Entelechy, I’d have thought the asterisk would have needed to be moved to the left a bit. :)

Kevin on June 13, 2007 at 12:13 AM

Good catch Kevin – I was wondering why it was held back for a few moments :) Of course, my head was spinning on these ‘global warming worriers’. They equate this their WoT, except that they can’t come up with the equivalent of decapitation.

Secondly, total mass carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is NOT an industrial event. NOX and carbon monoxide and other poisonous gases are, but NOT CO2. The global symbiosis of flora and fauna is still a far more massive contributor. And as has been recently reported, changes in global CO2 levels always FOLLOW changes in global mean temperature, and are not a cause. If you design a way to “scrub” the CO2 from buildings prior to it escaping into the free atmosphere, you will be depriving plant life of what it breathes.

What’s that you say? Today’s junk science “thinks” differently and…”No body expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

The Brits never miss a chance to build and dwell in substandard, tiny, cookie cutter developments while pointing a finger at Americans claiming we are wasteful.

My system has been functioning with very little upkeep for 27 years now. I get air temperatures inside the collector on hazy sunny days in the 90′s, and on bright January days that exceed 120 degrees. On cloudy days, it’s more like 65-70 degrees. At night, my entire south wall is a radiator.

While I was considering solar energy as a design criteria, I visited an experimental solar home in Minnesota designed and built by the University of Minnesota. This system used water as a medium (mine uses a trombe wall and air). “Grey water” from bathing was used to water the lawn and garden. There was no septic system as the toilet was a Clivus.

A Clivus is an indoor outhouse, but designed to keep the smell out (it worked, too). The kitchen sink had a chute into it to replace the traditional “garbage disposal.” In the basement, access doors allowed the occupants to shovel out the compost created by the natural movement of the waste into wheelbarrows for use on decorative plants and the lawn. That part wasn’t so pleasant, BTW.

And no, I don’t have a Clivus in my solar heated home — I drew the line at THAT innovation!

But the key feature of the home was the fact that it was an “earth home.” A home that was dug into a berm on the north side of the house that extended to the roof (which was planted in grass). The insulation R factor must have been in the 100′s!

Fans were used to circulate the air and exchange it with outside on a controlled rate, and even though we visited in the middle of January, when the outside temperature was 10 degrees below zero, the home was comfy, and livable, with a wood burning Ben Franklin potbellied stove supplying the only non-solar heat.

As an experimental home (circa 1979) the cost to duplicate it then would be very high. But I know of at least 2 “earth homes” in northern Illinois that are “dug in” (but with conventional roofs).

I would worry about radon gas, but in 1979, nobody really knew what radon was or if it was a hazard.

My house not only looks like, but is a modern, advanced architectural design (unlike the homes in the article) that is sided with rough-sawn cedar. Unless you are looking at the south wall (where the collector is), it looks like any other modern, elegant, cedar-sided home. Only the south wall gives it away and some people hardly even notice it.

The “state of the art” is there for new solar, extreme energy efficient homes. If you want one. The overall costs have come down dramatically in the years since I built for solar homes if it is designed from the get-go. And the payback is even quicker than for mine, as little as 18 months in some areas, depending on the degree-day and solar-day numbers.

Sorry about the preaching, but contrary to the impression that this article gave me, solar homes can be architectural delights, beautiful, modern, and comfortable.

Entelechy, I’d have thought the asterisk would have needed to be moved to the left a bit. :)

You’d think that those ‘engineers’ make it on a trip to America or to a conference of such sort…If they’d put that much energy into this, their world would be waaaaaaay less poluted shit*y, and much less complicated.

But these things cannot be done because of the environmentalist.

Yep, and just how did the damn environmentalists get so much damn power? All they have done is thwart progress and make jobs go away. Every business and home in the country should be powered by nuclear power. I should be able to heat my home with electic heat – supplied by nucleat power – at a fraction of the cost I pay for oil. We should have enough refineries to supply the entire world with refined petroleum products.

It’s insane. There is something seriously wrong with a human being, who would put the life of a freaking owl, ahead of one if it’s own kind.

Meanwhile, China just fired up another coal plant.

Kini on June 12, 2007 at 9:22 PM

We should too, to bring our electricity cost down. And we need to build at least a dozen new refineries because there is a very serious bottleneck in the processing of crude into gasoline in this country. But these things cannot be done because of the environmentalist. They are killing us. Without being about to use our energy resources we will become a third world country and that’s what they want.

Like Michael Barone says, global warming is the left’s counterpart to the war on terror. With the Blair era winding down in Britain, they’re starting to transition from one war to the other.

And they intend to win it.

As always I have to remind folks it’s much more than that:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-6473968,00.html

Tony Blair’s likely successor:

Chancellor Gordon Brown is seeking to regain the initiative on the environment with a call for a “new world order” to combat climate change.

