fifteen minutes starting 10:55 a.m.
over at casaubon's book sharon has laid out guidelines for a 90% reduction of emissions/consumption. i'm going to do my best to cut what i conceivably can. that does mean that i need to figure out the numbers for my household/person in the next day or two. this means contacting the facilities guy at work to see what the electric bills are like for the company and dividing by number of people in the office (roughly 100 people, but i'll count them to be sure). also need to contact the landlord about amount of heating oil our house uses and figure some way do get water figures. erin suggests timing and multiplying by the gallons per minute to figure out usage.
my boss interrupted my fifteen minutes with a call for aid on his pc.
figures as i see them right now:
~electric used at home in the last month: 113 kwh (entire household and it's wind energy)
~natural gas used at home in the last year: 51 therms (only used for cooking)
~mass transit travel each day: 20 miles/day times 365 days/year = 7300 miles/year by mass transit calculated at 100 miles/gallon = 73 gallons of gas getting around the city
~2 round trips to ithaca, ny to see my aunt and pick up/drop off jake = 500 mi/round trip times 2 round trips/year = 1000 mi/year divided by 35 mi/gallon (estimate for erin's saturn sl 2002) = roughly 30 gallons
more calculations to come.
3 comments:
while reading the article I thought...
no planes = no flying to cali to see the family.
Can I live my life without seeing them? Not forever.
So does that mean I should move back to cali?
hummmm
there are no simple solutions to any of this.
it's true. in order to make any of this work, it means a RADICAL change in the way we view our lives. i'm realizing that even with jake just 500 miles away, i can't sustainably see him as often as i'd like to. that's a big deal. it bears thinking about.
In this book I'm reading (Deep Economy by Bill McKibben), he talks about how with the advent of the steam engine at the turn of the 18th century, we've been able to push ourselves further and further apart from one another: a "bonus" of the industrial revolution was the advent of suburbanism.
I hear it often: I'd take mass transit, but I live 30 miles from work and the transit system is shite where I live (or doesn't exist at all).
There are two ways around this problem, and neither way is simple: move closer to where you work (or get a job closer to home) or organise with your fellow suburbanites and press your government for mass transit.
Both ways require a SERIOUS attitude adjustment and a radical change in the way we view convenience and happiness.
Another extraction of that conversation with the Biology Major was that some people cross themselves and pray to God for help, while we walk around the house unplugging appliances and whispering enviroment-saving plans to each other before falling asleep at night. We do what we can do and that's all we can do. *shrugs*
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