Two houses

D

deschain

0
Some of you may have already seen this. I was rather surprised by it myself.



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 this residence consumes more energy than the average American household does in a year. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2400. In natural gas alone, this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not situated in a Northern or Midwestern 'snow belt' area. 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 is 4,000 square feet ( 4 bedrooms ) and is nestled on a 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 the winter and cools it in the summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas and it consumes one-quarter 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. Surrounding flowers and shrubs native to the area enable the property to blend into the surrounding rural landscape.



~~~~~
HOUSE #1 is outside of Nashville, Tennessee; it is the abode of
the 'environmentalist' Al Gore.

HOUSE #2 is on a ranch near Crawford,
Texas; it is the residence the of the President of the United States,
George W. Bush.

An 'inconvenient truth'.

~~~~~~~~~~


I checked it on Snopes and it is actually true. I really hope not to start a whole big political thing over this. I just found it really surprising, considering the reputations of these two.
 
So you're saying Bush is cheap? :D
 
Woodt said:
I never thought I'd see something which actually made me respect George Bush. Gets you thinking.
Click to expand...

I know huh. I guess it's one of those things that goes to show how the media shows what they want to, to influence our opinions and whatnot. ---Like how they act like he baths in oil, dries off with hundred dollar bills, and eats baby seals for dinner. :p
 
To make things even more interesting, pretty much all economists who has looked at it say that trying to stop climate change by cutting emissions is a really bad idea.

It is very expensive and reduces economic growth, and that will mean that 100s of millions of the world's poor will remain poor, without proper health care, in risk of starvation, etc., a much worse effect than what would ever happen from global warming.

Iirc the Kyoto protocol, if implemented by all countries, would postpone the temperature we would've reached in 2100 to 2106, only 6 years delay over almost 100 years so no real effect, while the cost of it could alternatively stop 30 mio HIV infections in Africa and provide clean water and basic schooling to everyone on the planet that isn't getting it yet.

The politics that Al Gore and other environmentalists are pushing for are just unbelievably inhumane.
 
Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish statistician (sp?), actually is the guy who started the idea. He put together the Copenhagen Consensus, where a lot of the world's leading economists, including Nobel Prize winners, got together to try to prioritize the problems the world is facing (and so far climate change has been taking all the bottom spots).

He appeared before the US Senate or Congress, along with Al Gore and others, not that long ago, in some climate hearing. He's also worked with Michael Bolton on some seminars for UN ambassadors on the subject.

His basic idea is that an epidemologist and a meteorologist might each know a lot about the spread of HIV and climate change, but they can't prioritize the efforts. Economists are the guys who can do that, take the data from the scientists, look at the options, weigh the pros and the cons (including cost), and then given an educated opinion on the best way forward. When you look at it like that, emission reductions turn out to no only be very cost-ineffective, ie we could help more people better in other ways, but it even looks like the costs are so high it actually impedes economic growth enough that it'll do more harm than good.

It hasn't really caught on though. The idea that economic growth actually can help people more than the government placing heavy taxes or regulation and then investing it, is just too capitalistic for the socialistic political climate over here.
 
I don't think Bush's house affects my view of him as it's a pretty insignificant thing compared to his Presidential decisions (not giving + or - views ;))
But if that's true about Al Gore's place then I think he has a few questions to answer.
Maybe Gore's bills are so high because he provides shelter to all the baby Seals that George Bush wants to club?
 
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