Apr 12 2007
A tale of two houses: Which is greener? Hint: It is another inconvenient truth
Heard on the internet recently:
HOUSE # 1:
A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house all heated by gas. In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home.This house is not in a northern or Midwestern ’snow belt,’ either. It’s in the South.
HOUSE # 2:
Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university,this house incorporates every ‘green’ feature current home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F.) heats the house in winter and cools it in summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas, and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system.Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.
HOUSE # 1 (The 20 room energy guzzling mansion) is outside of Nashville, Tennessee . It is the abode of that renowned environmentalist Al Gore.
HOUSE # 2 (model eco-friendly house) is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas. Also known as ‘the Texas White House,’ it is the private residence of the President of the United States, George W. Bush.
So whose house is gentler on the environment?
Yet another story you WON’T hear on CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC or read about in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Indeed, for Mr. Gore, it’s truly ‘an inconvenient truth.’
Urban legend you say? Funny you should mention that. This is verified on Snopes:
Http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp
Claim: E-mail compares George W. Bush’s eco-friendly ranch with Al Gore’s energy-expending mansion.
Status: True.Origins: This e-mail comparison between the homes of President George W. Bush and former vice-president Al Gore began circulating on the Internet in March 2007 (shortly after the latter’s film on the global warming issue, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Academy Award as Best Documentary). Short and sweet, there’s a fair bit of truth to the e-mail: Al Gore’s Nashville mansion is something of the energy-gobbler the e-mail depicts, while President Bush’s Crawford ranch is more the model of responsible resource use the juxtaposition portrays it to be.
According to the Associated Press, the Gore’s 10,000 square foot Belle Meade residence consumes electricity at a rate of about 12 times the average for a typical house in Nashville (191,000 kwh versus 15,600 kwh). While there are mitigating factors (further discussed in our article about the Gore household’s energy use), this is still a surprising number, given that the residence is approximately four times the size of the average new American home.
The ranch home owned by George W. Bush in Crawford, Texas, (dubbed “the Texas White House”) was designed by Austin architect David Heymann, an associate dean for undergraduate programs at the University of Texas School of Architecture. While its precise size isn’t known, scuttlebutt has it that it’s about 4,000 square feet, all on one floor.
The ranch utilizes an efficient geothermal heating and cooling system that pumps ground water through a heat exchanger to warm the house in the winter and cool it in the summer, a system that expends roughly one-quarter the energy of a conventional heater/air-conditioner. Water used by the house is reclaimed, treated, and reused, and rainwater funnels from the home’s gutters into a large cistern, which holds the water for garden irrigation.
So much for those eco hating Republicans.
Yet another inconvenient truth Gore won’t tell you about.
6 Responses to “A tale of two houses: Which is greener? Hint: It is another inconvenient truth”
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Some facts inconveniently left out of here are –
* The Gore home is NOT an average home. It is four times larger than an average home, it is used as an office for both Al and Tipper, and this is a 70-year old home! They were not built energy efficient back then. HOWEVER –
* This year Gore was finally given the green light by city planners to install solar panels and other green additions at his mansion. Previously, town zoning laws did not permit residents of the upscale neighborhood to install solar energy technology because they were considered generators, and therefore, unsightly. Gore had been quietly protesting these laws for some years, but when an audit of his energy use surfaced in February he was raked over the coals, even though plans were underway to make his home more efficient and eco-friendly. Now he’s able to make green renovations in addition to the solar panels; he is also upgrading the furnace, windows, and light switches, as well as installing new floor radiant heat and solar vents, to improve the home’s energy standards
(ref: http://www.ecorazzi.com/?cat=21&paged=3)
* Gore pay a premium in order to get some of their electricity from Green sources. He purchases enough energy from renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and methane gas to balance 100 percent of his electricity use.
Sometimes when people don’t like the message — in this case that global warming is real — it’s convenient to attack the messenger. Should Gore work on the energy consumption level of his house? Yes, of course, and he IS doing so! Should the CURRENT energy consumption of his home obscure his efforts to alert the country and the world to an impending crisis, as this sniggering email tries to do? Of course not!
Individual homes aside, this email, which has been circulating for a while, is a scurrilous attempt to divert attention from the fact that Al Gore (as a private citizen without any responsibility to lead the world) has worked very hard to draw attention to and to find solutions for the problem of global warming. Meanwhile George Bush (as President of the greatest country on Earth and thus the person with the greatest responsibility of anyone on Earth to lead the world) has dragged his feet in getting our country to pay attention to this impending global crisis.
In response to Rick’s comments, the comparison is presented as such, and not an attack on Gore. It seems appropriate since he makes so many insinuations about the current administration in his lecture about Global Warming (an important topic that shouldn’t be politicized).
It is interesting that Bush would even have a green home, because the Gore camp wants us to believe that Bush and the Republicans could care less about the environment.
Thanks for the link on Gore’s updates. Here’s another source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18174408/ I guess the town decision makers saw the movie.
I am thrilled for both of them, happy to see more green homes, whoever lives or works in them!
Thought about this a little more. On the political side, if Gore can’t convince the locals where he lives to let him put solar panels on his home, how effective would he have been as President?
It seems pretty obvious that he is responding to criticism about his energy consumption with all of the “plans”. I applaud him for raising awareness of our energy consumption and environmental impact, but HE IS A POLITICIAN! The best way to lead is by example, and his news of green updates seems a little late to me.
See my blog for a clarification of these “facts”. Just because someone called ‘Snopes’ says its true doesn’t make it so. You need to actually understand the subject matter too.
It doesn’t matter what he’s trying to do now. the only reason he’s doing it is because he has been EXPOSED! An Inconvenient Truth is more or less a POLITICAL campaign and not a documentary. I mean he showed a futurama clip in the so called documentary. I mean come on, seriously, if you wanna get people to believe you, you don’t use cartoons!!! I think that he was trying to get people to laugh, so therefore they might like him. He deserves to be stripped of every award he’s won from this so called “documentary”. And i hope you liberals learn to know what the hell your talking about before you open your tree hugging, peace pus*y mouths.
and when we get some SCIENTIFIC PROOF that global warming is real, then you can say its real rick.