Not to pick on them, but, as reported in the Washington Post, it seems that Peg and Ronald Buchanan, from the Washington area, built a mega-beach house in North Carolina's outer banks with eight bedrooms, 5000 square feet of living space, a heated pool and a kiddie pool. The house, right on the beach front, sits just a few feet above sea level.
We figure the carbon footprint for this big ol' beach house with its two pools has gotta be huge--we're talking way beyond Bigfoot.
Now, the Buchanans have a problem. They can't get insurance on the home, valued--at least until the insurance problem--at $2 million. It seems the federal government has reclassified the beachfront area where their home is located as a high risk flood area. In other words, the rest of us are no longer going to be required to subsidize the risk that a hurricane will wash the Buchanans' home into the sea.
We feel sorry for the Buchanans, since they did invest a significant portion of their life's savings into this home. And certainly the Buchanans are not unique--a lot of folks in the U.S. have large carbon footprints.
Still, there's a poetic justice in all this: global warming coming back to haunt the folks causing global warming instead of poor folks in third world countries.
[We'll post some more on this next week--the Buchanans' story appears as part of an in-depth report on the Post on how insurers are pulling back from various coastal areas--and even metropolitan New York--due to worries about the increasing toll of global warming. It's an important story, yet the Post for some reason put it on the front of the Style section on a Saturday morning, rather than page one on a weekday, where it belongs.]
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