The Global Economy?

The NY Times published an interesting report last week about the growing construction in Europe of "passive houses" that are heated without furnaces. According to the owner of one such house in Germany, he uses one twentieth the heating energy of a comparably sized home.

So far, the majority of the 15,000 passive houses that have been built have been concentrated in Germany and Scandinavia. Why not the U.S.? The reasons given make you scratch your head:

The first passive home was built here in 1991 by Wolfgang Feist, a local physicist, but diffusion of the idea was slowed by language. The courses and literature were mostly in German, and even now the components are mass-produced only in this part of the world.

[snip]

But the sophisticated windows and heat-exchange ventilation systems needed to make passive houses work properly are not readily available in the United States. So the construction of passive houses in the United States, at least initially, is likely to entail a higher price differential.

So the technology has not made it to the U.S. because of difficulties with translation and importation? Don't we all sing hymns to the glory of the global economy?