Our houses are way too big

(and our cars are way too fast)

DURHAM -- After former presidential candidate Al Gore's global warming film "An Inconvenient Truth" won the Academy Award for best documentary this year, some conservatives called Gore a hypocrite because he owns a 10,000-square-foot house in Nashville. His power bills allegedly run $1,200 a month.

Current presidential candidate John Edwards is building a 28,000-square-foot compound -- about the size of a Food Lion -- near Chapel Hill. He, too, has been attacked for housing extravagances while claiming to represent the poor. Edwards' power bills are likely to be in the stratosphere.

A year or so ago, my wife and I toured a 10,000-square-foot model home in one of those subdivisions incorporating "plantation" in its name, just to see what such a thing looked like. It had an indoor basketball court, a theater, a bar, a panic room, a walk-in humidor and not one, but two kitchens.

There are many others out there like it, using gobs of power.

On another luxury front, Car & Driver magazine notes that the $110,000 Audi S8 has 450 horsepower and goes from 0 to 60 mph in just over five seconds. The top speed approaches 150 mph.

Many other cars offer similar performance. Nearly every car on the road will hit 100 mph.

With oil and natural gas volatile commodities, electricity stretched to the point of brownouts in some cities during summer and an increasing number of deaths involving speed -- especially among teen drivers -- I offer a simple two-fold plan to save money, energy and lives.

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As of Jan. 1, 2009, all cars manufactured for sale in this country, import or domestic, regardless of size, should have a top speed of 80 mph.

All new houses should be restricted to a nationwide size limit of 5,000 square feet.

Sound outrageous?

The fastest legal speed limit in this country is 75 mph. Why are cars sold that will do more than twice that?

Not only will capping speed and engine size make driving safer, but these measures will also save barrels and barrels of oil.

Similarly, a limit on house size will prevent the building of new palaces big enough to suck up the power it would take to light an African village.

Houses need not be enormous to accommodate growing families. My wife was one of four children. She, her siblings and her parents were very comfortable in their four-bedroom house in McLean, Va., a place my mother-in-law still calls home.

Similarly proportioned houses around her are disappearing rapidly, however. The 2,500-square-foot homes that have stood for 50 years in this Washington suburb are being torn down and replaced by structures two and three times as large. These overachieving abodes eat up not only more energy, but also the generous yards that surrounded the destroyed dwellings.

The occupants of one of these McMansions are a couple without children who are downsizing!

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I know -- I'm suggesting Big Government solutions to environmental issues. This is America. What gives the government the right to tell me what size to build my house?

(That's what homeowners' associations are for.)

But how many rooms can you physically be in at one time? And why would car companies sell autos that can go 150 mph -- or even 100 mph -- when those speeds are both illegal and unsafe?

The inconvenient truth is that no one needs a house over 5,000 square feet, and no one needs a car that travels faster than 80 mph. We would all benefit from downsizing, slowing down to reasonable levels and having more resources, including the human lives lost in car crashes resulting from dangerously fast driving.

It's time for real solutions to energy consumption and highway safety issues. These proposals are at the very least conversation starters.

(Anthony Hatcher is an associate professor of communications at Elon University. He and his wife live in a 1,600-square-foot house in Durham.)