Big deal. I'll bet your on grid right now.
A little science: The unit of
energy is the kilowatt-
hour, not the kilowatt, which is a unit of instanteous power.
If you meant to say kilowatt-hour, we can calculate how your "conservation" levels compare to the average energy consumption of a citizen of China, the country rich white guys like to trash for contributing to climate change. If you consume 1000 kwh per month, it follows, using something called "math" that just for your "appliances" you are consuming 12,000 kwh. Since there are still, as always, 8,766 hours in a year, it follows that your
electricity consumption alone is about 100 billion joules per year. This means your average continuous
power consumption is 3000 watts, some of which is probably involved in writing the smug post.
By contrast, the average continuous power consumption of a citizen of China was 277 Watts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumptionA citizen of India lives on 50 watts. A citizen of Sudan lives on 10 watts.
I'm very impressed with your "conservation will save us" notion that, um, Indians and Chinese and Sudanese should, um, live like you do and be as noble as you are.
On the other hand, your "sacrifice" might look a hell of a lot like consumerist luxury to them. And maybe they are
hoping to live like you. If they try, guess what? They're going to consume
more, way more, not less.
Or maybe you think they should agree to stay impoverished so you can feel happy about your sacrifice?
All new appliances?
You offer up some bull about mining.
Do you know where your magical solar cells come from?
Do you know what they're made of?
How about the batteries? Do tell us if the materials for those batteries quantum mechanically tunneled in from Jupiter or whether there might have been some, um, mining going on to make them.
Let me know exactly what your plan for helping a family of four near where I live, in say, Trenton, benefit from the "all new stuff" consumerist compliance tax break. Do you know how much such a tax break might effect a person trying to feed, clothe and educate their children on a Walmart salary (if one can get it)? You think a fucking tax break is going to induce them to buy an Energy Star refrigerator.
Bull. They're grateful if they
have a refrigerator, especially one with food in it, though truth be told, sometimes the only refrigerator that works that can be found in their neighborhoods is the one in the soup kitchen where people from my neighborhood go every Thanksgiving to feel, um, compassionate.
I am so sick of this smug consumer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortilla_Curtain">Tortilla Curtain "environmentalism."
If you don't know how people on this planet live, Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed Elbaradei sure as hell does.
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/printmember/elb0int-1">Interview: Mohamed El Baradei
Mohamed El Baradei: I went to Nigeria recently, and I compare that with the U.S. In the U.S., every American has 16,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That is enough, obviously, to empower your refrigerators, your air-conditioning, your iPods, everything you need. In Nigeria, they have 70 kilowatt hours per year. That translates into an 8-watt light bulb.
Interviewer: Did you say eight?
Mohamed El Baradei: An eight-watt light bulb. That's not even enough to power your personal computer. Without energy, there is no development. Without development, there is a sense of despair, and with a sense of despair, there are extremists. We need to understand always the link between development and security. That's something I very strongly believe in, and people need to understand. We cannot just erect borders.
We cannot erect walls between the north and the south, between the rich and the poor. We need to make sure that we have an equitable world, where every human being has the right to live a decent life, the right to live a life free from fear, the right to be able to send his kids to have education, the right to have Social Security in their old age. If you do that, I think the insecurities we feel -- the extremists that we are seeing -- will drop absolutely dramatically.
Notice that El Baradei who our grateful anti-nuke racists probably would not trust with nuclear energy because his name is
Mohamed is enuciating, subtly, the principles that precisely co-incide with the principles that were first enunciated by Eleanor Roosevelt in her
http://www.udhr.org/index.htm">Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which she had approved by the United Nations when she was the first American Ambassador to that body.
These are principles
worth enunciating, and guess what, a bunch of "me first" libertarians living a distributed energy toxicological nightmare off grid in an oblivious fashion are going to do
nothing toward that end.
El Baradei, of course, an Egyptian, is a tireless worker for nuclear energy and I suspect his reasons for being so are very much like
my reasons for doing so, even though El Baradei and I both live pretty damn well.
Have a nice Tortilla Curtain oblivious evening.
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