Green, green, green. It’s all you hear these days. Green is the color of the bandwagon bound for the future and we’re all climbing aboard.
I read a news story the other day about the latest thing in green houses, the “passive house.” Turns out there’s a really exciting, cutting- edge movement to make houses more energy efficient by stuffing the walls with insulation and sealing them really tight to keep out the cold. The article explains that if you do this right a house uses only a tiny fraction of the energy of an ordinary house–not much more than the bodyheat of the people who live there, plus their appliances. Sure, all that insulation and the attention to detail costs somewhat more, but you more than make it up in saved fuel costs. You get a snugger house and save the planet into the bargain.
Great idea, but a really annoying story to anyone who’s been around for a few decades. The same idea has been around since the 1970s ( the first decade we were concerned about high fuel prices). It even had the same name back then, although “passive,” was usually joined with “solar.” There were articles in newspapers and magazines about how a thickly insulated (“superinsulated”), tight house could practically be heated with the bodyheat of the people who lived there, or their appliances.
The whole point of this recent news story, what makes it newsworthy, is that the passive house is the latest thing, when the truth is it’s relatively ancient history.
And in ignoring that history, the reporter leaves out the real story: Why has this innovation lain fallow all these years? What’s wrong with us that we’re smart enough to come up with the idea but not smart enough to use it? How big a dent would we have made in the climate change crisis if passive house thinking had been incorporated into the building code several decades ago?
I recently saw another news story about a sensible, green idea: recycling cloth diapers instead of using the throwaways clogging dumps and transfer stations. As with the passive house, this is touted as the latest thing. In fact, for all the same, sensible reasons it was a big movement at least as far back as the 1980s when I was made to feel guilty by my wife at holding out for throwaways because they were easier, or so I maintained, for a harried parent.
Deja vu. Been there, done that. How soon we forget.
In a sense, the optimistic, self-congratulatory tone of these green stories is a coverup of the real story: the scandal of why our life was not long ago transformed by these ideas. The story being trumpeted is progress. The real story is regress and stagnation.
Stories less wrapped up in boosting green progress might instead be asking relevant questions: What went wrong? Why didn’t that good, green commonsense prevail? Was it just shortsightedness, as when fuel prices came back down after the 70s? Lack of that thing called “political will” (and why would that be?)? The heel-dragging, or downright hostility, of relevant industries?
All the auto industry and media ballyhoo creates the impression that we are on the cutting edge of gas mileage history. So it’s a surprise to find that most cars were doing better in the early 1990s, gas mileage-wise, than in 2007, the year of a survey I saw online. 100 years ago, the Model T got 25 mpg vs. EPA’s 2008 average of all American cars of 20.8. The cute, new Fiat 500 brags about mileage in the high 30s. There were reports back in the day of its 1970s version getting 50. My old VW bug got in the high 30s 50 years ago.
The problem is young reporters, I suppose, or at any rate reporters without memories, or historical curiosity. Maybe it’s some idea that the job of newspapers is to be reporting new stuff, not history. But sometimes history is the story.
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