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‘Going Green’
takes money to
save money
Yesterday, April 22, was Earth Day. Perhaps
more noteworthy than the celebration this year
was that last week the Environmental Protection Agency published a finding that greenhouse gas emissions are a threat to public health.
It is a finding that is being widely, if not universally, hailed as a positive step in combating global warming.
The health of our planet and, until the last six months or so, the health of world economies had been moving in opposite directions.
Seemingly, the more we had to spend, the more we choose to expend it on what the latest issue of Time magazine calls “the premise that more is better,” so that we have ended up with “houses that could hold all of our stuff but were too big to heat; ...cars that could ferry a soccer team but were too big to park.”
As a consequence of this economic comeuppance there is increasing, and welcome, emphasis on making our buildings more energy efficient and Earth friendly.
Unhappily, even that remains bound by economics.
Much is made of the fast that if you build your home to green standards, you can recover the added cost within, oh, 10 years or so. That model only works, however, if you pay the additional expense of the green improvements up front, with cash. Not many of us can do that.
If you are prepared to build, say, a traditional, bank-financed $300,000 home, and you then decide to go green, the cost will escalate to about $330,000, according to shoot-from-the-hip estimates.
Over the course of a 30-year note, even at today’s attractive rates, vour $30,000 green investment will about double. And green things wear out, too, just like their energy-guzzling counterparts. Most of your green items and green technologies will need to be replaced long before they are paid off, and the cycle starts anew.
In its current stimulating mood, Washington could make low-, low-interest loans — dare we suggest nointerest loans? — available to potential and qualifying middle-class home builders.
The loans would be repaid from the energy savings that green technology would provide, just as those savings provide incentive to the more well-heeled home builder who can pay for them up front.
Computer modeling can determine the benefits of most of the residential green technologies.
We could turn for help to the banks, who are no doubt dying to show their gratitude for all we have done for them.
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