The good news it's not going to encourage mansions.  That's wealth-limited.  The good news is that an eco-mansion is better than an anti-eco-mansion.

(and on a world scale, most of us in the US have mansions.  my 1000 sf is probably a mansion.)

The bad news is that there well be countless blog entries (especially on anti-environmental sites) about environmental hypocrites.  It is fodder for pundits everywhere.

is it Al Gore's?

Anyway...yes. Let's face it, rich assholes will always be with us. And this one just sank a lot of money into green building technologies. It's much more important to mainstream these (easily doable) technologies into the mass housing market than it is to heap our scorn upon one guy (or gal) who'd probably just jet off to Tahiti if he didn't get his rubber stamp.

LEED isn't perfect, but it's been a very, very good thing for the world. One of those environmental good news stories that environmentalists hate. If LEED says it's OK, then it's OK. We should accept this as a victory, and follow it up with another victory tomorrow.

Caveat: I don't know what "reduce energy consumption by 90 percent.", but if it means that the house will consume the energy a typical 1500 sqft would in the same location, then that's a considerable improvement on a standard American family home which is now up to...4000sqft? Since they're only getting "certified" (ie bronze) then is sounds like they're getting docked plenty for their habitat destruction...cause that energy performance is pretty good.

I'm up for eco-jetliner, eco-tank, eco-private Island and my the one I think I will win with is my eco-coal mine.

I don't consider it fair to unequivocally judge all mansions as anti-green.  There are plenty of criteria that determine wastefulness.

In other words the particular merits should be assessed on a point by point basis:

-Is this a first or second home?  What is the typical occupancy?  I wouldn't call 8 bedrooms wasteful if many of them are typically occupied.

-Size with relation to location.  Excessive size (and the resultant higher heating/cooling duties) are not as much of an issue in temperate climates.  Despite the cooling methods described, I have to believe there will be some decent AC usage down in Florida.  Of course size also results in higher energy usage of construction (but give them credit for the reclaimed teak).

-There are other criteria of course, but in general I don't consider green mansions ideal (2 laundry rooms sounds just a bit excessive..). But I'll certainly echo other readers' thoughts that mansions will always be built.  Might as well be green ones.  

Also, in closing, I think it important to mention that people with disposable income are pivotal in establishing markets for many of these technologies.  Furthermore, they're great for green publicity--most people don't have the means to build a mansion, but the 'oh wow' factor of this house brings greater attention to the green technologies which by themselves are economically feasible for many people.

eco means "pure as the driven snow"

LEED certified means something else.

While LEED does have certain criteria for things like size and siting, it's fairly weak in this area and it's likely that if it went down the route of judging people's lifestyle, it would probably be ineffectual.

LEED focuses on building envelope and energy use, and that's the most helpful thing right now. It incentivises us to use technologies that have been available for 30 years now. If you insisted on using the same mechanism to change Americans' lifestyles at the same time, then you'd be holding these technologies up another 30 years. There is a separate LEED for communities in the works, I eagerly await it--hopefully it will have the success "LEED for homes" has had.

I think the key is how much that mansion uses in absolute terms, not per square foot. If someone has built a 15,000 square foot mansion that use 90% less energy than a typical U.S. home, I'm fine with that. A 90% reduction is a 90% reduction,and that helps develop the technology.  If someone has built a mansion that uses 90% less than a typical 15,000 square foot home, that is not particularly green.

I think the key is how much that mansion uses in absolute terms, not per square foot. If someone has built a 15,000 square foot mansion that use 90% less energy than a typical U.S. home, I'm fine with that. A 90% reduction is a 90% reduction,and that helps develop the technology.  If someone has built a mansion that uses 90% less than a typical 15,000 square foot home, that is not particularly green.

So I saw this on "Living with Ed".

Supposedly Larry Hagman has a 25,000 square foot home and a $13.00 annual electric bill. That is the cost of the meter. He has an 82 KWh solar array that provides electricity for his home and 5 of his neighbors. According to the show, he is looking into adding Wind Power to supplement this. The property is also on its own well, which has a storage tank in the house that doubles as and indoor pool. The house is cooled with passive solar skylights as well.

The motivation for going green? His first year's electric bill was $37,000.

Efficiency is not inherently a good thing!  Is an efficient Nazi a good thing?

How do we measure greenness?  We shouldn't measure greenness by how many trees "were not cut down" or by how many fossil fuels "were not burned up."   We should measure success not by how much we save but by how much we give.

As far as I'm concerned, building a 15,000 sq ft mansion is taking away from space that would otherwise be a 15,000 sq ft nature preserve.  There's nothing "GREEN" about that.

We need to do better than being less bad; we need to be good.

Despite the way this post was worded, LEED is not pass/fail. It's a graduated system. "Certified" is the lowest grade. It implies that the building did well in some areas, not others. That seems to be the case.

