AMERICA’S GREEN
MECHANICAL OPPORTUNITY
WILL INVOLVE EVERYONE
TODAY, WE DRAW our inspiration from Mr. T. Boone Pickens,
a billionaire oilman and corporate
raider who is now building the
largest wind farm in the world. His
new 4,000-megawatt pinwheels in
Texas will double the wind energy
output of the United States. T.
Boone says, “America is addicted
to foreign oil. It’s an addiction
that threatens our economy, our
environment and our national security. e addiction has
worsened for decades and now it’s reached a point of crisis.”
How refreshing it is to hear a loud, sensible message about
sustainability on a national level.
Let me pull a 10-gallon hat way down over my ears and
give it a try: “Almost all of America’s 130 million homes
and buildings are energy, water and resource hogs. Every
building needs modern and coordinated green mechanical
systems to make them e cient, safe and comfortable.”
While Mr. Pickens’ solution only requires a few billion dollars and some good-for-nothin’-else dust farms in West Texas,
America’s coming green mechanical opportunity will involve
virtually every structure on every street in every town.
Consider that some Americans will run out of water
before they run out of gasoline. at storm water systems
are spewing toxins in thousands of cities and the federally
mandated solutions could cause more civic bankruptcies
than bloated pension systems. That natural gas shortages
and electrical grid breakdowns could leave our cities and
towns in the cold, in the heat or in the dark. at carbon
mandates, aging Baby Boomers and the breakdown of our
automobile transportation system will require the rebuilding of our cities and the abandonment of many suburbs and
most exurbs.
As the March 2008 edition of e Atlantic magazine noted,
sprawled-out, ine cient, plastic “luxury living homes” will
be foreclosed and then sold by banks for conversion into
cheap apartments for people who don’t have work, farming
skills or the means to get into the cities. Don’t take calls for
these conversions... you’ll have to wait for your money.
is rant will not t on a bumper sticker; but every stage
of this wrenching conversion to a sustainable society will
require close coordination between all the mechanical trades
to equip buildings to use less energy, use less water, produce
less pollution and require fewer city services like sewer, re
and storm water abatement.
Americans will give up a lot before they give up the single
largest investment they have... their houses. ey will spend
what they have to in order to make their buildings a ordable,
and in the process, they will give up what most people in the
world already don’t have – double mocha lattes, 220-HP bass
boats, frivolous air travel, Ivy League schools, and Chinese
so -as-a-baby’s-butt recliners. Money we once spent on stu
we don’t need will be diverted into rehabbing buildings on
a mass scale across America. Anyone in mechanical trades,
manufacturing, distribution and/or education should either
provide these critical “green” systems or else they should
nd another line of work. As another gnarly billionaire, Ted
Turner, once said, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”
Mechanical systems that aren’t green and can’t coordinate
with other systems in a practical way are useless. Companies
waiting for the “housing crisis” to go away are dinosaurs.
Installers waiting for Rush Limbaugh to tell them it’s OK to
focus on sustainable practices should try reading a newspaper or CONTRACTOR magazine or maybe go work for
General Motors building SUVs.
Nobody in Germany waited for ExxonMobil to tell them
to install the most advanced green mechanical systems available. Russia controls their access to natural gas, and every
once in a while, they shut it all o . Consequently, the Germans imposed strict building standards for water use, water
runoff, pollution, indoor air quality, energy consumption
and, as Wikipedia notes: “Germany was the fastest growing
major PV (photovoltaic) market in the world during 2006
and 2007. In 2007, over 1. 3 GWp of PV was installed. e
German PV industry generates over 10,000 jobs in production, distribution and installation.”
Nobody has shut o our natural gas yet, but what happens
in the next 20 years when the world’s biggest suppliers are
Russia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, and the supplies
will come from supertankers traveling through war zones...
do you think it couldn’t happen?
Dan Chiles has been a solar pioneer since 1980; a former
contractor, multiple patent holder and currently the marketing vice president for Watts Radiant, Spring eld, MO. He is
also the founding member of GreenMech and an elected city
o cial. He can be reached at danchiles@mac.com.
