But they’re in the minority. Most homebuyers don’t think about the ongoing costs of home ownership beyond the mortgage and taxes; using energy costs, too. And fewer still think about the pollution that energy use creates, but home energy use accounts for 16 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The proportion of newly built Energy Star homes is growing, but still only represents 20 percent of new homes built in 2009, according to Sam Rashkin, national director of the Home Energy Star program.

Despite the slow increase in newly built efficient homes, some 99 percent of existing houses are “sick” — damp, drafty, dusty, noisy and expensive to heat and cool. They “could be made at least 30 percent more energy-efficient with highly cost-effective, tried-and-true energy-efficiency improvements,” according to Rashkin. A 30% reduction in energy use is a 30% reduction in home energy costs; newly built Energy Star homes have, since 1995, saved homeowners an estimated $1.2 billion.

The Energy Star program won’t fix those old houses. Energy Star designations go to the cream of the housing stock; if just one in five new homes meets these standards, far fewer renovations do. So if energy efficient homes cost homeowners less and pollute less, why aren’t they more commonplace? Experts say economics and regulations are the root of the problem: Mortgages are structured in ways that fail to recognize the benefits of energy efficiency, while a patchwork of inconsistent and ill-enforced energy codes provides conflicting signals to industry.

Meanwhile consumers remain largely unaware of efficiency’s advantages, advocates say, thereby bypassing an easy target for considerable cuts in national carbon emissions — and home energy bills.

In this sense the Fuersts are typical of many homebuyers. Both in their late twenties, the Fuersts were aware of Energy Star-rated appliances, but didn’t know the label also applied to homes, said Krista Fuerst, a childcare director. Their home, which wouldn’t stand out in any new subdivision, and they mostly just wanted a place big enough to raise a family. They traded slightly longer commutes for smaller energy bills and freedom from costly renovations.

“We’re certainly conscious of the environment,” she explained, “but we’re not hyper-conscious. We’re not extreme green.”

Of course, the ultra-efficient heating and cooling systems, high-performance windows and other features that make the homes exceptionally comfortable also make them a bit pricier. The added cost for a new Energy Star home may only be about the price of a night at the movies on each month’s mortgage payment, but it’s enough to scare off many potential buyers.

“It’s an incredibly smart choice,” Rashkin said, since smaller utility bills more than offset the higher price. “But consumers are overwhelmed by first cost.”

Energy-efficient mortgages

To get buyers over that hump, a handful of specialized mortgage options have for decades given buyers more cash up front, since they’ll save on energy costs. But nobody’s buying. Before the mortgage crisis, when loans were easier to come by and energy was relatively cheap, energy-efficient mortgages weren’t very enticing, experts say, and lenders didn’t bother with them. Now the specialized options are more valuable, but lenders have grown accustomed to ignoring them.

“It’s really unfortunate,” said Jennifer Amann, buildings program director for the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “Energy-efficient mortgages have been available now for 20 years or so, but they’re a really underutilized tool.”

While energy-efficient mortgages are a good idea, there’s a more obvious solution, according to Cliff Majersik, executive director of the Institute for Market Transformation, which advocates for energy efficiency: Make all mortgages – not just specialized ones – account for energy use.

“The fact is that energy-efficient homes have much lower foreclosure and delinquency rates. So that’s a market failure, that we’re not giving homeowners credit for buying good, efficient homes,” Majersik said. “The challenge is that there are processes that have been in place for a long time, and there’s pretty clear evidence that they’ve let us down.”

The House climate bill includes a handful of provisions that would reward buyers of efficient homes. For example, the Federal Housing Administration would be required to insure at least 50,000 energy-efficient mortgages over three years, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would make the kind of wholesale changes to underwriting guidelines sought by Rashkin, Majersik and others. Another provision would enforce a national building code that would improve efficiency on new buildings by 30% immediately, and 70% by 2029. Currently, states can adopt any building codes they want, so requirements vary widely.

Homebuilders say they’ll build more efficient homes when buyers ask for them, but demand won’t grow until more people understand the benefits of efficiency. Many who have lived in energy efficient homes are convinced.

“The house is heated very evenly,” Krista Fuerst explained. “There are no cold spots and no drafts.” They set the thermostat at 67 degrees — much lower than would have been comfortable in their rental — and turn it down to 57 when they leave in the morning, but the temperature never drops that low, even after 12-hour days. So far their heating bills have been just over half what they paid last winter. “Now that we have lived in an energy-efficient house,” she said, “it would be very difficult to go back.”

