superzise my home ..and my energy bill

i hope and think that the us as a whole is slowly waking up and realises that something has got to change. (just ask ford and gm...) and i´ll bet that the majority of "mac mansions" type of houses buyers are regretting their purchase already. please note that the real picture is even grimmer than shown in the first graph. the graph covers only the time frame to 2001. the real push to bigger houses came after 2001.

ich hoffe und denke auch das die gesamte usa langsam aber sicher realisieren das sich was ändern muß. da muß man nur bei gm und ford nachfragen.....ausserdem gehe ich jede wette ein das die mehrheit der sog. mac. mansion (riesige villen mit zum tei meheren tausen qm) käufer diesen kauf schon jetzt bitter bereuen. bitte beachtet das bei der ersten grafik nur der zeitraum bis 2001 eingeflossen ist. der richtige größenwahn stellte sich erst danach ein. sieht also in wirklichkeit noch düsterer aus.

http://tinyurl.com/y2qy3j The size of the average American house more than doubled between 1950 and 1999, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics. From 1982 to 2004, the typical new single-family house grew about 40% from 1,690 square feet to 2,366 square feet.

In the face of these increases, however, the size of the average American household has shrunk from 3.3 to 2.6 people.

größer/bigger http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/01/06/business/0106-biz-webJAPANFUEL.gif

“It’s not just technology, it’s a whole mind-set,” said Hitoshi Ikuma, a specialist in energy issues at the Japan Research Institute. “Energy conservation is almost an obsession here among government, companies, regular citizens, everyone.” .....

Japan is the most energy-efficient developed country on earth, according to most specialists, who say it is much better prepared than the United States to prosper in an era of higher global energy prices. And if there is any lesson that Japan can offer to Americans, they say, it is that there is no one fix-all solution to living with oil above $50 a barrel. .....

Japan tops most global comparisons of energy efficiency in wealthy nations. Its population and economy are each about 40 percent as large as that of the United States, yet in 2004 it consumed less than a quarter as much energy as America did, .....

....The guiding hand of government has also played a role, forcing households and companies to conserve by raising the cost of gasoline and electricity far above global levels. Taxes and price controls make a gallon of gasoline in Japan currently cost about $5.20, twice America’s more market-based prices.

The average household here used 4,177 kilowatt- hours of electricity in 2001, the most recent figure, according to the Jyukankyo Research Institute in Tokyo. In the same year, the average American household consumed more than twice that, or 10,655 kilowatt hours