Five Percent: Conserve Energy

We’re wrapping up what turned out to be a really nice weekend with a niece and two nephews, plus our own boy and girl — seven of us all together. My sister-in-law and brother-in-law took a nice and well-deserved weekend for themselves. It was a lot of kids in a not-so-big house, but we did just fine.

None of the kids got a lot of sleep, except during our ride to the beach when they all conked out within the first 15 minutes of the ride. Aunt K. and Uncle P. (names withheld to protect the innocent) left their Nissan Quest mini-van and yes, we were able to get all seven people in the van. There were three things we realized on our drive to the beach.

First, (more…)

Today’s New York Times ran an article that started

Federal revenues from oil and gas produced on publicly owned land barely increased in recent years, despite soaring energy prices, mainly because production declined far more than the government’s published statistics have indicated, according to a new Congressional report.

This information was a result of an investigation; some thought the Bush administration was not enforcing the levies, or somehow letting oil companies have a benefit. Ah, the conspiracy theories are disproved (more…)

We have been frustrated several times recently hearing people say things about hybrids, like “they aren’t good for highway driving”. I think this is due to the fact that the EPA estimates for the Prius are higher in the city than the highway, which is unusual.

So, just to be clear, the fact that the Prius is rated at 55 Highway, 60 City should not lead you to conclude that it is “not good for the highway”. It’s not true. It was confusing, for example, to Click and Clack who perpetuated this growing myth (more…)

We live in Boston, and recently there was a failure of part of the new “Big Dig” tunnel system which caused a ceiling panel to fall on a car, killing the passenger. One tunnel was and still is closed, and traffic was snarled for several days afterward. But then something unexpected happened: people responded, and today’s paper reports that Despite closings, traffic is better than expected. My wife, who commutes to the city by bus right through the heart of the intersection most affected reported that her commute today was the shortest it has been in several weeks … better even than before the accident.

So I have, as Jonathan Swift would say, a modest proposal: (more…)

The last few days have been a heat wave across the country. Electricity usage has hit new records, about 2-3% higher than the records set last year.

We’re using more of everything. Not less.

Tip: Keep your air condition set to a higher temperature.

That’s all.

We drove back from Cape Cod today after a long weekend. There sure are a lot of large vehicles on the road … and hardly any small or efficient ones. Repeatedly, we observed trucks of the class Expedition/Yukon/Suburban/Tahoe carrying a single person. Compared to the average mileage, these behemoths do poorly: where average is ~25 MPG highway, they get about 1/2 of average. Our Prius today arrived from our trip in our driveway reporting average mileage of 48.2 MPG, which is about 2x better than average, so about 4x better than the big truck SUVs.

I hear people saying the Prius is small. They need room for … something. I am not sure what. (more…)

I did some calculating today. I found that some simple changes to lawn care routine can save you money, time, and effort. And by doing that you can stop having a negative impact on the environment. In fact, the impact might even be positive!

Conservation is an important measure for us to take, for sure. But a more important question might be how can we accomplish our goals in a way that does not expend, but sustains.

Today I considered the costs we have incurred from moving to a sustainable lawn. Does $500/year seem trivial to you?

This is a real example of how important it is to think, and dismiss your preconceived notions. I’ll prove that it’s not trivial. (more…)

My wife and I have been doing a lot of reading lately. Nothing we read is making us feel comfortable or secure. We’re feeling the kind of urgency that caused us to make personal changes, and then which caused me to start writing about them here. Yeah, we’re nuts, of course, but we seem to not have the capability to turn off the alarm bells.

Several years ago, after reading “End of Oil”, I felt as though we had the opportunity to solve the problems with energy that I have been writing about. The idea of the blog was to make incremental changes that would buy us time for real solutions to be developed. I am now less sanguine about what this means: words like “opportunity”, “evolution” and “transition” simply don’t seem realistic. The word “crisis” seems to be popping up a lot more. No one wants to be a downer, and ceaselessly beat the same drum. People stop listening and brand you as a nut case. I had hoped that being an example would cause changes to occur.

Yet we’re looking around our neighborhood and town and state and country and simply not seeing a lot of evidence that actual (positive) change is occurring. (more…)