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The Real Test Is Your Action
by jdp
We have had several discussions at the Moon of Alabama about peak oil, what the market does concerning energy and how world stability affects oil prices. Well, instead of arguing over oil, I feel it’s better to try and figure out and apply methods to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and be environmentally friendly. While this may not wet our appetites for Bush bashing, energy conservation surely isn’t his favourite subject.
First some web sites. Everyone should go on-line to www.energysavers.gov, a US Department of Energy site and download “Energy Savers: Tips on Saving Energy & Money at Home.” This booklet shows where in picture form and tells where you lose the most energy in your home and tips on how to correct problems.
Another useful website is the Energy Star site at: www.energystar.gov. This site rates all appliances in the home. If an appliance doesn’t have an Energy Star label, you want to ask for Energy Star standard appliances.
Just some “Fast Facts” from an Energy Star fact sheet I received at a conference last week. “If every household in the United States changed the lighting in one room of their home to Energy Star,”
1. We would save 857 billion kWh of energy and keep one trillion pounds of greenhouse gases out of the air.
2. Our annual energy savings alone would be equivalent to the annual output of more than 21 power plants.
3. Our annual savings could light more than 34 million US homes for one year.
This should be more than enough reason to switch light bulbs in your house. Our family is doing our part. Our home has fluorescent throughout including my outside lights. Our first sets of fluorescent lights lasted seven years. My walkway lights are solar. Our home has extra insulation including six inch walls and fourteen inches in the ceiling. We also have insulated floors. All of our appliances are energy efficient and our washer is a low water use washer.
On the local level, some of the initiatives our community is involved in are amazing. The community has a bio mass power plant located in it. The community received an Agricultural Renaissance Zone designation for forty acres. To heat any new business that may locate in the Ag Zone, the community through grants and grant match, run a circulating hot water line using power plant cooling water. This will provide 90 degree plus hot water to the businesses, the heat can be extracted and the water returned cooler. This increases the efficiency of the power plant, and allows the Ag businesses a cheap source of heat. (Europe is far ahead of the US in this type of venture, though eco-parks are becoming more common in the US.)
Along the river in the community a functioning Grist Mill is being built. Much of the cost is being paid for by grants, donations from business and individuals, and donations from local governmental units. This project has been seven years in the making. It has a twenty foot high water wheel and will be able to provide grain grinding demonstrations, and produce electricity. On the building will be solar electric and in the river a micro-hydro unit to produce electricity. The building should have plenty of electric and put energy back on the grid. The building will be heated with ground water through a heat exchanger.
The walls will be insulated with 1 1/2 inch foam with foil backing that reflects cold and heat. The building is wrapped in foil insulation with a R 10.2 value. The walls will have a four inch dead air space giving the walls a total of R-30.6 value. The roof rafters have 1″ ridged radiant barrier foam board with an R-12 factors. On top will be 12″ of blown insulation with an R-38 value for a total of R-50 value in the ceilings. This is a great addition to the community. And as a side note, the community officially has a new telecom company that will be a rural cooperative. They will locate in a room in the Grist Mill building and provide telephone, internet, cable TV and home alarm services to areas that currently do not have phone service. Yes, there are still many areas in the US without telephone service.
These are a few things you can do, what I am doing and what our community is doing. We can argue about peak oil anytime, but, the real test is the actions you personally take to help the problem. I would appreciate stories of peoples own energy conservation efforts and any ideas.
@Gylangirl
au contraire, I know quite a few families with kids who don’t use cars, or use them only minimally. it’s true that country dwellers have a harder time of it, and imho a legitimate use for powered individual transport; but the majority of the world’s people live in cities or urbanised areas, not out in the country.
the really intractable problem (aside from the deliberate sabotage and dismantling of US public transit networks in the 40’s — they can be rebuilt) is the “have cake and eat it too” suburban lifestyle, invented in the US — in which people choose (and are encouraged) to live at a great distance from shops, libraries, schools and other amenities, in a kind of wasteland that is neither country nor city, neither rural solitude nor community. they expect to enjoy all the amenities of urban life, while remaining cloistered in an enclave restricted to their own class (and sometimes race); and the only glue that will hold that lifestyle together is neverending car use, hours and hours of life-time spent driving around consuming fossil fuel and emitting toxins.