Yet here in one of the more thoroughly tilled cities in America, subversive has come full circle: the federal government plans to plant its own bold garden directly above a downtown plaza. As part of a $133 million renovation, the General Services Administration is planning to cultivate “vegetated fins” that will grow more than 200 feet high on the western facade of the main federal building here, a vertical garden that changes with the seasons and nurtures plants that yield energy savings.

“They will bloom in the spring and summer when you want the shade, and then they will go away in the winter when you want to let the light in,” said Bob Peck, commissioner of public buildings for the G.S.A. “Don’t ask me how you get them irrigated.”

Rainwater, captured on the roof, and perhaps even “gray water” recycled from the interior plumbing are both possibilities, the architects say. But they concede that they are still figuring out some of the finer points of renovating the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building, which was completed in 1975 and is currently 18 stories of concrete, glass and minimal inspiration.

Who will prune the facade? Maybe the same folks who wash skyscraper windows, the architects say. Perhaps the exterior concrete panels removed in the renovation could be reused as salmon habitat in a nearby river.

The G.S.A. says the building will use 60 percent to 65 percent less energy than comparable buildings and estimates a savings of $280,000 annually in energy costs. Solar panels could provide up to 15 percent of the building’s power needs. The use of rainwater and low-flow plumbing fixtures will reduce potable water consumption by 68 percent. And energy for lighting will be halved.

“It will be one of the more energy-efficient high-rises in America, possibly in the world,” said James Cutler, whose architecture firm, Cutler Anderson, led the design work.

The building has long been in line for renovation and improvements in energy efficiency, but money did not come through until the passage of the federal stimulus package last year, with its emphasis on environmentally friendly projects. That intensified the environmental ambitions; the building, the largest federal stimulus project in Oregon, is being renovated under the G.S.A’s new Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the plan. In December, Senators John McCain of Arizona and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, both Republicans, criticized the cost of the project and ranked it second on a list of what they called the 100 worst stimulus-financed projects. The G.S.A. has said that report relied on incomplete data, but the project’s cost has also raised eyebrows here.

Joe Vaughan, a longtime commercial real estate broker here, said that the building’s office space would ultimately cost more per square foot than some other environmentally-conscious projects that are built new.

“As a taxpayer, I think it’s a horrible waste of money that no private developer would undertake,” Mr. Vaughan said.

G.S.A. officials said the cost of constructing federal office buildings cannot be compared to private buildings because of security and other government requirements. Nor, they said, should the construction costs of the building be viewed in isolation.

“The idea is that the cost savings are in the energy efficiency,” said Caren Auchman, a spokeswoman for the G.S.A.

There are questions about whether the efficiency efforts will work as designed. “Most of what we put in our buildings is tried and true,” said Mr. Peck, of the G.S.A. “On some part of it, we’re prepared to be a beta tester.”

“My dream,” Mr. Peck added, “is we will find a technology that needs a test and we will make the market for it.”

The renovation is scheduled to be completed by 2013, said Donald Eggleston, the president of SERA Architects, which is overseeing the project for the G.S.A. This summer, he said, landscaping experts will experiment with vines and cover plants that can endure Portland’s wet, mild winters and its dry, hot summers — and do so at varying heights.

“We may train them on some vines in the nursery,” Mr. Eggleston said. “About 50 percent of the windows we need to shade every summer. You can’t take little seedlings up there in Year 1, because you won’t have anything up there for five years.”

Our own HotJobs points out several top recession-proof fields right now. The areas of education, energy, health care, and the environment itself are all good bets. And greenies will be glad to know that these overlap with E: The Environmental Magazine’s list of booming eco-friendly job sectors.

Other hot fields include environmental law, information technology, government planning and land use, and waste management and recycling. Plus, jobs such as accounting, human resources, and project management continue to be needed within environmental organizations of all types.

So where do you start your green job search? We’ve collected some of the best websites for job listings and other resources for a new earth-focused career.

