Monday, April 21, 2008

Energy Target Fairness--Absent at ABC News & National Geographic?

JohnR



Diapers and Showers and Sodas, Oh My!
I watched it... well until falling asleep. Here's my gripe.

There's a huge and growing gap between the relatively less/lighter impacts some of us are having and the relatively more/greater impacts others are having.

As a baby, I never used disposable diapers, thanks to my parents. Nowadays, I use about half the energy -- and discard about half the waste -- of what's being described as average. Much of this is how I am (maybe some from how I was brought up, some surely learned and evolved).

I think the declining-cost nature of these matters (i.e. pampers, energy, garbage disposal are cheaper the more you buy or do) makes more better.

Third-Sun's Geoff Greenfield said at NKU on Friday that the average customer he gets (wanting solar electric or wind) doesn't know how many kWh they use per day or per month or per year.

People just are not taught or encouraged to keep track of volumes like energy, waste, garbage or pollution. It's all abstract, as I said by phone the other day. If/when people actually start following their own numbers and comparing with others, as I do/encourage in my surveys and every presentation nowdays, they'd find there is usually no such thing as "average" or that few people find themselves in that group.

In all my writings and teachings, I instruct that responsibility and cost to use/waste/pollute less by whatever method(s) grows in direct relation to how
much one uses/wastes/pollutes.

If we decided tomorrow to cut gross usage/waste/pollution by a third or half, there are some of us who'd be able to relax and do nothing if we reference current averages per person as benchmark.

Others would find they have very hard work and/or big expense or change looking at them.

But I bet the mainstream would figure out a way to benchmark everyone where they were/are, such that I'd have to cut more even though I've already done rounds 1 and 2. This is just political/social reality. I think the show was woefully lacking in any perspectives like this... The fairness issues of goal setting applied to diversity of progress.

Still, on Saturday. I presented the average energy consumption of American households, based on DOE/EIA data: $1900 per year. My household is 48% of this based on 2007.

I broke averages into heating, cooling, lights, appliances, water heating,
refrigeration
, etc based on same source. Went thru each category, suggesting how much each could be cut BEFORE any solar-PV or RE. Then I showed how remaining values could and often are cut by practical RE, like passive solar and solar water heating.

Interestingly, the first and last speakers of Saturday's Green EnergyWorkshop had achieved EXTREMELY LOW usage.

You know, sometimes I get frustrated at how much lower my usage is than most households I audit, since I get the idea that most are doing almost nothing. Our total energy use is low, but we are in an all-electric house, so our electricity usage should be higher to account for heating (air, water, food, etc) But we are nonetheless about a third lower than KY average kWh per year. And that KY average is artificially lower because it includes also about 75% of KY homes which do not have electric-powered furnaces.

Anyway, back to the extremely low electric users, who they are and how they do it.

KSP's leader Andy McDonald with his wife and kid use but a tiny fraction of the kWhs I use. He does almost all heating with wood. And his "diesel Jetta" car is 50 mpg using a very high percent vegetable oil, so his carbon footprint is way lower.

Geoff Greenfield's presentation included his being off-grid for all electric for the last 10 years, although using quite a lot of LP for his generator backup.

The energy engineer who closed the show presented about power plants, but also showed that his annual kWh is down to between 3000 and 4000. Despite his very computer-heavy reliance like many of us. He actually operates a hydro plant on the KY River, from his home! Too cool!

I only say all this because I got a big healthy exposure to people who are doing way better than me/us. I'm a competitor and am reminded I need to kick myself in the butt, get even more done.

Sure, most people are still wallowing in their guzzling and grumbling, but that's no excuse for me to think where I am, howsoever improved from the past, is improved enough. Lots more to do. Too bad the guzzlers and grumblers don't think and act like that...






JeanetteHR
Personally, I'd be one to attack the diaper agenda of the greens as being unfairly dumping the waste reduction burden on children and their caregivers.

I've been on both sides of the users picture – having used cotton and later the 'paper' pampers, though not that brand -- and definitely do not believe that children benefit from this bogus idea that cotton and dripping messes is better than the well designed pamper-substitutes.

And the ridiculous idea that buying diapers in bulk/large quantities implies that you use them more wastefully is absurd. Buying in bulk and managing storage is a sensible way to operate a home, including diapers... etc.

So you see where this should launch lots of spirited exchanges among the politically correct greens as well as neo-greens.. Some ideas may look the same, but declining pricing for water usage certainly encourages people to waste water not conserve it but to apply that mechanism to diapers, which are stockable and storable, is poor thinking. Something is/was motivating this dumping on babies other than logic and facts.

Returning to the broader picture -- waste streams from total agricultural waste alone would replace about 4.5BB/y of the current oil use, namely all the imported oil! And the EPA documented waste streams in industry dwarf that! And we're supposed to believe that babies diapers are a solution. Really unbelievably absurd thinking. Thermal de-polymerization would convert those focussed waste streams to oil, remove the waste problems, solve the imported oil dependence, rebuild our economy, recover lost raw materials so we could reduce our CO2 and footprint, but will the money allocaters in industry and government even bring this idea forward? Deafening silence from them, while they sponsor TV programs on babies' waste streams? But that leads to even more twisted thinking in agriculture and industry.

Even just the waste in the standard stick built houses that are the required homes of the city/suburbs is figured to be more materials than HALF what they ultimately use and we pay for that. Think what those houses cost and picture how much material was wasted in their construction. Babies' diapers?

This sort of diversionary blaming is suspect. The monstrous wasters are not only setting children up to inherit a waste-drowned world, they are trying to make us believe that babies' diapers -- which are a sensible savings of time and effort, improve caregiving and comfort -- are the focus of what needs fixing?





JohnR
Regarding the diapers, again there's no discussion about how many babies.

Fictional character Nirgall said population x affluence was the formula. Malcolm Wells said to us that we could pretty much pollute and use as much as we wanted if it
weren't for our out-of-control population growth. I've said that as population grows, our individual allotments in a sustainable resource system go down. So it makes almost no sense to talk about how much anybody uses without a fulcrum somewhere. As one post at my website says, we need to know what we're aiming for. We can have great maps and vehicles of highest mpg, but if we don't where we're going, we're just driving around with great info and wheels.

In the fiction books Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars by Robinson, the character Nirgall is an ecological engineer, from the first class of grads from the 1st Mars university, from the 1st generation of humans born on Mars. Nirgall goes into politics, becomes a leader. He presents "ecological limits" to the Martian population, saying they need to pay far closer attention to how much energy, water and oxygen they use, because unlike on Earth, these resources are not only scarce but produced by intentional human efforts. In other words, humans were terraforming Mars, actually building eco-systems and technologies to produce necessities like water and oxygen. Nirgall tells the people that environmental impact is a function of how much population and affluence, explaining why births and affluence would be limited according to their gradually growing ecological carrying capacity.

I thought when reading it that he had it just about right. I also wondered when we'd develop a new school of studies called "ecological engineering".

In this nation, most focus on ecology is mostly about spirituality... Nice thing about ecological engineering is that it's an application of science. Who cares whether you're spiritual or not in that context... Same problem with "green", another new popular buzzword. Other than one book's title, I don't recall once seeing the word "green" used in those Mars books. Ecology has a specific meaning. Green is nebulous, nonspecific.