Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: How is "cheap" green? - A correction.

[Racheli Gai (racheli]

Just a small correction: in the last sentence of my post, where it says 
"insolation" it
should be "insulation".  (Thanks to Joyce for pointing this out).

Racheli.


On Jan 11, 2008, at 3:36 PM, Racheli Gai wrote:

> I don't get it: How is "cheapest" equal to "greenest", and how are old
> trailer parks green?
>
>
> Brian wrote (in part) :
>
> > To a first approximation, the total of mortgage plus utility bill
> > measures resource consumption.  Thus, cheaper is greener.  The
> > greenest community may be an old trailer park.
>
>
> > ....    They can tell you the cheapest per-unit
> > housing development they've seen approved in the last couple years.
> > That's the cheapest and greenest you will be permitted to build.
> >
> >                                         
> I don't get it: How is "cheapest" equal to "greenest"?
>
> And regarding  trailers: while are green in a sense - since they 
> probably tend, on the average
>  to have smaller footprints, and they also probably use less materials 
> than conventional houses
> (and therefore contain less embodied energy?)
>
> Trailers are very un-green, though,  in many other ways: they are 
> known to be made of
> cheap/toxic materials, and as far as I know they (or most of them) 
> sorely lack
> in insolation, so they are not efficient in terms of energy use.
>
> Racheli.