What's wrong with this picture?

Why we need a big honking progressive carbon tax on McMansions.

Apple keeps delivering this ad from an Ontario ground source heat pump (GSHP) installer, and every time it does, I think of another answer to the question, "What's wrong with this picture?" An image search finds that the photo is the lead image for a real estate company in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the house is likely backing onto Lake Norman, just north of the city.

1) It's not geothermal! 

The first and most obvious problem is that neither North Carolina nor Ontario is exactly a hot spot for plate tectonics, earthquakes and volcanos, where you find direct geothermal heating. Try Iceland, Japan, and Yellowstone National Park. I know the GSHP industry co-opted the term, and even the Environmental Protection Agency uses it this way, but it's wrong. The company paying for this ad writes:

"Geothermal energy is energy stored within the Earth. This clean and renewable energy can provide a reliable source of heat for your home (even during the coldest Canadian winters). In the hot summer months, a heat pump can cool your home by transferring heat from your home into the ground using the same geothermal system that heats your home in the winter." 

Here they twist themselves into a geothermal pretzel to try and explain how the system provides renewable energy for heating yet can somehow keep you cool, too, like two systems in one. They never explain how most heat pumps today move heat from the air outside or to heat or dump air outside to cool, and nobody calls them renewable or "aerothermal." It's just a heat pump. It’s not renewable. It’s not geothermal. (I complained about this in an earlier post too)

2) The lawn!

My friend and former editor Melissa Breyer wrote, "Lawns are egregious water hogs; they also degrade our watershed, and thrive on chemicals that taint our waterways. And to what end? All so we can be a bit more like the 18th-century European elite, who started the lawn craze in the first place? Meanwhile, these expansive carpets of status symbol could be put to crucial use in helping to stave off the extinction of insects." She wants them all to be torn up and naturalized. I want them to deal with that brown spot where the dog must have pooped in the foreground; it is supposed to all be green!

3) The house! Think of sufficiency.

Honestly, how much house do people need? And how many toilets? This four-bedroom house has five full bathrooms and two half-bathrooms spread over 7539 square feet. Surprisingly, it was on the market for 243 days and sold for just $5.2 million, which sounds cheap for waterfront property-if I have the right house here- perhaps quite a few people thought it was too much. 

In my book “Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle,” I called for sufficiency; as the IPCC defines it: “As a complement to efficiency, sufficiency directs attention to consumption, calling for a reduction of the absolute levels of consumption and addressing overconsumption in rich countries to stay within the limits of the earth's carrying capacity." That’s because making all this stuff releases massive emissions of upfront carbon.

In an ad for energy-efficient heating and cooling, this house is a poster child for overconsumption. It seems like poor marketing. 

4) The stuff! Think of simplicity. 

Mies van der Rohe famously noted, "less is more." Robert Venturi countered, "Less is a bore." Morris Lapidus, the architect of the Fontainbleu hotel in Miami Beach, wondered, “If you like ice cream, why stop at one scoop? Have two, have three. Too much is never enough." Whoever designed this house is in the Lapidus school, dishing out the ice cream. Come the revolution, the arrowslits on the turrets may be useful, but they seem a bit much now. The whole confection is a bit much. I am no Kate Wagner, but there is so much McMansion Hell happening here, a ridiculous house designed for a completely different climate. Reyner Banham wrote in his 1969 book “Architecture and the Well-Tempered Environment” about the American way of building, complaining of:

"the failure of architects and designers, who have abdicated their responsibility for indoor comfort, designing without consideration of the consequences for the indoor environment, and just handing the whole thing over to the engineers and contractors to solve it for them."

Or today, the heat pump guy. There is a whole lot of abdicating happening here, where some architect has developed a completely inappropriate house that will only be liveable by applying massive amounts of electricity. Banham noted that where architecture used to have some relation to climate, we lost this with modern technology:

"By providing almost total control of the atmospheric variables of temperature, humidity and purity, it has demolished almost all of the environmental constraints on design that have survived that other great breakthrough, electric lighting. For anyone who is prepared to foot the consequent bill for power consumed, it is now possible to live in almost any type or form of house one likes to name in any region of the world that takes the fancy. Given this convenient climactic package one may live under low ceilings in the humid tropics, behind thin walls in the arctic and under uninsulated roofs in the desert."

Or French Provincial chateaux in North Carolina. 

Our heat pump salesman promises efficiency for your dream home, but as Samuel Alexander noted, "without sufficiency, efficiency is lost." Alexander interprets Willian Stanley Jevons, writing that “a more efficient heater can lead people to warm their houses for longer periods or to hotter temperatures, since the relative costs of heating have gone down.” Or they can make them bigger for the same reason. If a GSHP lets you build your monster McMansion Hell dream home, what have we gained with this technology? Nothing, just bigger houses.

5) It’s time to zone out.

I have written before that the single biggest factor in the carbon footprint of our cities isn't the amount of insulation in our walls; it's the zoning. We have bylaws that promote this kind of development that consumes massive amounts of water and energy and emits megatonnes of upfront carbon. While it is arguable whether these kinds of houses should be banned by a lake in the country, they impose a carbon load on everyone on the planet. That’s why we need a big honking progressive carbon tax based on the upfront carbon emissions of every McMansion. Take the money and put Mister GSHP salesman to work fixing existing houses that could take true advantage of the technology. Perhaps then he could afford a stock photo of a reasonable dream home.