Never enough when it comes to being ‘green’

by Nathan Stout of AccordingToWhim.com

Doom! Gloom! Disaster! Calamity! These are all words co-opted by the ecological talking heads describing the earths fate if certain actions are not taken RIGHT NOW. I see the stuff all over the place. Miguel, if you want facts just go watch ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ (which I am sure you do every day as you bow before the altar of liberalism)(I kid, I kid!).

Anyway I am not here to disprove any of those claims (which are at this point and time STILL not coming true) but to look at changes in our society and asking ‘aren’t they making a difference’?

We hear all the time about water conservation and how Americans waste it. My question is, how much have we SAVED through new technology and the way we are taught to use water? Low flow toilets have been the standard since 1992. How many billions of gallons of water has that saved? It is said the they save Americans 11.3 million dollars a day with these toilets (that equals to $72,270,000,000 over the last 18 years and no telling what that equals in water)! What about low flow shower heads, or teaching people to do stuff like turn off the water while brushing teeth or shaving? What about motion sensor and timed restroom faucets? Surely there have been some major cumulative effect savings when it comes to all this combined?

Electricity is another area where technology has had to have greatly reduced the amount used. Think of the florescent light bulb alone. Energy Star says that: “If every American home replaced just one light with an ENERGY STAR light, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year, about $700 million in annual energy costs, and prevent 9 billion pounds of greenhouse gas emissions per year, equivalent to the emissions of about 800,000 cars.” Now, who is going to just replace one bulb in their house with a florescent bulb? I’m no eco-nut but I am a money-nut and I know they save big bucks in the long run so I replaced about twenty in my house alone. I am sure the average American replaces more than just one so for lets just assume that the average house has replaced 5 bulbs (that number is small to make up for the people who don’t have any)… that would mean yearly we save 4,000,000 worth of car emissions and can light 15 million homes with the electricity we saved because of this innovations. We aren’t being told that by the Al Gores of the world, we are still on a slippery slope of disaster!

There is also a growing movement to ditch the plastic bag at grocery stores as well as the usual push to use public transportation as well as electric cars and better gas mileage on vehicles. Don’t forget the usage of Ethanol in our fuels. I can also mention the conversion from CRT monitors and televisions to flat panels which use much less electricity. All appliances now are energy rated and are more energy efficient.

All these changes have held because they are consumer friendly. They save money and everyone wants to save money.

Now, can we even begin to imagine how much all these changes have positively effected our world ecologically? I doubt it. The fact is we don’t know and no one is going to bother to tell us. We need to be kept in ‘panic mode’ so we can accept the next change.

For the most part I don’t think people mind as long as it won’t affect them in the pocketbook (unless they wish it to).

Since no one is saying it I will say it to the world…
Good job on making positive changes to help the environment and such.

All these changes I have talked about are certifiable. You can plug in a LCD monitor and a CRT and you can PROVE that the LCD is using less electricity. You can do the same with a high flow and low flow toilet (but you might get electrocuted) and you can PROVE the low flow uses less water.

I think things like the Cap and Trade tax and Carbon Credits and such are a hard pills to swallow because there is no certifiable PROOF that these are based on. The proof that has been handed to the public has proven faulty (look at the predictions from Gore’s movie) and sometimes outright lies. My real suspicion is that money is behind all that. These talking heads talk about how we need to make changes in order to save the planet but in the end what are backing are ways for people to pay to do this (credits and taxes). It doesn’t help to be a big flag waver (Al Gore) of the movement when you are making money off the fear you help create.

OK, I’m off the soapbox there. What I want to ask again is: have the changes we’ve made had any difference? I would have to say yes since they are quantifiable. Good job world.