Driving is freedom. People WANT cars. They will never stop driving them. The idea that Americans will start riding bikes in mass is laughable. We will certainly get more fuel efficient cars but the cost of fueling them will actually go up. Why? Because world demand for energy is going to far out pace any cost saving improvements that can be developed and brought to market. Oil hit $86+ a barrel today. Some people are forecasting $100/barrel by as early as years end.
And guess what? Oil could go to $200 barrel and Americans are going to keep on driving just the same as they always did. It's a lifestyle that they aren't going to give up. Ever. When given the choice between giving up their cars or driving considerably less or living the lifestyle they want Americans will opt for lifestyle.
Some tree huggers will surely come in here and try to tell me that there is a shift in American culture toward being more energy efficient. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's the difference between words and action, rhetoric and reality. And the reality is that in the face of all the endless chatter about global warming we have been buried in for the last decade Americans on average are consuming MORE energy per capita than ever before.
The future you describe in the last paragraph is China. Very few people in China have cars. So how do they build hundreds of cities of million+ people? Companies provide housing on-site for all employees. People bike to work, using public transportation, (rarely walking though). In fact, probably half the world already operates with a fraction of the fuel that the US uses.
America is very unlikely to change. Just talk to any American and you'll see we're headed for disaster. Our whole economy, city structures, everything is built upon driving. Where that is going to go, time will only tell.
One tip I've seen that goes along with the closing doors tip above... close off vents in rooms you don't use. It will keep the heat from pumping into those rooms and will just circulate back into the rooms you do. Just make sure that you keep the doors closed, too!
My boyfriend and I have started carrying cloth bags with us to the store. A few months ago, I noticed we had a GIANT bag filled with those god-awful plastic bags. I refuse to throw them away because I just feel wasteful and not eco-friendly. So, we're reusing the plastic bags we have and NOT acquiring any more!! because of this, it's really gotten me into reusing (I have SERIOUS issues with recycling) and so i buy milk in glass reusable bottles now. Both of the above mentioned items also saves me pennies each shopping trip, but pennies add up. Like I said, I have issues with recycling. I don't do it. Except, for aluminum which is a worthwhile recycling effort, which is why again, you get money back for it. I reuse plastic and paper anyway. I reuse plastic bottles and containers for drinks and food. And, I shred used paper and give it to my hamster for bedding. I love to reuse.
Everyone can make a difference! If you are passionate about stopping global warming and the environment you should check out this website http://www.nvisioncfl.com . Changing to CFLs is a great way for individual people to really make a difference! You should also check out this site http://www.youtube.com/user/helpourworld for more ideas on how to help our world!
Just by reading this I can tell you are a positive person. We need more Carrie Kirby's in the blogosphere! However, I fear the recalls will only get worse as stores like wal-mart continue to pressure its Chinese suppliers to cut costs (and corners). There comes a point when safety outweighs savings, at least it should. I'm a part of WakeUpWalMart.com and we issued a report that describes Wal-Mart's joint venture with China.
Will it take loss of life to get Wal-Mart's attention? Let's hope not. In the meantime, we'll all heed your advice.
Hi, Phil. As you know, I'm an American spending two years living in London. My wife and I don't have a car over here, and although we rented one recently for a special trip, ordinarily we don't miss having a car at all. My wife bicycles to work. London isn't bike friendly for a European city, but there are bike lanes, and government prints excellent free maps advising routes. The tube, bus, train, tram and river-boat systems are all terrific.
I was just in Copenhagen a couple weeks ago, and Denmark is even better for bikes. The typical major street will have a side walk for pedestrians (with a curb) and a bike lane (with another curb) and then the street, so there are dedicated bike lanes on either side of the car traffic, separated from car traffic with a physical barrier.
Petrol in Britain costs the equivalent of $8 USD a gallon. Some people still drive, but the cost is a disincentive, and the excellent country-wide transit system is an incentive to take the bus or train instead. We even hiked either end of the Pennine Way recently, and hikers could get dropped off by bus at one end and pick up a bus at the other.