• Sustainable Business Green Dream Jobs: Large list of positions at all levels with environmentally conscious employers. From solar water heating system installer to web producer, from human resources assistant to fish campaign organizer, you’re bound to find something intriguing here.
• Idealist.org Job Search: Openings at nonprofits; search on “environmental & ecology” or “energy conservation & green living” for unique listings such as organic farm manager in Southwest Florida and video editor for the Clinton Foundation.
• Green Jobs: This site is all about the burgeoning area of renewable energy. If you’re interested in solar, wind, or biofuels, whether installing, engineering, or selling, check this one out.
• EnvironmentalCareer.com: Lists hundreds of jobs, especially in environmental sciences and energy fields. Also has opportunities to transfer existing skills into green businesses — for example, a senior billing coordinator position for environmental consultants.
• Business for Social Responsibility Jobs Board: Worldwide positions at companies that value people, communities, and the environment. Includes big names such as the Walt Disney Company.
• Grist Job Board: Environmental groups from around the country post their jobs here. Also, Grist’s Kevin Doyle has a series of articles about the green job market.
• TreeHugger Job Board: Dozens of green business and organizations list their openings here. Subscribe to the RSS feed for the latest updates.
• Jobs With the National Park Service: Love the great outdoors? You could work anywhere from Hawaii’s volcanoes to Yellowstone’s geysers. The park service has 16,000 permanent employees and another 10,000 seasonal employees each year.
• World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms: If you’re interested in the fast-growing field of organic food (no pun intended), you could volunteer on a farm to get experience. This site connects volunteers with farms around the planet.

Another green tip: Many companies encourage applying online these days, so you can email your resume. But if you have to print it, look for high-quality paper made with recycled fibers. No point killing trees when you’re applying for an earth-friendly job!

A group of scientists who sequenced the genomes of three parasitic wasp species say their work has revealed that the tiny insects have features useful for both pest control and medicine, and could even improve understanding of genetics and evolution.

In a study to be published in Friday’s edition of Science magazine, lead researchers John Werren, a professor of biology at the University of Rochester in New York, and Stephen Richards at the Baylor College of Medicine, Texas, described their tiny subjects.

“Parasitic wasps attack and kill pest insects, but many of them are smaller than the head of a pin, so people don’t even notice them or know of their important role in keeping pest numbers down,” Werren said.

“There are over 600,000 species of these amazing critters, and we owe them a lot. If it weren’t for parasitoids and other natural enemies, we would be knee-deep in pest insects.”

The tiny insects lay their eggs inside often much larger hosts, including caterpillars. When the eggs hatch, they kill the unsuspecting host from the inside out.

But the wasps only target specific insects, acting like “smart bombs,” said Werren.

“Therefore, if we can harness their full potential, they would be vastly preferable to chemical pesticides, which broadly kill or poison many organisms in the environment, including us.”

The wasps, which all fall in the Nasonia genus, also offer promise for genetic research.

Like the fruit fly, a common genetic research subject, the wasps are small, easily grown in a laboratory and reproduce quickly, but the wasps have only one set of chromosomes.

“A single set of chromosomes, which is more commonly found in lower single-celled organisms such as yeast, is a handy genetic tool, particularly for studying how genes interact with each other,” Werren said.

The scientists also uncovered, to their surprise, that the wasps have acquired genes related to the human smallpox virus, a discovery that may have applications for the study of evolutionary processes.

“Emerging from these genome studies are a lot of opportunities for exploiting Nasonia in topics ranging from pest control to medicine, genetics, and evolution,” Werren said.

The A3 is driven by a 2.0 liter clean diesel engine that gets 42 MPG on the highway. The A3 is another example of the new clean diesel that is legal in all 50 states. Last year’s winner was the 2009 Jetta TDI, so clean diesel has certainly arrived as a competitor in the green car field. Other finalists for the award were the Honda Insight hybrid, Mercury Milan Hybrid, Toyota Prius, and the VW Golf TDI.

Audi also showed up with its second “e-tron” concept car. (An earlier e-tron concept was unveiled at the 2009 Frankfurt Motor Show a few months ago.) While it looks like something a Cylon might drive, it is a powerful 2-seat electric sports car with 45 kWh battery capacity and two electric motors that provide over 200 hp. This gives it a range of 250 kilometers (155 miles). As a sports car, its numbers aren’t quite as strong as the Tesla roadster, but it is likely to appeal to a different buyer than the Tesla.

In remarks today, the company announced that an e-tron vehicle is expected to be ready by 2012. Audi’s strategy for electric vehicles is to skip the ‘mild hybrids’ that use electric motors just as a boost to the gasoline engine and instead focus on full hybrids. Their direction is to prepare for the future when electric drive vehicles are more commonplace. Audi representatives also announced that a full hybrid Audi A8 is to be unveiled at the upcoming Geneva Auto Show.

Across the semi-arid region that is home to more than 20 million people, restrictions on water use in homes and businesses imposed this year have produced a 15% savings, regional water officials say.

Leading the way has been Los Angeles itself, where a more than 18% reduction means the city will have used less water in 2009 than it did 25 years ago, despite the addition of 1 million people in that time, according to the city’s Department of Water and Power.

