I recent article from The American Thinker and some comments from the book Liberal Fascism got me to thinking. Will this sign:

?

For those of you who haven't had to have academic exposure to this, the US Green Building Council is a somewhat formalized entity that is advocating the US of so-called 'green' technologies and building systems when we design buildings and their sites. With the proper classes and testing, an aspiring architect can add "LEED Certified" as another bullet point to their resumé when looking for a job. Sadly, this is very definitive of what LEED is all about.

For those in the architecture and interiors professions, we are inundated with ads for green products and technologies in just about every professional publication out there. Green is the hot topic for editorials. Green is the product you can't miss out on, lest you be behind the curve. This should come as no surprise for people in most any industry. As Rush has said, when news outlets and publications can't find and real news to report, they fall back on speculation, and what else would be more interesting to speculate on? There are gobs of money streaming from venture capitalists (at least we are told to think so) to "green tech," so that market must be on the verge of exploding. It's funny how much of those foci have been talked about for years, but no one has had any real success in the marketplace...

In any event, a part of me wonders if the likes of Obama, or his puppeteer, might push a move similar to FDR's collectivist NRA. Pelosi & Co.'s CFL mandate was already enough to piss off every other designer I know. FYI, aside from industrial applications and long hospital hallways and institutional uses, professionals loathe CFLs. Their color spectrum is horrible. They add a BIG cost to a project, and they tend to break far more often than you'd think. Anecdote: I had a roommate who decided to replace every bulb in our apartment with CFLs, and 30% of them stopped working in 3 months (they're supposed to last 3-5 years). I could easily see national politicians trying to change building codes, which are usually called out by cities and states and are standard around the world, aside from CA. That kind of thinking behind nationalizing a stricture normally left to local government, strikes me as typical ignorant liberal policy. Who could know better what every individual situation needs than national government entity issuing mandates? *sarcasm*

The voluntary LEED placard may just be a "chic" adornment that might get your building into a publication, but should this sort of thing become mandatory, it would just as odious as the NRA version from 80 years ago. I've taken the classes and applied the principles, so believe me when I say that this form of the green movement does little to bring the total cost of building and operation down. The up front costs of special technologies is not earned back by energy savings, and just the additional required planning alone can cost a fortune. Consider the recent effort to "green" the capitol by hiring a firm to redesign the outdoor lighting. I believe the figure had it taking somewhere around 80 years before the energy savings (assuming prices and inflation didn't change energy costs from a year ago) would pay for just the design fees.

Like it or not, the majority of the US is designed for individual automobile transportation, but green strictures steal from the "new urbanist" movement and try to force site planners and engineers to cater to bikes and mass transit well before the transportation the rest of us use, going so far as to knock down your point rating because of where your build site is.

I could wax eloquent on all of the illogical bumblings behind "Leadership in Energy and and Environmental Design" and the USGBC, but it's nothing any one besides someone in the industry would care about. Suffice to say, the envirowackos are sticking their fingers into as many pies as they can and want to charge us more and more to continue our American lifestyle. This is yet another example of their over reaching, and would become even more so should they lobby and get legislation enacted.

How likely do you think a move like this from them would be?