Granted, Britain is a lot more densely populated than the U.S., but the U.S. is often aggressively hostile to walking, biking, or mass transit. I've been in many U.S. neighborhoods where there were no sidewalks, and economic development was so poorly planned that you'd have to drive for miles from a residential area to buy groceries. Frankly, I like the way of life here in England a lot better than the car culture of the U.S. I'm looking forward to the changes that skyrocketing oil prices will require in America.
Put your bulk grains, such as flour, in the freezer for a day, to deal with any small critters that might have been present. I don't always do this, but when we notice weevils showing up, I remember to freeze things again. It hasn't been a big problem since I've been able to use airtight containers, but the plastic bag full of flour that didn't fit into the bucket is a risk.
I keep my brown sugar in the bag it came home in, squeezing out all the air before resealing with a twist-tie, and then that bag goes into an airtight container. It would get hard when I wasn't diligent about closing and sealing the bag, and it would get hard when I didn't keep it in the plastic bucket, but it's been doing fairly well this way.
As per Grub (the book) I started saving my scraps in my freezer and just putting them in a bucket the night before I'm dropping them off at the community garden. It solves the issue of attracting fruit flies.
I tried worm bins 2x but ended up somehow killing the worms so I have no idea what happened but I'm not willing to go for a 3rd massacre! (I expect both areas I had them in were too hot.) The community garden is easy and it gives me an excuse to go there.
I find myself unemployed and I've been thinking back to a story my grandfather told me. When he returned from WWII, the only job he could find was over at the nursery near his house. And while it wasn't a great job, it paid the mortgage! Imagine being able to find a job within walking distance that paid the mortgage. I'm in a specialized field and I've been looking at jobs in a 50 mile radius to try and match my last salary... because I have the bills that match that salary. I think driving less is coming, but I think it's going to take other massive changes too.
Maybe he's renting his secure parking spot to someone else while he's out of the country, and has made back that $15 five-fold or even twenty-fold. He didn't need a convenient secure parking spot while he was gone, and someone else might have appreciated subletting his spot for a time.
There are a lot of ways to split the hydrogen and oxygen that make up water. Burning the hydrogen you get is never going to give you back more energy than it took to split the water molecules. (I noticed that the meter on the radio energy emitter was labeled in watts, and that they never let you see how many watts it was drawing while it was running.)
This is a good example of how ordinary hopefulness and wishful thinking lead people astray. This particular scheme, I think, is a dead loser--it will never yield positive net energy. But there are lots of other schemes out there that will produce some net energy. None of them are going to produce enough energy to keep the SUVs on the road.
1. Just bought a reusable plastic water bottle and a Brita water filter so I won't be tempted to buy bottled water any more.
2. I'm going to try really hard to remember to bring my canvas totes to the grocery store with me or at least keep the plastic bags in the car to reuse them.
3. Every time a light bulb burns out, change it with a CFL.
I tried both methods on small hail dents. Neither removed the dents. It's hard to say if they were reduced in size, since they were already pretty small and I didn't measure before and after. I tried the dry ice on a larger dent and it noticeably reduced it in size but didn't remove it all they way.
This You Tube video is about a guy that found out how to burn salt water. He was looking for a way to cure cancer and discovered this by chance - wouldn't it be great to find a way to tell the oil companies to shove it.
Marisa, thanks for the question. The city does provide smaller food and yard waste bins (I can't recall the exact size, but it's significantly less than 96 gallons). You might be able to use one of those, but then you'll have to pay for pick-up ($10 a month, unless you split the cost with other neighbors). You might want to consider worm bin composting, but it really depends on whether or not you have the space for a bin.
I have given this some thought in the past and your article made me think of it again. The world would be a better place if it ran like Disney World. People could just hop on the train and get from point A to point B in the blink of an eye. And the streets would be a lot cleaner too.
I buy everything I can from the bulk bins these days to avoid plastic waste and excess packaging in general. I take cotton drawstring bags for dry goods and glass jars for anything somewhat wet. Where I shop, we can weigh the containers before we fill them so that the checker will know how much weight to deduct from the total.
