How Green Was My McMansion

A recent story on NPR on a power company installing solar panels on its customers' homes and businesses was presumably intended as a glimpse of one utility's novel approach to cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions. The story began, however, with the most disturbing of anecdotes:

"When Sean Durkin built a 4,000-square-foot house in Charlotte, N.C., he wanted to install solar panels. But he gave up when he learned that it would cost about $40,000.

"We'd love to have the panels — if we could afford it — and be completely green," Durkin says. But given that his utility bill is only about $200 a month, he says "it made no sense."

Then he heard that his local electric company, Duke Energy, wants to install solar panels on hundreds of customers' roofs and vacant lots.

"If Duke could put them up and they're going to get a better deal with it, then at least I'm helping the cause, and that's what I wanted to do," Durkin says."

Yes, Sean Durkin apparently thinks he could be "helping the cause" if only he could afford solar panels on his 4000 square foot house. 4000 square feet!

Ok, clearly I could just end this post right there at the point where I snarfed out my coffee in disbelief upon hearing this tale of woe because what else do you need to know, right? There's been only about a majillion electrons spilled on the topic of green housing and grotesque overconsumption and general insanity that's been powering the US housing bubble. Nonetheless, I, as your intrepid blogger, will forge on because clearly Elizabeth Shogren, the reporter on this piece, and her editors at NPR did not feel the need to point out that if only Durkin had a teensy bit of sense, he'd be doing a hell of a lot more for The Cause if he'd built a reasonably sized home (and maybe would have had a bit of cash leftover to buy some solar panels himself.)

In fact, the US used to be a land of reasonably sized, though frankly still pretty darn large, homes. In 1970, the median new house in the US was 1385 sq feet, with a quarter of new homes still under 1200 sq feet in 1973. But by 2006, it was up to 2248, with 24 % over 3000 sq feet and only 4% under 1200. At the same time, the number of people per household, however, is dropping, down to 2.59 in 2000.

So, first of all, the per household consumption of energy for a 4000 sq foot house is 155.2 million BTU; for a home with between 1000-1500 sq feet, only 75.4, and for the range that the median new home falls in, 106.8. In other words, Durkin's house is consuming 45% more energy than the median new home and more than double that of a very reasonable living space of 1000-1500 sq feet. On top of that, a not-so-well insulated 1500 sq foot house is still better than a very well-insulated 3000 sq foot house. (And of course, an apartment in a multi-unit building is an even bigger winner: 60.2K BTU for a three+ bedroom apartment vs. 101.2K BTU for a three bedroom freestanding house.)

Sure, you say, but what crazy people could live as a family in a 1000 sq foot? Well, actually in Japan, the average home is about 1,020 sq feet, about the same as in Europe. Nonetheless, Europe, Japan, and the US all have roughly similar number of people per household, ranging from 2.1 to 3.1. In the US, though, even the median home size is a bloated 1795 sq feet.

And our gigundic houses correlate closely with our gigundic energy appetite, with the US per capita energy consumption, almost twice that of Japan and Germany. Our productivity doesn't quite make up for it either with US energy intensity (i.e. energy consumption per dollar of gross domestic product) exceeding theirs as well, 9113 BTU/$ for the US vs. 7021 for Germany, and 6539 for Japan.

When it comes down to it then, both Sean Durkin and NPR missed the point, stated quite nicely by Matthew Yglesias today:

"If you look at how people live in the United States, the real green individual is the poor person who lives in a small apartment, rides the bus to work, and consumes beef relatively sparingly. That guy’s environmental footprint is probably smaller in most ways than that of a prosperous person who goes out of his way to consume green products. [...] “to go green” on a social level would probably look very different from what an individual upper middle-class environmentally minded consumer’s personal efforts to do so look like."