If designed properly, climate impact should be far less than a normal home, that's one of the main points (aside from the long-term climate impact). Locally sourcing the materials is a big part. Many try to get super-hippy-dippy and rely on manual wall construction with heavy emphasis on rammed earth, I think this is great from an impact perspective, but not really scalable or appealing to a wider audience. But if concrete can be augmented with local dirt (I.e. concrete cavities filled with earth as a thermal mass), this is an excellent compromise. The tire/bottle walls are really dumb, people need to stop using them (unless you like the aesthetic I guess, or have way more time than money, or feel like financing a lot of medium-skill laborers).

Earthships as imagined by Michael Reynolds are super specific to New Mexico. The design works well there, but if you try those techniques in basically any other part of the country, you are gonna have a bad time.

I think the biggest takeaway from the philosophy is "actually think about design and construction based on the location, rather than what is common/easy." Stick-in-place construction is widely common in USA, even when that design is an antipattern in a climate (such as the southwest).

See: why the standard Earthship (tm) (yes it's a trademark, anything else is just Sparkling Sustainable Architecture) designs are a bad choice for cold climates.

https://www.ecohome.net/guides/1161/do-earthships-work-in-co...

tl;dr - they are a design stuck in the 70's in NM. Eco architecture has advanced significantly since then.

Could you elaborate on eco architecture's advances? I always liked the idea of the earthship but, y'know, humidity.

Heat/enthalpy recovery ventilators are a big one. In New England, you want maximum insulation and minimum air leakage. Without mitigation, this leads to poor air quality. Therefore you want air changes, but you don't wanna vent all your heat (in winter, cold in summer), so you exchange heat between incoming and outgoing air.

HRVs only recover sensible (thermometer) heat but don't affect latent heat (humidity heat of vaporization) so there exist enthalpy recovery systems. However these run into icing problems in winter, when they would be most helpful. It's an area of active research.

Ground-source heat pumps are the best thing ever for temperate regions, since you can actually store heat/cold between temperature cycles and even seasons, but rather expensive to install, unless you are already putting in a leach field. I'm hoping for some advances in tech to make laying geothermal loops cheaper, I.e. cheaper and easier directional drilling.

E-glass (low emissivity) is increasingly popular. There's a cool trick where you have clerestory windows or skylights with e-coating to let in light but less IR. Then your south-facing regular windows have regular glass and big overhangs. This gives you year-round natural light and winter-only solar gain.

Thanks for this; I always thought it seemed a bit too good to be true