Just a note to everyone considering putting food waste into their yard waste bin: not ever city accepts food waste in these bins, so check and make sure before you do it!
Here in Oakland, it's fine. The city takes yard waste, food waste (including meat and bones), and soiled paper in the same bin. But in order to keep as much of my compost for my own container garden use, I bought an Urban Compost Tumbler.
Here is my post about the various types of tumbling composters I considered:
In addition to tumbling composters and worm bins, people in small spaces might want to consider Bokashi, but you do need a place to bury the unfinished compost.
Up in Phoenix people regularly commute 1.5 hours to work each way in giant SUVs with their AC blasting because its 115 outside, spending $500 ore more on gas each month. They have one of the crummiest public transit systems I've seen. Yet, even if gas goes to $5 a gallon, I don't see people changing their habits. I just see them complaining a lot, continuing their driving patterns, and chalking it up to the cost of living. This is unsustainable on so many levels!
That's why we live in Tucson, where everything we use frequently is within walking/biking distance. A long time ago I used to commute an hour each way to work, and I'll never do it again.
I will keep a bucket next to my shower to catch the water wasted while it heats up. After it sets out overnight & the chlorine has dissipated, I will use that water in my fish tanks!
And I'll use the fish tank water to water my plants!
I'm still working on putting my resolutions from January into effect. So far I'm succeeding wildly on 1 and 2. It turns out #3 is actually the hardest for me.
1. Take mass transit to work. (Work is 42 miles away, so this is not trivial)
2. Contribute regularly to Environmentally minded charities (this is part of a larger resolution to donate monthly)
3. Recycling is good, but reuse is better. See what can be done to reuse grocery bags before recycling them. Use canvas or other non-disposable bags when at all possible.
Driving is freedom. People WANT cars. They will never stop driving them. The idea that Americans will start riding bikes in mass is laughable. We will certainly get more fuel efficient cars but the cost of fueling them will actually go up. Why? Because world demand for energy is going to far out pace any cost saving improvements that can be developed and brought to market. Oil hit $86+ a barrel today. Some people are forecasting $100/barrel by as early as years end.
And guess what? Oil could go to $200 barrel and Americans are going to keep on driving just the same as they always did. It's a lifestyle that they aren't going to give up. Ever. When given the choice between giving up their cars or driving considerably less or living the lifestyle they want Americans will opt for lifestyle.
Some tree huggers will surely come in here and try to tell me that there is a shift in American culture toward being more energy efficient. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's the difference between words and action, rhetoric and reality. And the reality is that in the face of all the endless chatter about global warming we have been buried in for the last decade Americans on average are consuming MORE energy per capita than ever before.
The future you describe in the last paragraph is China. Very few people in China have cars. So how do they build hundreds of cities of million+ people? Companies provide housing on-site for all employees. People bike to work, using public transportation, (rarely walking though). In fact, probably half the world already operates with a fraction of the fuel that the US uses.
America is very unlikely to change. Just talk to any American and you'll see we're headed for disaster. Our whole economy, city structures, everything is built upon driving. Where that is going to go, time will only tell.
Good thinking!
One tip I've seen that goes along with the closing doors tip above... close off vents in rooms you don't use. It will keep the heat from pumping into those rooms and will just circulate back into the rooms you do. Just make sure that you keep the doors closed, too!
I completely forgot about CFLs! Wonderful invention. Last forever, and use less energy. Brilliant. =)
My boyfriend and I have started carrying cloth bags with us to the store. A few months ago, I noticed we had a GIANT bag filled with those god-awful plastic bags. I refuse to throw them away because I just feel wasteful and not eco-friendly. So, we're reusing the plastic bags we have and NOT acquiring any more!! because of this, it's really gotten me into reusing (I have SERIOUS issues with recycling) and so i buy milk in glass reusable bottles now. Both of the above mentioned items also saves me pennies each shopping trip, but pennies add up. Like I said, I have issues with recycling. I don't do it. Except, for aluminum which is a worthwhile recycling effort, which is why again, you get money back for it. I reuse plastic and paper anyway. I reuse plastic bottles and containers for drinks and food. And, I shred used paper and give it to my hamster for bedding. I love to reuse.
