Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Rationalizing on Earth Day

Tomorrow is Earth Day and Friday is Arbor Day.

I drive a car I've had for 10 years and it gets about 20 miles to the gallon. This is not good. However, even if I could afford a newer, eco-friendly car, my old Impala would still exist. Someone else would be driving it and getting 20 miles to the gallon. So, I may as well keep driving it.

After going to bed each night, at least a dozen small lights still remain on all over the house. There are power strips behind or under furniture, there are LED's on various electronics, the stove and microwave plus a few night lights. I'm told that we could reduce our energy consumption by as much as 10% if we turned them all off. But, who is going to crawl around every night turning off all the energy "vampires"? Really!!

We could also reduce our energy costs by replacing all of our windows with expensive new onesand replacing our appliances with more energy efficient ones. Oh, if only...

So, I do what little I can and urge others to do the same. That's called rationalizing.

3 comments:

Bevie said...

There is a point where energy savings must either give way to safety and practicality, or we just chuck everything and turn back the clock about five or six hundred years.

One of the largest group of air polluters are cattle. There are more cattle alive today than at any other time in history. Why? Burgers. And all those cows and bulls produce a lot of methane gas.

Ms Sparrow said...

Add to that all the landfills and garbage dumps and we're turning our planet into a sewer. Isn't methane explosive? What if it built up to that point? Whoosh!!
There goes everything!

Olde Dame Penniwig said...

I don't know if it's just rationalizing, Ms. Sparrow. It seems to me to be more of a case of tending to those things you can, and letting other things just continue on. Trying to strike a balance on the side of saving energy, without getting into debt. In life and in budgets, something has to give!