Will simply slapping a couple of solar
panels on this McMansion really cut it? |
I appreciate this mega-trade organization getting with the spirit of things, but I just have a feeling that the whole new home construction market is about to be “hybrid-ized”.
Please allow me to digress for a few paragraphs…
Last year I got a new set of golf clubs. Yes I know, not the most environmentally friendly sport, but I replace my divots, figuratively and literally. The irons were “hybrids” meaning they were weighted like traditional clubs but designed to look and feel more like a driver. This sort of design characteristic was supposed to help straighten my slice (hasn’t), improve accuracy (nope), and add a few yards to the swing (negative).
The clubs are very pretty though.
I didn’t buy them because they were branded “hybrid”, and actually found the marketing annoying. There was a time when a hybrid was a type of tomato, but today you can’t make hardly any purchasing decision without encountering the vaguely misleading term.
You can’t even watch television without having the word foisted upon you.
After the “big game” I saw former Pittsburgh Steeler and part-time movie star Terry Bradshaw hand Superbowl XLII superstar Eli Manning the keys to a brand new Cadillac Escalade hybrid.
“Super!” I thought, “Finally! How did we ever get by without a luxury hybrid SUV?”
The standard “pre-hybrid” Escalade motors around town to a dismal 12mpg (2WD model) but thanks to the wonders of modern technology these gasoholics will now get a 45 percent increase in efficiency. Quick someone call OPEC and tell them to quit pumping - fuel crisis averted!
I’m sold! Or rather will be, the new Escalades won’t be available to non-Superbowl MVPs until this fall. Or wait, maybe I’ll hold off and put my money on the 2009 GMC Sierra Hybrid, it’s just so hard to decide which beast I need to tow my golf cart. Just kidding, I'm a walker.
You can get hybrid shirts, hybrid extreme pants, hybrid shoes (hey I own a pair of those!), heck pretty much anything you want today could be considered hybrid.
Even a hybrid water heater.
And that leads to my particular area of understanding -- green building.
New home starts are sagging, production builder’s stock is flaccid, we’ve a ten-month supply of new homes sitting empty and potential buyers are starting to smell grim financial times in the air. Money’s getting harder to borrow and by all accounts the housing bubble burst last year. Lets face it, the industry is shanking like my five-iron shots (that means not doing well), so what can we expect from the marketing mavens at production home building companies?
Probably the same greenwashing we’ve seen from the big auto companies.
Anyone who knows anything about building a more environmentally responsible home will tell you that the first thing you should do when looking to reduce the carbon footprint of your new home is to reduce the foundation’s footprint. Smaller is always, always, always better. Less to heat, less to cool. Less materials used in construction, less materials used in maintenance. Less to light, less to clean. Build smaller and take the extra dough you would have spent on the media room, den, and four-car attached (heated) garage and beef up the insulation, get a more efficient HVAC system and put in a natural lighting fixtures.
But above all else, build smaller.
That’s not very sexy. That’s like buying a bicycle when you really want a Prius, or buying a Prius when you really want a Lincoln Navigator. If there’s one thing we know about the American consumer, we like things large, even if quality suffers.
So when faced with trying to sell the same tired old product, the next logical leap for our suffering new home market will be to slap a few photovoltaic panels on the roof, maybe install a little micro wind generator above the guest house and call the McMansion a “hybrid-home”.
Nice ring to it, eh?
All it takes is a little gumption in the ad department. Start pumping out the marketing materials that conjure images of living off the grid, mix in a few healthy hints of sky rocketing energy costs, then pluck the heart strings of climate change guilt with some pictures of polar bears. Slap a nifty logo on the side and there you go, a hybrid is born.
It will sell because people have legitimate concerns about the environment, energy prices, and an uncertain future. But a few bamboo floors and solar panels on the roof won’t do diddly for our planet. The truth is that you can create a zero-energy home that does generate enough power to support itself, but it isn’t easy. It’s expensive in start-up costs, you are still tied to the grid, and finding a production home builder willing to step-up and do it is dicey. At best a home buyer can try and find someone building a “high performance” home, but those brave souls are still too few and far between. We all want new homes to be state of the art, but don’t be fooled by the hype, we aren’t even close yet.
To be fair, no one has trotted out the “hybrid-home” as a serious marketing ploy, at least as far as I know. But the market is ripe for this sort of greenwashing and if we fall for it, we could easily slip into a type of hybrid-nation that perpetually hits the snooze button on climate change.
We need to fix our homes, new and existing, and we need to get serious about it now.
Maybe I’m just too sensitive. It could be that I’m just a little cynical about the whole over use of the word “hybrid” and shouldn’t worry so much. Maybe I’ll just vault over to the icebox for soda and think about it.
