Serious Clears the Air of Accusations by Fox, et al.

Stop manufacturing, no, but performing some math to find out which building materials are better for the environment, yes!  So far everyone is aglow with product performance, and that’s good, but what we ALSO need to know is how much we are messing things up when we make these high performance products.  And by the way, we NEED to do this to distinguish our (American made) products from the Chinese products in just such a way.  Our products should be high performance AND low in carbon and toxics emissions to manufacture. Unless this is done LEED will be a farce in short order.

[Note - the firms listed by Surace are glass and architectural glass firms which corrects yet another false Stossel accusation about there being no other window companies on the list].
This editorial gloss from the article is just a bit mis-leading!  Some of these companies also supply glass to automobile manufacturers - does this qualify them as car-makers?  Yes, glass is the major component of windows, but not exclusively so!  There were no other Window companies on the list of ARRA funds recipients as reported by Stossel.

To gotmercury?:  It appears you may have read “Cradle to Grave”.  If not, you’ll love it.  The points in your second missive are all good, even the capitals serve a purpose. But in your first missive you imply that Serious Materials has not done a CtoG analysis.  Do you know this to be the case?

In any case, would you agree with the following statements?
1) If a building material has a CtoG carbon and toxics footprint (and slave labor footprint etc) that is not perfect but is substantially better than the products it would displace, that would be a good thing.
2) The greatest good is done by the new green building product that has the highest product of improvement in CtoG footprint and the number of units of the old product that are displaced.  For example, a green product that saves one pound of CO2 every time it displaces the sale of an old pre-green product, and sells a million units, is preferable to a green product that saves two pounds of CO2 per unit but is so expensive that it only sells a thousand units.

When a white house appointee is married to the guy who is getting millions in taxpayer dollars, then his pay is actually taxpayer money given to him by his wife and therefore as he is payed, his wife who has access to that money now in his bank account uses it to buy items for their personal use, oops looks like another Chicago taxpayer dollar shell game to me.
The only building material good for the environment is ? How about wood. 100% recyclable.
So everybody quit whining about the right, left, center, CO2 etc. and go plant a tree. Get out of your 3000 square foot house into your SUV, stop at AM/PM and get something cold that’s fizzing CO2 in a disposable container, buy a tree and PLANT THE DAMN THING.
We can stop all greenhouse gas emissions right now but not one person has addressed how to get the gasses that are already in the atmosphere out, so until your plan is something besides give me your money, shut the hell up!

climate change from c02 is a HOAX!!!!  Any kind of legislation in the name of the almighty “green” isn’t about anything but the green obama puts in his and his buddies pockets!!!

You Lie!  The administration new exactly who Cathy was, and is, prior to confirmation.  Can you say crony capitalism? How much of my tax dollars is greentech in line for to spread this propaganda?

Bush was a corporatist too.  How’s that Hope and Change working for ya?

Hey Steve - nice rebuttal, you deep thinker, you.

To GreenGeorge,

In my first comment I simply asked if anyone is doing life cylce assessment analysis on building products. If Serious Materials is serious then they should probably not be in business using vinyl.  I am not sure if any building material manufacturers are doing LCAs to determine the impact of their manufacturing activities.  If they did, maybe it would show that making things here is better for the environment then making them in the coal belching and toxin spewing China.  I also have not seen building materials LCA inforamtion being considered in USGBC’s Leardership in Energy and Environmental Design criteria.  Shame on USGBC. 

I agree with you that product price has to be right.  Still that’s what innovation is all about, companies must compete on both price and performance.  Its just that performance should be defined more broadly than just R values.

Keep on.

Pelosi has been filling the swamp not draining it.  Brown won in Mass mostly do to independents getting tired of corruption.  This is an open and shut case of conflict of interest.  The working wealthy poor are getting real tired of having the IRS seize our money only to have Obama share it with his buddies.  This crap has to stop.  I am tired of working 50+ hour weeks and having the government stealing an ever bigger chunk of my hard earned money.  Taking it to a logical conclusion means major civil unrest.  the political class better pay attention.  There are so few of them and so many of us.  The value of these politicians isn’t worth a plug nickel since the constitution provides for there replacement.  Not only should they be voted out of office, they should be made life time guest in one of our over crowded correctional facilities.

The political slant to this article comes off as immature and unprofessional. Stick to actual reporting. For better green tech sites I would recommend http://www.alt-energy.info/ or http://www.ecogeek.org/