Osler's Razor

Your dad is right as usual! I live in a suburb with its own power plant. Every time there is a storm, power goes out in the neighboring city and Giant Power Company takes days to fix the problem. Meanwhile, ours stays up and running.
 

I am a big fan of solar hot water. We have a unit in NC and perhaps one or two days in the past 3 years did we opt out of taking a hot shower due to the weather (even in the winter).

I have friends with the point of use hot water systems and they love it. This helps eliminate the need to continually heat a hot water tank.
 

As you may not be surprised to know our entire house exploded. It was a mess but also an opportunity. how many times in your life do you get to replace two cars and an entire house all at once? I saw it as an opportunity to try and do some good and GO GREEN.
We could replace our cars with HYBRID cars. We could rebuild the house with GREEN MATERIALES like bamboo and solar heaters or those super flush toilets or whatever they are you know the ones... LOW FLUSH something like that It's been FIVE YEARS...I cannot remember EVERYTHING..

ANYWAY The problem is it takes a lot of $$$GREEN$$ to go GREEN. Hybrid cars are most of the time 40% more expensive than their non-hybrid counterparts. GREEN Building materials are GREAT but also hideously expensive..We looked into EVERYTHING: Denim insulation that is soaked in Boric Acid which makes it bug-proof, fire-proof, mold-proof - everything proof abut also AFFORDABLE PROOF. LOW VOC Paint is twice as much as regular SUCKY paint or whatever. Bamboo Flooring was an option and the floor is priced well... but we needed it to go u the stairs too, and the stair treads were three times as much as the Maple we finally chose... Those Low usage or whatever water hears ALSO a lot of money. You can do little things Like Light switches that turn the lights off automatically when no one is in a room.. etc you can do little things but even THEY add up When it is 7 dollars for ONE FREAKING LIGHTBULBE I do not care that it will last me FIVE YEARS... I need like 25 of them... I don't have that much disposable income where I can put all of my money in LIGHTBULBS.

The other problem we ran into was that the builder of our house had never heard of a lot of this stuff and the ones who did were in Portland and were very kind of.... I don't know SNOBBY about coming ALLLL THE WAAAAAYY to CANNNNBY. REALLLLLY? you live in CANNNBY??? OH. Then of course Canby Plumbing did not carry those Dual Flush or whatever earth friendly toilets Which meant we would have to buy them ourselves at COSTCO and then have him install them MAYBE.

My Point is that I LOOKED INTO THIS. I did, believe me and it is GREAT to GO GREEN!!!! WHO WOULD NOT WANT TO have a solar heated.. EVERYTHING, and go OFF THE GRID like Jay Leno and Ed Begley and Jackson Browne and all of these celebs??? But it's hard to save the Earth when you live in the REAL WORLD and you cannot even afford "LUXURIES" like new tires and Health Insurance. I would LOVE solar panels. I would LOVE an electric car. I would LOVE so many things and to be off the grid and help the earth and be a part of the SOLUTION etc. But right now I can barely afford Piano lessons and basketball camp. so....
 

To Tyd's point - it is expensive and requires people to take baby steps.

The light burns out, replace it with the new bulb.
 

I believe it is necessary to rethink where we get our energy. Life has been easy and as long as we have paid our bills we have had plenty of heat or cold and lots of electricity. Very few of us knew where or how the energy we used was created. It didn't seem to matter. We know now that we should have cared. Our use of carbon fuels has had disastrous effects on our planet, our security and our economy.

In the news today I read that one coal fired plant in Kentucky uses 40 railroad cars of coal a day and that it will cost billions of dollars to add scrubbers for this plant to continue to serve it's community. A natural gas plant will probably replace it, using, at the moment, a cheaper carbon fuel. Unless we take an interest we will continue to depend on carbon fuels to provide our energy needs and to finance our elections for some time.

I believe that some day we will go to former gas stations to have a quick change of long lasting batteries or fuel cells. We will have homes that are so well insulated and air tight that they don't need furnaces or air conditioners only air purifiers. Each home will have vertical wind machines that looks like a Calder sculpture or incorporated in the structure of the house. Invisible energy will come from photo voltaic cells in the windows and roof shingles. Shops and factories will have green roofs and aircraft fuel will come from chicken fat. Instead of large electrical plants sending electricity over distances with great transmission losses, local communities will create park/energy fields, geothermal projects and place turbines in their rivers. In cities like Detroit with so much unused land and people, projects like these could transform the city. Energy will be traded and credited. Millions of jobs will be added to replace the loss of work in the coal mines and lobbying firms.

All these ideas are, in fact. possible today. No one idea or alternative energy source will solve our problems, but we should start to localize our energy production. It could be fun and put a lot of forward looking people to work. Dad