Not Just for Tree Huggers

Despite the free fall in housing prices nationwide, green homes are still red hot.

Daniel McGinn

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 12:35 PM ET Mar 8, 2008

Rob Moody didn’t set out to be a builder. After graduating from college with a biology major, he began work as an environmental-science teacher in Asheville, N.C. On weekends, though, he spent long hours fixing up the classic shingle-style home his family had owned for nearly a century. Then, after seven years in cinder-block classrooms, he decided to make a change. “My love for old houses fell together with my love for the environment,” says Moody, 34, who launched The EcoBuilders to construct environmentally friendly houses. Today Moody’s foremen drive pickup trucks that run on used grease from fast-food fryers. And whether he’s building new homes or renovating old ones, he insulates them to the hilt, uses sustainable materials and recycles so much debris that he requires only the smallest Dumpsters. Clients love the approach. “We doubled production last year, and we’ll probably double again this year,” Moody says.

The predominant color in the building industry right now is red, not green. America’s housing markets remain in free fall, as the foreclosure crisis continues and more homeowners discover their mortgage debt exceeds the value of their house. Last year the average home builder laid off a quarter of its employees; this year the industry estimates it will sell just 632,000 new homes, its lowest total since 1992. But amid this gloom, there’s buzz about consumers’ shifting demand toward “green homes”—and how builders with this expertise remain busy despite the bust. In a 2007 survey by the National Association of Home Builders, home buyers said they’d be willing to spend an additional $8,964 on a home if it could cut their utility bills. Throughout the industry, there’s a sense that consumers have finally reached a tipping point. “It’s taken almost as a fait accompli, that green building is where the market is headed,” says Michelle Moore, senior vice president at the U.S. Green Building Council.

For all the professed consumer interest, though, the average home buyer knows little about green building. That’s partly because it’s a broad concept with several components. The most obvious attribute is energy efficiency. For some buyers, that means investing big money in fancy geothermal or solar technologies—but more often it simply means being diligent about using good insulation, efficient appliances, superior windows and designing the house to take advantage of the sun. Green houses also conserve water, often by using specialized plumbing fixtures. For some builders, going green also means limiting waste, sometimes by using “panelized,” factory-built walls or recycling wood from older homes. Inside, green homes often feature sustainable materials, like countertops made from recycled glass.

For a public tired of stories about the latest health scare, green homes have another allure: they’re often healthier. Since these homes are built more tightly than drafty older homes, many builders install systems to bring in—and filter—fresh air. Green builders typically use paints that are low in volatile organic compounds, and avoid the carpeting, adhesives and varnishes that often give new homes their distinctive smell—and that have been associated with health problems. When George and Dorrie Sieburg hired Moody to remodel their Asheville bungalow in 2005, this approach was a big selling point. “At the time, we were pregnant, and we wanted to build as green as we could to make sure it was safe for our child,” says George, whose wife is expecting again.

As with many innovations, some of the biggest gains in efficiency come from using old-school materials that have been slow to catch on. Consider spray-on foam insulation, which fills and seals wall cavities better than the fiber glass used in most residential construction—but at twice the cost. As energy costs rise, however, more buyers are opting for it: sales of Icynene, the leading brand, grew 22 percent annually the past three years. When Jacob and Alecia Sessums added a master suite to their Asheville home, they opted for foam insulation, a multizone heating system and a superefficient tankless hot-water heater. As a result, their gas bill dropped from a high of $400 a month to $37. Says Alecia, 32: “For people in my generation, [going green] is the way you have to do it—there’s not a choice.”

For darker shades of green, homeowners typically take more-radical action. In Grapevine, Texas, the home Ross and Tami Bannister moved into last fall is so tight, “it’s built kind of like an ice chest,” says Ross, who marvels at how infrequently the heat kicks on even on the coldest days. While their house is filled with sustainable products, its most innovative functions involve water. Out back lies a 10,000-gallon tank that collects rainwater from their roof; the water is filtered and routed inside for household use. On the roof, solar panels heat their water. Ross says people are sometimes surprised to hear about the home’s advanced technology, since it’s hidden beneath the bones of a classic Texas farmhouse. “It wasn’t like we built some sort of George Jetson-looking future house,” Ross says. That’s partly why their custom builder, Chris Miles of GreenCraft Builders, fields five calls a week from prospective buyers.

