Is Greening Your Home Worth It? | Newsweek Project Green

PROJECT GREEN
Not Just for Tree Huggers
Daniel McGinn
Rob Moody didn't set out to be a builder. After graduating from college with a biology major, he began work as an environmental-science teacher in Asheville, N.C. On weekends, though, he spent long hours fixing up the classic shingle-style home his family had owned for nearly a century. Then, after seven years in cinder-block classrooms, he decided to make a change. "My love for old houses fell together with my love for the environment," says Moody, 34, who launched The EcoBuilders to construct environmentally friendly houses. Today Moody's foremen drive pickup trucks that run on used grease from fast-food fryers. And whether he's building new homes or renovating old ones, he insulates them to the hilt, uses sustainable materials and recycles so much debris that he requires only the smallest Dumpsters. Clients love the approach. "We doubled production last year, and we'll probably double again this year," Moody says.
POLITICS | TRUE OR FALSE
Candidates Think Flip-Flopping is the Only Way to Win Elections
Evan Thomas
The fund-raiser was unremarkable, by L.A. standards. Under enormous chandeliers at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, wealthy donors mingled with showbiz types (Dennis Quaid, Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Beals) and ate endive spears stuffed with brie. Couples willing to donate $28,500 got to dine beforehand with the candidate, Barack Obama, who gave his usual stump speech and mocked his opponent, John McCain, for believing "that a bunch of oil rigs along the California coast was a good idea." (McCain had just recommended that states be allowed to opt out of the federal ban on offshore drilling.) This last zinger got a roar from the crowd, not a few of whom own shorefront properties in places like Malibu and Santa Barbara.
HEALTH | MULTIPLE CHOICE
What Condition Could Stem Cells Help First?
Sharon Begley
The answer almost doesn't matter, because stem-cell research has become the latest casualty of a plague sweeping biomedical science: advances in the lab aren't reaching patients. Only part of the blame for the logjam can be pinned on President George W. Bush's 2001 executive order that crippled human embryonic-stem-cell research, which means that the problem won't magically disappear when Bush leaves the White House next January.
TECHNOLOGY
Is There a Hybrid Auto in Your Future?
Keith Naughton
With gas above $4 a gallon, hybrid cars are hotter than a laptop battery. But is gas-electric propulsion the future of personal transportation? It's definitely on the fast track. Federal forecasters predict hybrid sales could approach 2 million vehicles by 2013, accounting for 11 percent of the total U.S. auto market, up from 2.5 percent today. By then, we'll have 89 hybrid models from which to choose (including the hot little Honda pictured), up from 16 today.
TECHNOLOGY | TRUE OR FALSE
The Internet is the New Sweatshop
N’Gai Croal
When an executive wants to sound humane during a public address to the staff, he or she will trot out the well-worn phrase, "Our most valuable assets leave the building at the end of the day." Clichés are generally true, but this one may not be, thanks to the growth of user-generated content on the Internet. Whether they're creating content for sites like YouTube and Wikipedia, viewer-submitted news services like CNN's iReport or videogames like Spore and LittleBigPlanet, today's most valuable employees will most likely never set foot inside the building—or collect a paycheck. They may be teenagers posting videos of themselves dancing like Soulja Boy, programmers messing around with Twitter's tools to create cool new applications or aspiring game developers who want to create the next big thing. But what they all have in common is a somewhat surprising willingness to work for little more than peer recognition and a long shot at 15 seconds of fame.
BUSINESS
Green, or Greenwash?
Temma Ehrenfeld
When Kermit the Frog sang "It's not that easy being green" for the hybrid Ford Escape, he wasn't kidding: the eco set blasted Ford, noting that it plans to produce three times as many gas-guzzling pickups as hybrid SUVs (Ford counters that it's greening all its vehicles). Enviros are on the watch against"greenwashing," the "unjustified appropriation of environmental virtue," as one group puts it. Lexus, an eco-darling for its hybrid SUV, drew ire when it flew a car to Paul McCartney from Japan. Fiji has been lambasted for flying water around the world (the company carbon-offsets). Now consumers are showing "green fatigue": in a Boston College survey, only 47 percent said they trusted corporate green claims.