It's all too easy to use a pass/fail framework to adopt an unreasonably high standard. You focus on the what they got wrong, while ignoring what they got right--it tends to turn into unconstrutive criticism. That may seem like a harmless online pursuit, but I'm not so sure...all too often environmentalists seem so caught up in their own personal scenarios of doom'n'gloom (I blame PETA for the general funk that seems to have descended upon Grist the last few days) that they can't see "what's in front of their noses".

Many environmentalists seem to be the intellectual equivalent of depressed, spending all day navel-gazing at the sorry state of humanity. What good does that do? Pretty soon, you begin to believe nonsense like "We need to do better than being less bad; we need to be good." rather than realizing that in order to be good, we usually have to be less bad for a while. "The perfect is the enemy of the good" is so true it's a truism. Why is it that we forget this so often?

I'll measure the greenness of this project after the next big hurricane hits this area and how much of our taxes go toward subsidizing the reconstruction of any dwelling or publicly funded infrastructure in this area.  Check out the picture -- water on two sides of the house and maybe 5 feet above sea level!  

Sometimes we lose sight of the big picture.  Florida is the most disaster prone state in the US.  Should we be promoting any kind of certification or providing incentives for people to be building on that site?  

Freedom, our cherished freedom, allows people people to make really stupid choices and then we reward them with gold stars.  People, we just aren't being smart here.

Give this project the big, black stamp of disapproval.  There is my reader opinion, and thanks for requesting it Joe.  

This house should no more be certified than the should get credit for reducing "greenhouse gas intensity."

If you're polluting, you're polluting, no matter how efficiently you're doing it.

USGBC gives guidance on how to build a greener building.  They aren't the morality police.  If this helps someone to think a little more carefully when they build a mansion, so much the better.  But questioning whether or not one should build the mansion is moralizing.  The fact that the house is big and they could live on a smaller footprint is only meaningful in a vacuum.  Suppose, for example that the owner is a huge contributor to the Sierra Club and needs a big space for entertaining at Sierra Club fundraisers.  Should that count for LEED points?  I don't think so - but then by contrast, they shouldn't get docked points if they use the space to fly in out of town jet-setters for big tropical hardwood bonfires.  

I think you got it right at the start when you acknowledged that people are going to build big homes - so why shouldn't the USGBC provide them with a template to do so more responsibly?

do they also have a garage full of Hummers with yellow "bring back our troops" stickers on them?!

"But questioning whether or not one should build the mansion is moralizing." Sean

Tell me, was Gandhi moralizing when he said (paraphrasing), "the earth can meets every man's need but not everyman's greed"?  

So, am I moralizing to say that if the earth cannot supply houses like this for everyone then those who are choosing to live like this are stretching the earth's capacity to supply houses for both the rich and the poor?  What separates moralizing from a simple statement of reality?  Recognizing the costs to all of our living the American standard +++ is not moralizing.  

There are not only environmental and land ethics on the line here but human ethical values as well.  Living big has big costs, no matter how green the coating.  If that is moralizing, so be it.  

I'm not suggesting that there isn't a moral high ground - just that USGBC ought not be the arbiter of our morality.

LEED is a consensus driven industry organization.

They won't moralize and they aren't the epitome of green.

For now, LEED for the general public falls into the same category as Democracy in the following quote.

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all of the others.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't develop a better version of a greenbuilding rating system.

How about a Grist rating system?

justlou, what exactly do you think the words

Do not develop...sites that meet...the following criteria:
+
Previously undeveloped land that is within 50 feet of a water body

mean?

This house didn't get points for site selection. Nor did it get points for compact development, though it may have gotten points for being located near existing iinfrastructure or on a previously developped site (we don't know). It may have gotten points for using native plants and a low-maintenance lawn. But it likely got there because of the energy efficiency.

Again, let's not forget that LEED is a voluntary system. In order to be effective it needs to be flexible. If anyone's upset about it, go look at some Platinum buildings. Those are the one's that USGBC really says are "green". It's just saying that this one is "slightly green" Feel better?

For a workable system we can hardly expect to use as a criteria some standard of "absolute sustainability". Largely because no one alive can define what "absolute sustainability" is, in practice. But more importantly, in a complex and expensive industry like building, you need to learn to walk before you can run.

Al Gore flies (and eats meat). Does that mean he's not green?

The elephant in the room is the size.
If we are okay with collectively acknowledging that a house with an enormous footprint, which creates new impermeable surfaces near a water source, destroys habitat, will need to be filled with "stuff" and inevitably maintained is "green", well then what exactly does the term mean?  Some people are saying that the rich are going to build houses like this anyway.  That may be true, but do we add to their ego trip by allowing them to use a label that is better reserved for more conscientiously constructed buildings?  I say that you if the USGBC choose to do that they are compromising the value of the label. I know it's a slippery slope though.  What if it were 5,000 square feet?  That's still a behemoth.  But this house is so far outside of the average American home size that it obviously flouts green sensibility.  
The green features on this house are admirable. But let them stand on their own and save the accolades for people who inspire us by thinking outside the box.