The biggest energy-savers can still require big investments. A photovoltaic solar system, which generates a home’s electricity from the sun, can cost $40,000. Likewise, a geothermal system—which uses pipes to send water underground, where the heat stored by the earth’s subsurface is converted into energy to heat and cool the home—has long been a budget buster. But as energy costs rise, the return on investment does, too. Last fall, when Shirey Contracting remodeled Sean and Lynn Dillon’s home in North Bend, Wash., the couple spent $34,000 on a geothermal system. That’s more than twice the cost of an ordinary heating and cooling system, but Sean figures it will pay for itself in six years. Along the way, they’ll feel good about reducing their carbon footprint.

Builders are working hard to educate consumers about why such expenses can be worthwhile—and why a lot of green innovations can be done for relatively little money. New kinds of certifications will also help consumers understand the paybacks. In December, the U.S. Green Building Council began offering LEED certification (it stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) for homes; last month the National Association of Home Builders announced plans for its own green certification. Both use point systems that tally up a new home’s earth-friendly attributes and award different levels of certification. In theory, a certified home will be easier to resell down the line, but green-building advocates also hope that the new yardsticks will make consumers pay more attention, the same way Consumer Reports and J.D. Power and Associates rankings became big influences on car shoppers a generation ago. Says home-building consultant Sara Lamia: “People will see how the house they’re living in is costing them money, and it gives consumers a reason to buy a new home.”

At times such chatter about how a shift toward green building might lift this moribund industry sounds like so much wishful thinking. So far most of the biggest builders are experimenting with only the most basic green innovations (like using Energy Star appliances); most of the greenest builders do only a tiny number of custom homes. “The smaller you are, the more your numbers might mislead you to thinking this is what matters,” says Ivy Zelman, an industry researcher. Some environmentalists apparently believe builders are putting green labels on homes that aren’t really environmentally friendly—an attitude that appears to have motivated arsonists who torched a neighborhood of newly built trophy homes outside Seattle last week, leaving signs saying BUILT GREEN? NOPE BLACK!

It’s also apparent that some green innovations are used side by side with products that aren’t so earth-friendly. At the International Builders Show in Orlando last month, the plumbing company Kohler showed off ecominded low-flow shower heads and bathroom faucets—but across its booth, it also displayed gigantic water-hogging showers and whirlpool tubs nearly large enough to hold residents of Sea World. Likewise, if you build a green home in the exurbs but still drive an hour to work, has your carbon footprint really decreased? These are questions Danielle and John Arnett have considered. Next month they’ll break ground on a 4,600-square-foot home in Colleyville, Texas. They hope to include loads of green technologies—perhaps even solar panels and a wind turbine—but they’re still building a house that’s nearly twice the size of the average newly built U.S. home. They admit a smaller house would be greener, but in their neighborhood, where nearby homes range from 6,500 to 12,000 square feet, they say their new house will be downright cozy. “It sounds crazy … but it’s really, really relative,” says Danielle, who notes they reduced bedroom sizes in an attempt to downsize the design.

If there is a downside to this trend, it may be the growing number of green homeowners who’ll brag about low utility bills the way golfers boast of low golf scores. But for builder Rob Moody, whatever motivates people to desire better-built homes, he’s not complaining. “People know it’s good for their pocketbook, they know it’s good for the environment, and they like the badge,” says Moody, who was in New Orleans last week working with ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” on an earth-friendly project. Green homes may not spark the building industry’s recovery, but in a world whose energy problems aren’t going away, they certainly can’t hurt.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/120128

February 26, 2008

NEWS ANALYSIS

In Los Angeles, Oscar Statues Become a Popular Export

By DAVID CARR

LOS ANGELES — The morning after the Academy Awards dawned here with a realization: There will be a lot of gold leaving Los Angeles in the next few days.

Javier Bardem, Marion Cotillard, Daniel Day-Lewis and Tilda Swinton are each taking statues across the Atlantic. Oscars for art direction, makeup and costume design all went to people for whom the United States is a passport stamp.