“The region has really responded,” says Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

The biggest water conservation results have come from residential customers, rather than business or industry, city water figures show. The cost, for many residents, has been brown, dormant or dying grass lawns due to a stricter water diet.

“We restricted watering the lawns — that was the main saving measure,” says David Freeman, general manager of the L.A. Department of Water and Power.

Since June, Los Angeles has permitted lawn sprinklers to run only on Mondays and Thursdays, for no more than 15 minutes a day, and never between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., when evaporation is greatest. The restrictions are enforced by more than a dozen “water police” who patrol for sprinkler scofflaws and follow tips by residents tattling on water-wasteful neighbors.

Those water cops have investigated 17,000 cases since June and issued more than 6,000 citations, and repeat offenders face fines of $100 to $600 and potentially having their water shut off, L.A. water department spokeswoman Jane Galbraith says. The city raised fees for customers whose monthly usage exceeds a fixed allotment based on historical use and family size.

The result has been a more than 23% reduction in water use by single-family homes here.

“Frankly, a lot of people pretty much gave up on keeping a green lawn all summer and kind of gave in to it,” says Freeman, a former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority. “There was no shortage of angry people.”

Substitutes for grass

Tight water supplies have sent some searching for more environmentally friendly alternatives to green grass — such as no-water landscaping with gravel and cactus; low-water native plants such as rosemary, lilac and yuccas; and synthetic grass.

Daniel Bagdon and Rick von Schrader, partners in a ForeverLawn franchise, have been ripping out brown grass and installing their proprietary brand of artificial lawns at homes ranging from multimillion-dollar mansions in Malibu and Pacific Palisades to more modest houses and apartments. Their green synthetic turf has replaced natural grass in public parks, fields and dog runs and around commercial buildings.

Business has been up 20% to 25% this year, von Schrader says, much of it driven by customers tired of the cost and hassles of watering. “Half the time people say, ‘I want to save on my water bill,’ ” Bagdon says. “It comes down to cost.”

Los Angeles soon may start paying some of the cost of replacing grass lawns. Freeman said his department is proposing that the City Council adopt a “cash for grass” program next year in which residents who rip out grass lawns for one of the drought-friendly alternatives will receive cash or rebates. Freeman said they have not decided on an amount, but he expects the incentive will exceed $1 per square foot of grass removed.

The city has other restrictions. It is illegal to wash a car using a hose without a shut-off nozzle, to wash down hard-surfaced driveways and sidewalks, or to not repair a leaky pipe or fixture.

Restaurants are prohibited from serving glasses of water to customers unless they request it — even though drinking water accounts for 1% or less of water consumption, Freeman says. “It’s to bring it to people’s attention,” he says. “Obviously it’s not to save that quantity of water.”

Not everyone’s happy

Some say the restrictions go too far.

Greig Smith, an L.A. City Council member from the San Fernando Valley, calls the lawn watering limits “too draconian” and is proposing an ordinance allowing watering three days a week for a shorter time period, eight minutes.

He said he used that watering pattern on his own yard and kept it green — though he was in violation of the city’s limits.

“My lawn is one of the greenest on the street. It worked,” Smith says. “What prompted me was … neighborhood after neighborhood looking really run down with bushes, lawns and flowers dying.”

Los Angeles and Southern California receive little rainfall most of the year and rely heavily on imports of water via aqueducts from the Owens Valley in eastern California, the Sierra Nevada through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and the Colorado River. Each of those sources is under pressure by drought, competing interests and in the case of the Delta, court-ordered restrictions on pumping for environmental reasons.

Each year has brought new limits on the amount of water available to Southern California from those sources. Even critics such as Smith acknowledge that forced conservation isn’t ending anytime soon.

“We do live in a desert,” Smith says. “We have lost a lot of our water rights over the last two decades, and that has hampered our ability to provide water to Los Angeles. We are going to have to live with this forever and be smart about it.”

If we think we’re already pretty good, the logic goes, why should we waste resources trying to be good — we’ve already accomplished goodness.

A new study (abstract with link to free PDF), set for publication in Psychological Science, takes this idea a step further, and in a way particularly relevant to our suddenly “green” product rich world. What is the effect of all these green buying options suddenly available to millions of Americans. Well, in short:

In line with the halo associated with green consumerism, people act more altruistically after mere exposure to green than conventional products. However, people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products as opposed to conventional products.

That is, exposure to the concept of “greenness” makes us act better; but indulgence in the actual purchasing of green products makes us act worse.