CHANGE TO CFLS
Everyone can make a difference! If you are passionate about stopping global warming and the environment you should check out this website http://www.nvisioncfl.com . Changing to CFLs is a great way for individual people to really make a difference! You should also check out this site http://www.youtube.com/user/helpourworld for more ideas on how to help our world!
Just by reading this I can tell you are a positive person. We need more Carrie Kirby's in the blogosphere! However, I fear the recalls will only get worse as stores like wal-mart continue to pressure its Chinese suppliers to cut costs (and corners). There comes a point when safety outweighs savings, at least it should. I'm a part of WakeUpWalMart.com and we issued a report that describes Wal-Mart's joint venture with China.
Will it take loss of life to get Wal-Mart's attention? Let's hope not. In the meantime, we'll all heed your advice.
Hi, Phil. As you know, I'm an American spending two years living in London. My wife and I don't have a car over here, and although we rented one recently for a special trip, ordinarily we don't miss having a car at all. My wife bicycles to work. London isn't bike friendly for a European city, but there are bike lanes, and government prints excellent free maps advising routes. The tube, bus, train, tram and river-boat systems are all terrific.
I was just in Copenhagen a couple weeks ago, and Denmark is even better for bikes. The typical major street will have a side walk for pedestrians (with a curb) and a bike lane (with another curb) and then the street, so there are dedicated bike lanes on either side of the car traffic, separated from car traffic with a physical barrier.
Petrol in Britain costs the equivalent of $8 USD a gallon. Some people still drive, but the cost is a disincentive, and the excellent country-wide transit system is an incentive to take the bus or train instead. We even hiked either end of the Pennine Way recently, and hikers could get dropped off by bus at one end and pick up a bus at the other.
Granted, Britain is a lot more densely populated than the U.S., but the U.S. is often aggressively hostile to walking, biking, or mass transit. I've been in many U.S. neighborhoods where there were no sidewalks, and economic development was so poorly planned that you'd have to drive for miles from a residential area to buy groceries. Frankly, I like the way of life here in England a lot better than the car culture of the U.S. I'm looking forward to the changes that skyrocketing oil prices will require in America.
Put your bulk grains, such as flour, in the freezer for a day, to deal with any small critters that might have been present. I don't always do this, but when we notice weevils showing up, I remember to freeze things again. It hasn't been a big problem since I've been able to use airtight containers, but the plastic bag full of flour that didn't fit into the bucket is a risk.
I keep my brown sugar in the bag it came home in, squeezing out all the air before resealing with a twist-tie, and then that bag goes into an airtight container. It would get hard when I wasn't diligent about closing and sealing the bag, and it would get hard when I didn't keep it in the plastic bucket, but it's been doing fairly well this way.
As per Grub (the book) I started saving my scraps in my freezer and just putting them in a bucket the night before I'm dropping them off at the community garden. It solves the issue of attracting fruit flies.
I tried worm bins 2x but ended up somehow killing the worms so I have no idea what happened but I'm not willing to go for a 3rd massacre! (I expect both areas I had them in were too hot.) The community garden is easy and it gives me an excuse to go there.
I find myself unemployed and I've been thinking back to a story my grandfather told me. When he returned from WWII, the only job he could find was over at the nursery near his house. And while it wasn't a great job, it paid the mortgage! Imagine being able to find a job within walking distance that paid the mortgage. I'm in a specialized field and I've been looking at jobs in a 50 mile radius to try and match my last salary... because I have the bills that match that salary. I think driving less is coming, but I think it's going to take other massive changes too.
Maybe he's renting his secure parking spot to someone else while he's out of the country, and has made back that $15 five-fold or even twenty-fold. He didn't need a convenient secure parking spot while he was gone, and someone else might have appreciated subletting his spot for a time.