And even some of the Americans were from far away: Joel and Ethan Coen, who generally come here only under duress, will be going back to their home in New York with three Oscars for their “No Country for Old Men,” which won for best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay. So will one of the movie’s producers, Scott Rudin, who joined them for his own victory lap onstage.

The libretto for Sunday night’s Academy Awards was written in many tongues, and even the melody that went with it carried a faraway tone. The lustrous industrial pedigree of Alan Mencken and Disney had three songs from “Enchanted” in the running, but all were trumped by a pair of footloose buskers, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, one Irish, one Czech, for “Falling Slowly” from “Once,” an Irish film that was made on a budget that might pay the craft services bill on a studio picture for a week.

On Monday, as it watched all the loot leave town, the industry that bestows it could not be blamed for asking the same question that Butch Cassidy put to the Sundance Kid about their relentless pursuers: “Who are these guys?” It was a decent-to-good evening inside the Kodak Theater: the academy and Jon Stewart shook off the conflict of the writers’ strike and were game to put on a conservative show. But a huge, throbbing mechanism of Los Angeles agents, producers, and corner-office folk went mostly unthanked and unrewarded.

For the last couple of years, Hollywood has managed to fend off several attempted kidnappings. Two years ago it looked as if a posse of small movies from the East Coast would leave town with their hands full, but “Crash” passed them all on the freeway: a Hollywood movie about Angeleno concerns. Last year, same thing: “The Departed” did exactly what you’d expect of a movie with Big Stars and Big Box Office, winning four Oscars, including best picture.

Not so this year. For the first time since 1964, when Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Peter Ustinov and Lila Kedrova captured all four best actor slots, American actors couldn’t get a seat at their own table. In a more curious twist — from which Ms. Cotillard was exempt in her twirl as Édith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose” — foreigners were awarded for inhabiting particularly American archetypes. Mr. Day-Lewis did not portray just a rising titan in “There Will Be Blood,” after all: his role was early American capitalism itself. Ms. Swinton was more contemporary in “Michael Clayton,” but it was an equally dark-hearted version of same. And Mr. Bardem won for a role in a movie based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, the Boswell of the American soul.

American actresses who were raised to think that impossible glamour and demure comportment were the surest routes to the top must have watched in amazement as Ms. Swinton was handed the crown. With a shock of spiky red hair; a rich, complicated private life; and a heavy dress that looked snipped from the stage curtain, Ms. Swinton, a consistently brilliant actress, seemed more like an ancient Druid than a movie star.

“It was a huge victory for the Celts,” she said, cradling her statue at the Governors Ball after the ceremony. “Spain, France, England, we all served as a reminder that it was Europeans that invented Hollywood in the first place.”

The Governors Ball after the Oscars ceremony is a gigantic industry tree house. No one comes for the food, although it was lavish and abundant. You show up, instead, to claim a place in the hierarchy and to check status. A quick walk around the room showed a democratic dispersal of hardware and congratulations given and received in all manner of accents and idioms.

Some of that international hegemony — or absence of parochialism, depending on your perspective — goes all the way to the top. Daniel Battsek, chief executive of Miramax, and Peter Rice, president of Fox Searchlight, are both British and both in the thick of things. This year Miramax had a piece of “No Country,” “There Will Be Blood,” and “Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” And Fox Searchlight may not have won the ultimate prize, but in each of the last two years it came up with movies — “Juno” and “Little Miss Sunshine” — that have made a lot of money and were also around for the Oscar dance.

At the Governors Ball, Sid Ganis, the president of the academy, seemed thrilled that he and his crew had acquitted themselves against the tough circumstance of a recently settled writers’ strike. He said he wasn’t about to overanalyze the results.

“It was a great reminder that we are an international organization, that we want to reflect the best in cinema from all over the world,” he said. “It would be nice to have a few Americans in there, but we are extremely proud of the academy’s choices.”

Which is interesting in itself. The academy has long been accused of a provincialism woven with leaden taste, but its members proved this year that they will vote for what they perceive to be great work, regardless of its lineage or commercial impact.

