Oh, and then there's Green

One more thing on the Buzzword topic. Thinking people need to dig deeper into the Green Building thing. The Green Building craze is supposedly coming from the grass roots, but isn't all the buzz now coming from Realtors, Contractors, and the newspapers that carry their ads?

OK, sorry about the cynicism; maybe the well-meaning grass roots started the craze. But the develoturds (developers) latched onto it as a way to prolong the inevitable bottoming of the Real Estate Bubble a bit longer.

Here are two facts the "Build New, Build Now, and, oh yeah, Build Green" crowd seems to forget to mention:

The ULTIMATE Green Building technique is renovating an existing building, NOT building a new one...even if that new one is built with the latest energy conservation technologies. If we're serious about promoting conservation, we need to encourage the renovation and expansion of our many nice, existing buildings in New Mexico. Renovation takes far less energy overall than building from scratch.

If you MUST build, New Mexicans have been building Green for centuries, using mud bricks. Adobe construction doesn't kill as many trees as wood frame construction, and adobe walls are very energy conserving. Let's promote it with training and tax breaks.