4/1/08

The Green Life

I've been really interested in Green living and have wanted to learn as much about it as I can. Overall there seems to be a shift in society towards being more eco-friendly and hopefully it will become easier and more affordable to do what's right for the Earth. I've found some interesting websites and I'm going to start having links and ideas that we all can do to implement some of these ideas.

William Clinton Foundation
Energy Star Green Building
Energy Builder
EarthDay
NESEA
Green at Home

It seems like a great thing to help the environment and you end up saving money so I want to learn as much as I can about it all. It feels like there is general info all over the place but I'm going to try and pull it all together and make it simple. Some of the things I read seem to not really make sense, others seem way too extreme and some of it just seems like its not really going to help. If anyone has any ideas I'd love to hear them!
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

yeah, we get a lot of that in New Mexico - partly because we want to keep a nice outdoors life and partly because we really don't have a choice since most companies don't make it this far.

Be careful, though. A lot of "green" stuff actually takes more energy than it saves. (Turns out one of my peeps from college went on to be an economist that studies this stuff- she's hilarious!) Biofuels is a great example. You can make fuel from corn. Well, corn is "expensive" to make - it takes a lot of ferilizer, uses a lot of water (way more than other crops) and there's a lot of gas that is used to run the tractors, etc. Fertilizers require gas to make, too, adding to the cost of biofuels. So, yes, the consumer saves a little, but society as a whole uses a lot more energy.

The bottom line is that most products may save a little money and fuel when you use them, but they take a lot of fuel to make. The Prius (which I drive, so don't get on my case) is a perfect example. Yes, in three years, at $3 a gallon, I'd save money on gas. But my friend points out that I have to take into account all the fuel and energy and resources it took to make the car - add on another five year (and that's essentially regardless of the car you buy). Making a car is an energy intensive process. So I have to drive the car eight years to give back to the environment.

So I ask my friend, how do you save energy with a car? Her answer: stop driving.

The fact is, most of the energy that is used is consumed during the manufacturing process and the delivery of the product from factory to shelf, not the actualy usage of the product, so to save the environment (and I know all my fellow economists are saying I should have my economic credentials removed right now) is to stop buying crap we don't really need.

There are obvious exceptions, of course. Dishwashers use less water, generally, and are more sanitary than hand washing, if you fill up the dishwasher before you run it. The LG front loading clothes washer uses CONSIDERABLY less water and energy than any other clothes washer (but you pay twice as much more it). Actually, any front loading washer is more efficient - I'm told that top loaders are actually banned in Europe for that reason. Thermostats that are programmable save more energy than it takes to make them.

And we wary of manufacturer's claims. I love to knit. Everyone thought that buying bamboo yarn was so great because it was renewable (like wool from a sheep wasn't?) Turns out that the chemical process that it takes to make bamboo yarn has the same waste as leach mining - it runs off cyanide, etc into the water systems. That is why you will only find bamboo yarn that is make in China - you can't have that kind of runoff in the US. So we stopped buying bamboo and went back to wool.

No really- I love knitting with wool in the freakin' desert...

7:36 AM PDT

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