes time to realign Federal bureaucracy. In the case of 9/11 the blame lies as much or more with Clinton, Bush Sr. and even Reagan as with GWB. More really, GWB *might* have improved the non-traditional intelligence community had he been given a chance (he probably wouldn't have, but it's moot since he wasn't given the opportunity). Same thing here. Obama inherited a broken regulatory system and hasn't had a chance to fix it (again, he may or may not have actually done so if the disaster hadn't happened, we'll never know now).
Presidents are responsible for the things that happen on their watch, certainly. In both cases the President took responsibility, and vowed to fix what was broken (success or failure not withstanding), but that doesn't mean it was the current President's fault. Being stuck with the bag doesn't make you a bank robber, though it makes you responsible for some of the consequences of the bank robbery.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.