The New Trophy Home, Small and Ecological

[groovedaddy]

For the high-profile crowd that turned out to celebrate a new home in Venice, Calif., the attraction wasn’t just the company and the architectural detail. The house boasted the builders’ equivalent of a three-star Michelin rating: a LEED platinum certificate.

The actors John Cusack and Pierce Brosnan, with his wife, Keely Shaye Smith, a journalist, came last fall to see a house that the builders promised would “emit no harmful gases into the atmosphere,” “produce its own energy” and incorporate recycled materials, from concrete to countertops.

Behind the scenes were Tom Schey, a homebuilder in Santa Monica, and his business partner, Kelly Meyer, an environmentalist whose husband, Ron, is the president of Universal Studios. Ms. Meyer said their goal was to show that something energy-conscious “doesn’t have to look as if you got it off the bottom shelf of a health-food store.”

“It doesn’t have to smell like hemp,” she said.

That was probably a good thing. The four-bedroom house was for sale, with a $2.8 million asking price.

Its rating was built into that price. LEED — an acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is the hot designer label, and platinum is the badge of honor — the top classification given by the U.S. Green Building Council. “There’s kind of a green pride, like driving a Prius,” said Brenden McEneaney, a green building adviser to the city of Santa Monica, adding, “It’s spreading all over the place.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/us/22leed.html?th&emc=th

[Javaman]

1. “It’s spreading all over the place.” at 2.8 million, I doubt that. nt

[phantom power]

2. Reminds me of "mass produced" hydrogen cars priced like a Ferrari.

I can't recall the last time I noticed a Ferrari on the road. Their mass must not be very large.

[NNadir]

3. It it's good for the mass of millionaires, it's ecological.

I may have this wrong, but I recall reading somewhere that the richest 1% of the world owns 50% of the world's resources.

The theory that only millionaire stuff counts gets a lot of respect here and elsewhere, not from me necessarily, but from a number of seld described "thinkers."

[phantom power]

4. On that subject, I came to a realization...

which is that expensive "limousine liberal" solutions aren't especially worth getting upset about.

One of two things will happen. Either a solution becomes affordable enough to be useful to most people, in which case everybody wins, or it remains unaffordable, in which case it stays marginal no matter how many puff pieces get published about it.

The only scenario that concerns me these days is if some solution becomes cheap, but has high environmental cost. Coal is killing us because it's both very cheap and very polluting.

[NNadir]

5. That would be true of millionaires weren't running around opposing options for those who are not

millionaires.

That is not the case however.

The anti-nuke movement was born in Lloyd's Neck, NY, one of the wealthiest enclaves in the world. LILCO had the unmitigated gall to suggest building a power plant - a nuclear power plant - where the rich folks live.