(Indeed, major studios really only hit it big in the tech categories, with “The Bourne Ultimatum” winning for sound editing and mixing, and film editing.)

The version of Hollywood that we all think of when we think of the Oscar show was mostly relegated to those who served as presenters. George Clooney — crown prince and class clown alike — was up for best actor but focused on his presenter duties, presenting 80 years of Oscar glory.

“I’m not going up there for an award today,” Mr. Clooney said on the red carpet before the show. “This is Daniel’s year.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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Liquid Gold

Ethanol is supposed to be good for the environment. But producing green fuel can cost a lot of water.

By Jim Moscou

NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE

Updated: 10:08 AM ET Feb 21, 2008

Mike Adamson remembers when water wasn’t such a problem. As a kid growing up on his family’s cattle feedlot along the Colorado-Kansas border, “you could dig a post hole and see water runnin’ in the bottom,” he recalls. Today, Adamson is 48 and in charge of the family business, Adamson Brothers and Sons Feedlot, a holding ranch for cattle as they go to market. And the water, he says, is disappearing. “The lakes are gone. The wetlands are gone.” In fact, Adamson adds, entire stretches of the nearby Republican River are gone.

In the arid regions of the American West, water has always been a precious, liquid gold. But in Adamson’s home of Yuma County, two hours east of Denver, the stakes just got higher. Thanks to the boom in ethanol production spurred by green-energy concerns, corn farmers in Yuma County–one of the top three corn-producing counties in the country–are enjoying a new prosperity.

But the green-fuel boom touted as a clean, eco-friendly alternative to gasoline is proving to have its own dirty costs. Growing corn demands lots of water, and, in Eastern Colorado, this means intensive irrigation from an already stressed water table, the great Ogallala aquifer. One sign of trouble: in just the past two decades, farmers tapping into the local aquifers have helped to shorten the North Fork of the Republican River, which starts in Yuma County, by 10 miles. The ethanol boom will only hasten the drop further, say scientist and engineers studying the aquifers. The region’s water shortage has pitted water-hungry farmers against one another. And lurking in the cornrows: lawsuits and interstate water squabbles could shut down Eastern Colorado’s estimated $500 million annual ethanol bonanza with the swing of a judge’s gavel. Collectively, “[ethanol] is clearly not sustainable,” says Jerald Schnoor, a professor of engineering at the University of Iowa and cochairman of an October 2007 National Research Council study for Congress that was critical of ethanol. “Production will have serious impacts in water-stressed regions.” And in Eastern Colorado, there’s lots of water stress.

Still, with so much money growing in the fields, the current problems haven’t stopped anyone on Colorado’s plains. “Finally, here’s the alternative market that farmers have been working toward for decades,” said Mark Sponsler, executive director of the Colorado Corn Growers Association. The state’s farmers planted a near record acreage of corn in 2007, up nearly 20 percent from the year before. It’s not hard to see why. After hovering around $2 a bushel for nearly 50 years, corn is trading at about $4.50 today. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has called for ethanol to displace 15 percent of the nation’s gasoline supply by 2015, double that by 2030. And Yuma is preparing. The state’s two ethanol plants have been built nearby in just the past few years, with a third on the way. “It sure is a good time,” says Byron Weathers, a farmer with 2,500 acres of corn. “It’s definitely been a big plus for our state. The whole nation, really.”

But the effort to keep the good times rolling locally has actually fueled a bitter Hatfield-vs.-McCoy atmosphere in these parts. “There’s definitely tension between families,” one long-time Yuma corn farmer said, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation. Here’s the trouble: eastern Colorado is painfully dry, but it sits on top of one of the world’s largest underground freshwater oceans–the Ogallala Aquifer, which stretches from Montana to New Mexico. Seepage from the Ogallala in eastern Colorado creates the headwaters for the North Fork of the Republican River, which flows past the Adamson family farm, and into Nebraska and Kansas. But before the Republican reaches the border, 4,000 groundwater wells tap the Ogallala, which depletes the river further and faster than rain or winter run-off can recharge it. Near Yuma, the water table has dropped more than 100 feet in the past few decades, drying out Adamson’s post holes.