There are a lot of ways to split the hydrogen and oxygen that make up water. Burning the hydrogen you get is never going to give you back more energy than it took to split the water molecules. (I noticed that the meter on the radio energy emitter was labeled in watts, and that they never let you see how many watts it was drawing while it was running.)
This is a good example of how ordinary hopefulness and wishful thinking lead people astray. This particular scheme, I think, is a dead loser--it will never yield positive net energy. But there are lots of other schemes out there that will produce some net energy. None of them are going to produce enough energy to keep the SUVs on the road.
1. Just bought a reusable plastic water bottle and a Brita water filter so I won't be tempted to buy bottled water any more.
2. I'm going to try really hard to remember to bring my canvas totes to the grocery store with me or at least keep the plastic bags in the car to reuse them.
3. Every time a light bulb burns out, change it with a CFL.
I tried both methods on small hail dents. Neither removed the dents. It's hard to say if they were reduced in size, since they were already pretty small and I didn't measure before and after. I tried the dry ice on a larger dent and it noticeably reduced it in size but didn't remove it all they way.
This You Tube video is about a guy that found out how to burn salt water. He was looking for a way to cure cancer and discovered this by chance - wouldn't it be great to find a way to tell the oil companies to shove it.
Marisa, thanks for the question. The city does provide smaller food and yard waste bins (I can't recall the exact size, but it's significantly less than 96 gallons). You might be able to use one of those, but then you'll have to pay for pick-up ($10 a month, unless you split the cost with other neighbors). You might want to consider worm bin composting, but it really depends on whether or not you have the space for a bin.
I have given this some thought in the past and your article made me think of it again. The world would be a better place if it ran like Disney World. People could just hop on the train and get from point A to point B in the blink of an eye. And the streets would be a lot cleaner too.
I buy everything I can from the bulk bins these days to avoid plastic waste and excess packaging in general. I take cotton drawstring bags for dry goods and glass jars for anything somewhat wet. Where I shop, we can weigh the containers before we fill them so that the checker will know how much weight to deduct from the total.
More on the store where I shop here:
http://www.fakeplasticfish.com/2007/08/store-report-rainbow-grocery.html.
Just a note to everyone considering putting food waste into their yard waste bin: not ever city accepts food waste in these bins, so check and make sure before you do it!
Here in Oakland, it's fine. The city takes yard waste, food waste (including meat and bones), and soiled paper in the same bin. But in order to keep as much of my compost for my own container garden use, I bought an Urban Compost Tumbler.
Here is my post about the various types of tumbling composters I considered:
http://www.fakeplasticfish.com/2007/08/compost-tumbler-solution-to-potting.html.
In addition to tumbling composters and worm bins, people in small spaces might want to consider Bokashi, but you do need a place to bury the unfinished compost.
Up in Phoenix people regularly commute 1.5 hours to work each way in giant SUVs with their AC blasting because its 115 outside, spending $500 ore more on gas each month. They have one of the crummiest public transit systems I've seen. Yet, even if gas goes to $5 a gallon, I don't see people changing their habits. I just see them complaining a lot, continuing their driving patterns, and chalking it up to the cost of living. This is unsustainable on so many levels!
That's why we live in Tucson, where everything we use frequently is within walking/biking distance. A long time ago I used to commute an hour each way to work, and I'll never do it again.
Great post!
I will keep a bucket next to my shower to catch the water wasted while it heats up. After it sets out overnight & the chlorine has dissipated, I will use that water in my fish tanks!
And I'll use the fish tank water to water my plants!
The kids and wife are teasing me because I am constantly taking things out of the trash and putting them in the recycle bin.
Hold off as long as possible on turning on the heat.
Replace the windows and insulate the house better for our Maine climate.
I'm still working on putting my resolutions from January into effect. So far I'm succeeding wildly on 1 and 2. It turns out #3 is actually the hardest for me.
1. Take mass transit to work. (Work is 42 miles away, so this is not trivial)
2. Contribute regularly to Environmentally minded charities (this is part of a larger resolution to donate monthly)
3. Recycling is good, but reuse is better. See what can be done to reuse grocery bags before recycling them. Use canvas or other non-disposable bags when at all possible.