And of course there’s this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=442150&in_page_id=1770

Homeowners who refuse to make their properties energy efficient will face financial penalties under drastic government plans to transform Britain into the world’s first ‘green’ economy.

In my state a bunch of kids successfully pushed for a law banning idling school buses!!! WTF!?

Don’t buy the “Well, even if you don’t buy “global warming”, what harm is there in slowing pollution” line, that’s not what this is about folks.

If you look at history, civilizations have often perished from demographic changes and cultural breakdowns. There really arent any examples of societies failing because of natural resource problems. To the extent that problem is encountered a society that is culturally intact can adapt using engineering and technology. Just look at New Orleans, hurricanes are not a recent invention. It was a cultural/civic disater.

Traditionally, the WHOLE comprises the PARTS, and the PARTS compose the WHOLE:

Good: Brits planning “eco-towns” comprising ugly….
Or: Brits planning “eco-towns” composed of ugly….

There is a perfectly good word “composed” that means the same thing as this newer meaning of “comprise”, which is the OPPOSITE meaning from the older one. That threatens to render the word completely meaningLESS, since the two meanings cancel each other out.

If you find yourself using the phrase “comprised of”, you’re almost certainly using the newer meaning that negates the old one. Most likely, you heard some pseudo-intellectual use the word, and you think it will make you smarter to use it too. Please stop destroying English.

NOTE: CRANKY OLD GUY doesn’t mind it when words gain new meanings, provided that those new meanings are not arguably the opposite of the existing meanings. By the way, something that agrees with other sources does not ‘jive’ with it, it ‘jibes’ with it. And we don’t get French Benefits.

This has been another rant from the CRANKY OLD GUY. We now return you to your regular programming.

I mean, it was a massive new home – complete with a sprinkler system that was activated by a passing satellite that could sense how dry the area was. Oh, but the water was (mostly) rainwater. They even had to seed the entire new lawn because they “Couldn’t find an organic sod farm”.

One of the highlights of the show was watching the laborers do all they work because they were all Mexican, and I kept thinking, dang, I wonder what their immigration status is.

If liberals ever take over completely, mankind will be extinct in short order.

I’d like to buy some land and open an organic sod farm now, and charge $250 a yard for my wonderful organic sod.

“Here, the air is replaced just once an hour.”

One solution begets more problems. If this occurs, they will start seeing people becoming sick from the stale air.

I was in Architecture school in the 70′s. This is recycled (no pun intended) design from that era. Solar collectors, thermal mass walls, low water scandinavian toilets, wind turbines. It all has been proposed before. Design and innovation costs money. One reason this didn’t take before was it was expensive to have an “eco-friendly” house. And frankly, I don’t want to hear a bunch of wind turbines whirling in my neighborhood. How many people have the interest or intellect to become building engineers and know when to switch from solar to wind energy to jumping back onto the collective grid. England’s weather is similar to the Pacific Northwest. I would be surprised if solar energy is a viable solution from November through March.

They don’t have to bother.

CO2 emissions are controllable with new technology (mentioned on NPR’s “Science Friday” two Fridays ago, by the scientist working on getting it out into use) that removes the gas from the air and fixes it on metal strips. Essentiallyt, huge louvred blinds, hung in remote areas, can “scrub” carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels.

Case closed.

profitsbeard on June 12, 2007 at 8:00 PM

Sorry profitsbeard, but that technology is no good. And isn’t because it doesn’t work, I’m sure it works fine. But that idea is no good because you cannot charge industries for carbon offsets if they are not putting any CO2 into the air.

You miss the point of the global warming scam, the idea is for it’s backers to make money, to do that you must sell carbon offsets or impose taxes based on your emissions. And trust me, even if you are able to scrub all of the CO2 that your industry produces, they will find some kind of emission to charge you for. If they are allow to charge you for the production of a harmless gas like CO2, the stuff you exhale, then they will be able to charge you for anything.

Maybe it would be better to fight this thing based on the fact that the globe is not warming and that CO2 is a harmless and indeed beneficial gas.

However, one crucial detail – the price – is still missing. The builders say it is too soon to estimate the cost of producing the design commercially.

So how much energy is expended to create these high tech homes? Wouldn’t a cheaper, smaller, one story home with double paned windows and decent insulation use a fraction of the building materials and have a lower lifetime energy cost to build and maintain?

I like some of the technical ideas in this house design. It’s also not objectionable-looking in the row-house configuration shown in the article. I don’t find the row-house photo to be any uglier than a typical modernist building; but that’s admittedly a low standard. Even Frank Lloyd Wright produced the lovable pile o’ concrete known as the Usonian house, so sometimes technical innovation takes a while to assume more pleasing form.

Yes, as a free-standing single-family house, it is regrettably butt-ugly.

The comments section has an amusing note from a guy who objects to the wood-frame construction. He wants a “proper brick house” in the traditional English style. I felt like posting a follow-up comment, warning him never to buy a vacation home in Orlando, Houston, Vegas, Phoenix, etc….