In Yuma County, the battle is between farmers who irrigate 400,000 corn acres with groundwater against those who draw surface water from the river using drainage ditches, like Adamson. (Adamson uses the water to grow less-water intensive crops, like wheat, that he can feed to the cattle). As the wells draw down the water table, the river flow drops, too. So, when the valves are opened, the water barely trickles into irrigation ditches, like Adamson’s, whose family’s right to draw that water according to state law dates back to the 1800s. “We’re the canary in the coal mine,” Adamson said. If there’s little water in his ditches, the river is running low.

To be sure, scientists have been watching the depletion of the Ogallala for decades. Years of drought haven’t helped either. But the corn-based ethanol boom has added pressure, and money, to keep the tap on. So to save the river and their water, Adamson and a group of surface water-right holders sued in 2005 to shut off the wells. A hearing is set for June. If they win, hundreds, maybe thousands of groundwater wells irrigating corn could be shut off instantly. “It would devastate the economy,” says Doug Sanderson, the city manager of Yuma, the county seat.

Yuma County farmers face another water threat, this one from neighboring Kansas. The downstream state has struggled for decades to get its fair share of the Republican’s waters. Tensions peaked eight years ago when Kansas brought a lawsuit against Colorado and Nebraska to the U.S. Supreme Court–and won. Today, the two states still owe Kansas enough water to supply a small city for a year. But, like a shop-a-holic with credit cards, Colorado’s groundwater wells keep pumping. “We’re at a junction with the interstate compact,” says Dave Barfield, chief engineer for Kansas. “[Kansas] farmers are being hurt. They are telling me to go get ‘em…. And we are.” Last month, Kansas demanded its water, suggesting Colorado and Nebraska shut down groundwater wells. If things get worse, the Supreme Court could order it. The threat has sent Colorado’s politicians, farmers and others scrambling, and proposed solutions are as perplexing as the problems.

To send Kansas its water–and keep the Colorado well on–a state legislator is pushing to drain the Bonny Reservoir, a popular border lake called the “crown jewel” of eastern Colorado. It’s a key stopping point for migratory birds, a fishery maintained by the state, and leased by Colorado from the federal government, who are not likely to let the water go. Still, the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Greg Brophy of Yuma, has made the message clear: “We can’t value fish over farmers.”

Yuma corn farmers have come up with their own idea. Last month, the local Republic River Water Conservation District, a board responsible for keeping Colorado in water compliance with Kansas, approved the funding for a multi-million dollar pipeline that will pump water into the Republican River from a farm willing to retire 6,000 acres. Water will flow to Kansas. Problem solved. The source of that water? The Ogallala Aquifer. It’s an idea some have called robbing Peter to pay Paul. “It is to a degree,” says Ken Knox, Colorado’s chief deputy state engineer. “But we’re trying to maintain the entire social-economic production in this part of Colorado.”

What’s becoming clear is that the price to keep ethanol profitable is not cheap. The purchase of those wells will cost more than $50 million–a market-maker price tag that’s even catching the eye of the surface-water right owners. “You know, money is an enticing thing,” Adamson said. “It’s great to be noble. Sometimes it’s hard to be noble. But you’ve got to take care of your family.” One attorney close to the case is more succinct: “[Surface-water owners] are probably just waiting for the right price.” Should the right price come along, Ogallala’s groundwater will be left uncontested, at least in Colorado, a likely scenario. As for the Republican River? “We know we have a finite resource. We know it won’t last forever,” says Yuma City Manager Sanderson. “But we certainly don’t respect the resource more than we respect the people.”

Scientists and engineers say there’s a clear lesson from the Republican River saga: water and energy are inextricably linked. “They will be the two driving forces of the future,” says Knox. “And we’re starting to see the future in this region.” Professor Schnoor calls ethanol simply “a bridge fuel” to undiscovered and truly environmentally-friendly technology. Meanwhile, with warm months just around the corner and a meeting with state officials in Denver to discuss the pipeline that he opposes, Adamson is frustrated. “Trying to solve problems by using the same old techniques doesn’t solve the problem,” Adamson says. “We’re going to make the area a desert. It’s going to be uninhabitable.” And that would be a high price to pay.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/114364

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