An article in Slate describes the experiment:

In an experiment, participants were randomly assigned to select items they wanted to buy in one of two online stores. One store sold predominantly green products, the other mostly conventional items. Then, in a supposedly unrelated game, all of the participants were allocated $6, to share as they saw fit with an anonymous (and unbeknownst to them, imaginary) recipient. Subjects who had chosen items from the green store coughed up less money, on average, than their counterparts. In a second experiment, participants were again assigned to shop in either a green or conventional store. Then they performed a computer task that involved earning small sums of cash. The setup offered the opportunity to cheat and steal with impunity. The eco-shoppers were more likely to do both.

The environment is certainly not the only place where this idea of moral self-regulation pops up. Another recent study found that white people who voted for Obama later appeared to feel they had more license to be racist in other aspects of their lives.

Alternately, research has shown the effect to work in the reverse. When people are made to feel negatively about their moral status, they’ll act better to try to compensate.

The ultimate lesson, I think, is that our motives are rarely what we think they are. We think we want to do good to do good, but more likely we want to do good because we feel guilty. Likewise, those of us who think we’re good people, we’re probably the ones who act the worst — because we think we’ve got no moral deficit to pay off.

So, buy green this holiday season. That green product is a green light to act like a real bastard the rest of the year.

There’s been some focus on going green by going bigger recently. But often, efficiency just becomes one more pathway to profligate waste. Let’s take interstate highways as an example here, since they’re both the solution to and cause of so many of our problems.

Let’s say you wanted to move a 100,000 cars from one city to the next city before interstates. The gridlock would have been tremendous. Cars would have idled for days, travelling at low, inefficient speeds with start and stop traffic that would have wasted a huge amount of gasoline. With interstates, those 100,000 cars can speed along a seven lane highway at efficient speeds without ever tapping the breaks. Highways are much more efficient.

Of course, before Atlanta had seven lane highways, no one was driving 60 miles to work every morning. The waste per mile driven has dropped dramatically, but much more dramatic is the rise in miles driven. In the end, interstates led us to build our cities in an extremely unstable way that I believe is responsible for a great deal of the current economic turmoil in the world, not to mention an unstable global climate.

This story re-plays itself over and over again. Technology lets us build more efficient televisions, so we make them gigantic. Technology allows us to build the Airbus A380, with room for 853 passengers, by far the most efficient plane per passenger mile, and suddenly a billion more people can afford air travel. Technology allows us to build a cruise ship that holds 6,300 passengers, transporting them with 30% less fuel per passenger, and there are 6,300 people eating crab cakes and surfing on artificial waves on a boat that’s too big to dock anywhere in Europe.

Bigger is greener when you’re replacing needs that were met inefficiently elsewhere. If you’re getting someone on a bus instead of in a car, or in an apartment building instead of a house, that’s greener. But if you’re creating new and exciting ways for people to over-consume efficiently or, worse, unsustainable infrastructure that will only lead to an unstable future for our world, then bigger is better for someones wallet in the short term, but bad for us all in the end.

About 100 German McDonald’s restaurants will make the change by the end of 2009, the company said in a statement Monday. Some franchises in Great Britain and France have already started using the new color scheme behind their Golden Arches.

“This is not only a German initiative but a Europewide initiative,” Martin Nowicki, McDonald’s Germany spokesman, told The Associated Press.

The Oak Brook, Illinois-based burger behemoth has more than 32,000 restaurants in 118 countries and has long been targeted by activists as being environmentally unfriendly.

Still, in recent years the company has warmed to “greener” practices, including environmentally friendly refrigeration and converting used oil into biodiesel fuel.

“With this new appearance we want to clarify our responsibility for the preservation of natural resources. In the future we will put an even larger focus on that,” Hoger Beek, vice chairman of McDonald’s Germany, said in the statement.

In Germany, McDonald’s has seen significant growth despite the global economic crisis, opening 42 new restaurants this year for a total of 1,350.

The chain plans to open another 40 new restaurants across Germany in 2010, encouraged by a worldwide revenues of $23.5 billion.

I’m not going to lie: it’s a little confusing to get your head around. First, Winston discusses smaller companies’ decision to put green issues to the side during the recession. Cost concerns basically put other projects on the back burner for many small companies, despite pressures to the contrary, while some larger corporations still forged ahead in the world of eco-friendly products and production.

From Walmart to GE, some of the largest companies in the world pursued, and are pursuing, carbon emission reduction programs. In fact, Winston points out, “over half the largest 500 companies in the world now have specific greenhouse gas reduction targets.”

Which brings us to Hopenhagen’s place in the green scheme of things– costs on carbon and emissions will stimulate green initiatives worldwide. With proper policies, many countries will be able to take a piece of a market estimated to be worth $2 trillion by 2020.