interestingly enough, the strange life of the suburbs, usually embraced partly for a sense of “safety,” turns out not to be any more safe than urban living; suburbanites are more likely to be killed or injured by a car than urbanites are to be mugged, and urbanites who walk/bike/bus have better general health than suburbanites. oddly there is not much difference in stress/depression levels between the two demographics, though I myself find suburbs intensely depressing. Guardian Article.
Twitch back the lace curtains and, far from a good life, you’ll find that living in the “burbs” can lead to a range of chronic illnesses including high blood pressure, arthritis, diabetes and migraines, according to new research.
Scientists writing in the journal Public Health even found that the strain of life in suburbia could leave residents prematurely aged, compared with city dwellers.
great legacy to pass on to the kids eh? and that is not counting the issues in child development raised by Mayer Hillman and others — the “UPS package kids” who are shuttled from one location to another through their entire childhoods, never achieving independent mobility until they can get their driver’s license at the age of 16, miss out on some fairly important stages of mental, social, and physical development. loving parents imagine that cocooning their kids from cradle to high school in heavily armoured cars is a good thing, but it may not be.
btw there is no such thing as “a car that doesn’t ruin the environment” — this is like believing you can be a vegetarian and still eat chicken. the definition of “car” as we know it is a heavy vehicle (15 to 30+ times the weight of its driver plus payload) with a power plant sufficient to provide snappy acceleration and high speeds over long distances. there is no power source other than fossil fuel that will provide this blend of features, nor is there any way to make the absurd disproportion of vehicle weight to payload weight anything other than grossly inefficient and wasteful. nor for that matter is there any way to make the huge, heavy vehicle w/o enormous energy investments, materials mining, etc.
if we consider the greenhouse gas emissions for which the average US car is “responsible” — the emissions that can be traced or apportioned to that particular car — then 30 percent of that total emission happens during manufacturing. its subsequent life on the roadway accounts for only 2/3 of its contribution to greenhouse gas overload. and we’re not even talking about the amount of clean water that is irretrievably polluted by the various manufacturing processes, etc.
now, we could get creative and imagine a private, covered, self-powered vehicle that would be more sustainable, but it would not be recognisable to today’s driver as “a car” — the body would be made of ultralight composites, the acceleration would be modest, the top speed would be modest, it would not be as soundproofed, the range would be more limited, etc. it would, of course, be far safer — driver, passenger, pedestrian and cyclist deaths would be reduced considerably. but today’s driver would reject it out of hand. it would not be “fast enough” or “strong enough” or (and this I think is the real reason) macho and swaggering enough to keep consumers happy.
I note that car-dependent persons often seem to recite the same script when brought face to face with the consequence of car-dependence; and the script is similar enough both emotionally and structurally to the script that substance addicts recite, that the metaphor or simile of “addiction” remains defensible for me.
the driver disavows all responsibility for the choices they have made that commit them to car-dependence. they disavow responsibility for the pollution they emit, or the fuel they guzzle, or the noise they inflict on others, or the pedestrians they endanger, or the millions of animals killed by cars every year, or the health problems they inflict on themeselves by total car dependence. the responsibility is all with someone else… a shadowy “They” who must “invent” a magical solution that will let us have our cars, just like they are now, and yet still have a healthy planet. it’s always someone else’s problem to “fix it”. it’s always “you can’t expect people to…” (get wet when it rains, walk more than a block, make friends with their neighbours, not fly everywhere at the drop of a hat, travel more slowly, get a little exercise)– but on the other hand we can confidently expect other people — lots of them — to die or starve or accept perpetual colonial occupation, so we can go on driving our cars everywhere. I know which expectation I think is “plain crazy.”
and, by the way, No, we can’t run them on peanut butter 🙂
Posted by: DeAnander | Sep 29 2004 18:38 utc | 21
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