As an aside, I really hope that this label doesn't qualify them for any tax breaks.  I'm sick of handing out welfare to the insanely rich.

"Feel better?"

Do I feel better about anyone building any sized home, green or not, on such a shaky foundation in hurricane alley?  

I am not hung up on this label.  Just hung up that people can't see the big picture for what it is and substitute such artificiality to make their perception of reality work.

That size PV setup in florida could power 10 average size homes.  Or 20 super efficient earth circulation cooled homes.

Make this mansion earth cooled too and it would be an outstanding example for the renewable/conservation energy re-evolution.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

This echoes the foolishness of the government agency I currently work for.  They are intersted in constructing a new, high-tech, 'green' building.  Great!  But they are planning to locate it out beyond the outer burbs of our metropolis, where most workers will have to commute an additional 10-25 miles daily and there's not even the option of public transit.

Rediculous.  Multiply that by some 150 workers and you get a sense of how much additional gas will be burned, how much additional pollution will be generated, how much additional traffic congestion will result, how much more incrementally we will be relying on imported oil from countries who hate us, how many more greenhouse gases will be spewed, how many more hours will be squandered by people with families and dreams commuting to-and-from work listening to rabid talk-radio hosts rather than spending the same time more usefully and creatively.

Ah ... but we'll have a 'green' building!

We live in a seriously f***ed-up society which has forgotten, or seems to have never really learned, what a pleasant world we could create for ourselves if we just tried.  

I live in a delightfully walkable neighborhood with modest-sized houses ... except for the ones that have been scraped-off for McMansions, and are occupied by seemingly invisible owners who slip in and out of their garages surreptiously in smoked-window SUVs. I guess they like the rising property values.

So gee, I'm delighted that the owner of this monstrous monument to selfishness and self-aggrandizement is spending his generous Bush tax cut on something so 'environmentally sound'.  No doubt the staff of 12 servants who service his sprawling house are very impressed.  Except for the fact they doubtlessly have to each drive 40 miles RT daily to trim his shrubs.  They certainly can't afford to live any closer.

You get it.

For a rating system like the one discussed here to have any real world impact the location of the building site would have to be heavily weighted against all the other positive attributes of the buildings themselves.  

So there should be negative values applied in big doses for the choice of building sites instead of simply zeroing out the building site if it does not meet the incredibly weak criteria in the standard.  In this system you could have a platinum rating but have a building five feet above the 100 year flood plain (How many 500 year floods have we encountered lately?  Lots!) or 100 feet from a site that would be history in the next category 5 hurricane (but evidently from the comments here, this passes some folks' sustainability test OK).  Insane!  

And as you say, the environmental costs for you commuters over the lifetime of the "green" building more than offsets any gains from said construction by many factors.  

How many bridges do you have to cross to get to that new building?  Your increased gas tax dollars will take care of that, eh?  No?  Well, we'll just have to grow the economy faster with more green buildings to help pay for it.  

Unsustainable building habits and expectations have deep infrastructural, historical and sociological roots. Things won't change overnight. They won't change at all if the green movement is not inclusive, celebrating every step forward. Critique is of course necessary, but care should be taken not to mix agendas. LEED's agenda is very simple: promote higher performance building (that is therefore 'greener')and help to educate the general public about how this can be done effectively. Lumping other agendas together garbles the message - and the goal. It is hopefully the case that the next generation's wealthy will prefer smaller homes. But even then there will be those who prefer, or even require, larger homes. That all buildings will be sustainably built is the goal. How will we achieve this if we discourage our most vocal and dedicated allies from the start? For every forward-thinking 15,000 sf LEED-rated home there are thousands of old paradigm resource hogs that get no attention at all. The green-inclined wealthy could simply choose to avoid the attention and get one of those.

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." Marcus Aurelius

It is tempting to lambast a 15,000 square foot house.  But that aside, I guess I would have more respect for the project if I knew it took an old existing house and turned it into something green, rather than building from scratch (new land or a knock-down).  Many builders in Austin, TX have done this and are very proud of their efforts.  

Separately although maybe related, Austin has tried to zone McMansions because they tend to dominate over the 1,000 SF bungalows, especially in historic areas.  It was a common practice to chop the roof off an old house, add two more stores, expand sideways, and add a guess house and garage out back.  

What can I say, I guess I'm a history nut.  I'm a fan of re-using old structures rather than the wrecking ball or the bulldozer.  This probably has nothing to do with the fake awards being handed out, but I think goes to the root of many of our problems ... what exactly is "green"?

Onward through the fog

I think it depends on how many families are living in it.  Hey, maybe this person has mom and dad move in and maybe a brother and his family, and it's all good.  

What boggles my mind is that a family of 3 or 4 people thinks it needs this much space.  Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.  I'm with the other commenter who said, what a waste of good money.  

The formula should be simple:  The amount of greenhouse gas per person per hour spent in house.

Turn it over to Haitian refugees.

Steve E.