How to Live a Low-Energy Lifestyle (Truthout, via AlterNet)

[marmar]

How to Live a Low-Energy Lifestyle

By Kelpie Wilson, TruthOut.org. Posted April 5, 2007.



Americans can cut consumption and keep their affluence -- but it will take a change in priorities.

Al Gore is really doing it, bringing climate awareness to the doorsteps of opinion makers and forcing them to consider all of its implications. Of course, no good deed ever goes unpunished in this country.

Aside from all the sniping about his annual home power bill (which turns out to be so high partly because he spends an extra five grand or so to buy wind power and might also have something to do with a vice president's security needs), lots of the usual "free market uber alles" types are accusing him and all green-minded folks of forcing them to wear the dreaded "hair shirt" of mandatory reductions in their energy use.

Incredibly, those who aren't complaining about the sacrifices are indignant about Gore making it all seem too easy. In Robert J. Samuelson's New York Times editorial last week titled "Hollywood's Climate Follies," he accuses Gore of painting the issue as "saints vs. sinners" and failing to acknowledge that "the lifestyles that produce greenhouse gases are deeply ingrained in modern economies and societies. ... Those who believe that addressing global warming is a moral imperative face an equivalent moral imperative to be candid about the costs, difficulties and uncertainties."

It's hard to tell exactly what triggered Samuelson's outrage, but it seems to be a line from Gore's Oscar acceptance speech where he said, "We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act. That's a renewable resource. Let's renew it."
...(snip)...

Now is our chance to develop the American low-energy lifestyle. You can see how I do it. Multiply my investment by ten and you can outfit a regular suburban house in California to meet all of its own energy needs plus charge an electric car. See "The Near-Zero-Energy Home Makeover" in Solar Today. But not everyone can afford to make that kind of personal investment in solar energy. We have to pull together to make it happen. It's mostly a matter of changing our priorities.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has projected that the final cost of the Iraq war will be at least a trillion dollars. I wondered how much solar power that money would buy, so I made a quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation. The installed cost of solar power is currently about $9 a watt, so $20,000 would buy a 2.2 kilowatt solar power system. That is enough power for a household with modest needs to spin the meter backward a good portion of the time. A trillion dollars would put a system like that on 50 million roofs.

Our parents and grandparents rose to the challenges of WWII and retooled our domestic industries into a finely honed war machine in a matter of months. There was no whining about "hair shirts" and sacrifice. There's a part of us that longs to make the kind of noble sacrifice we are called on to do in wartime. Many, many people are looking at their children today and wondering what they can do to leave them a world cool enough to live in. They are ready to do something now but don't know where to start. Here are the first two things everyone should do right now. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/50075/