Carbon neutral and CO2 emissions, etc

bennty
Wed, 08 Sep 2021 21:35:53 +0000

bgbg4us:

I think if we really want to change what’s going on, we will all have to sacrifice.

But on those really hot humid summer nights, when there is no wind power or solar power available, do we all really want to turn off the air conditioning? Or do we really want to use less fossil fuels to keep our houses barely warm in the winter? Do we want to stop traveling? Stop having our convenient grocery stores, delivery services? Cut back on our cell services, wifi? Our increased living standards have gotten us into this mess.

During February, when the midwest was in a polar vortex, and the electric grids were forcing rolling blackouts because they couldnt make enough electricity, and the natural gas companies were asking people to turn down the thermometer during sub zero weather – know what happened (in our metro area of 600K at least)??? nothing. people didnt react. Natural gas usage went up. No decrease in electric use. It’s hard and uncomfortable to sacrifice.

And on the flip side, if we all lived like low-key lifestyle like Bennty and my 80-yr old au-natural parents, what would happen to our economy? If we won’t change our demands, I guess I’ll just venture to say nuclear is probably the best bet going forward for climate change reasons.

Well -

the question’s really “do you want to make some adjustments, or do you want your house burnt down or flooded or caved in? What do economies look like when simultaneous large areas of the country are like kicked-over antheaps because of climate events?” About a month ago, my dad’s ex was asking me advice about solar panels, and mentioned that she had trouble getting a quote because her roof, in rural VA, was in too much shade. So I said, I know you’re not planning on staying there forever, but if your roof’s in shade, that means tall trees are right around it. Given climate change, you might want to clear some of that – increased risk of tornado, windstorms, fire. Which sounded a little extreme for a house in Appalachia, but a few weeks later Ida came through, with tornadoes. Not the first time I’ve had a conversation like that, either – some years ago I was working on a climate-science textbook for the Smithsonian, and I had a bit in there with artists’ renditions of Manhattan underwater post-future-hurricane. Before we went to press, Sandy came through, and the pictures stopped being futuristic. I asked my editors if we should pull them in case of trauma, and to their credit, I think, the editors said no, be clear-eyed.

I’d argue that people upped their utility use in the blackouts/vortex because most people have no idea how else to react, and their infrastructure and houses and neighborhoods aren’t set up for anything else. You change that, you change the behavior. You don’t have to suffer to use less, but you do have to know how to do it, and you need to be set up for it. If you want a fancy version of that, this guy ( July | 2021 | All things environmental ) has been blogging about planned sustainability in Hamburg and Vancouver for a long time now. But there’s also a reason why home economics was once a real subject. If you weren’t going to consume like a monster, but you were going to live well, you were going to be careful, and that took thought, also knowing how your house and the things in it worked.

One of the things I’ve come to think is a gigantically self-serving and pernicious myth being promoted by the likes of Bezos and Musk, those paragons of humanity, is the idea that people are so stupid, selfish, and lazy that they’d like nothing better than to be stapled into chairs and fed through a tube while being pleasantly stimulated by war fantasies. Having said that, I can see how they came by the idea: those are exactly the kind of people they spent their young adulthood with. But it’s not my experience of most people. I think people generally like to feel useful and engaged with other people, and as if they’ve done something worthwhile, however small, at the end of the day. So I am not at all hopeless about people learning to take better care, if you don’t make an Everest out of the challenge.

I didn’t have a/c as an adult until I was around 30 (the bigger worry was usually the computer, not me), and over the last few years, I’ve pushed the thermostat up progressively in summer. Right now it’s usually at 77-78F during the summer, with downstairs, where my office is, a few degrees cooler. But then I’ve also put a lot of thought into solar gain and airflow in the house, and the role of humidity. I know this house well, so I use the areas of hot, cold, warm, dry as the seasons change.

In winter, for instance, the warmest, driest part of my house is my bedroom, so my bedroom is also my clothes dryer, obviating the need for electricity-driven humidification. My split-level house also has a stairwell and hallway that are unheated and are essentially a chimney and cold sink; if I don’t block off the hallway, the entire downstairs is cold. So I block it off and allow the stairs and little bit going to the garage to become that cold sink, meaning that when it’s subzero out, the bottom of that stairwell is at around 46-48F. (No pipes are in danger.) Then it also becomes cold storage. The rooms behind that hallway, though, are in the low 60s, which is fine.

I do use less fossil fuel to keep my house barely warm in winter. Notably, though, I am warm. Some years ago I was listening to an apoplectic guy on an MIT Soapbox podcast who was railing against the stupidity of heating an entire house’s air to keep one or two humans warm. And I thought: yeah, that’s spot on, really just another version of powering the 5000-lb minivan to move the 120-lb woman and a couple of 60-lb kids around. So now I wear a lot more wool, which lasts forever, and a heated vest on the coldest winter nights. It’s got a little (yup) battery, which is bad, but costs out environmentally vs. the chronic CH4 use. I can also use an electric oil-filled radiator that runs off the solar panels, though I don’t like to use it at night, because that’s some major wattage vs. the 5W for charging the vest battery. I also remember to get up now and then and move around. And I’ve got a foot-thick down duvet, which I expect I’ll pass down to my daughter, and woolies and sheepskin slippers, average lifespan ten years, so I can turn the thermostat way down at night. There’s a rather tasteful woolen trapper blanket from the 1940s hanging in front of my front door, on a rail, and that does an immense job of stopping bleedthrough cold, especially on windy nights. (The house tests as good and tight, but there’s a limit to how tight you want it.) This winter I’ll be testing some windbreak screening around the northwest corner of the house. The effect of all this on my CH4 use vs my neighbors’ is very visible – I use half or less what they do, even in a polar vortex – and the switch to a high-efficiency furnace and the smallest sensible gas-powered tankless water heater has depressed gas use further here. What would make it even better: thicker exterior walls and a southern exposure. Too late for this house, but this sort of planning should be part of housing code (and someday will). Yes, a developer will get slightly less rich, okay.

Increasingly, I find I go back to mechanical things, simply because you don’t have to use a battery or even electricity, sometimes, and they last forever. I have a little shelf clock that’s next to where I sit and read or knit, and I like it a lot, but it eats button batteries. So I went on ebay and found a lovely little brass travel windup Westclox from the 1960s. No more button batteries. Not mechanical, obviously, but my Casio solar pocket calculator has worked since 1982. My typewriter has worked since 1967, no plug, no booting, no pop-up windows. In general, if I’m buying something new, I’m asking: does it need to be plugged in, does it need to run on batteries, is it full of electronics, and if the answer is yes to any of these things, I look for other ways. When my horrible Target toaster died, I bought a gorgeous (and very expensive) toaster that I expect will be the last toaster I ever buy. It’s a mechanical, repairable thing that was built and tested by a person and makes brilliant toast and cheese toasties. No electronics, no internal batteries, nothing like that. (Sorry to go on about toast: it’s hard to imagine you’re living poorly when you’re eating toasted sourdough rye with local butter and the black raspberry jam you made a couple of months ago.) And the reel mower: no gas, no battery, no cable. Works great. Sharpen the blades every few years and you’re good to go. (Fiskars, btw.)

Wattage is also something I look at when I buy, just as I look at nutrition labels.

Traveling: When I was a kid, travel was expensive, and you just didn’t do it often. We didn’t die, and it didn’t stop us from seeing the world; we just went less often and usually for longer. You already budget moneywise for travel; no reason you can’t budget environmentally. If you want your total carbon emissions to stay under, say, 3 tons a year, and you want to fly somewhere, where are you going to cut? Maybe you won’t buy something else; maybe you’ll take more buses; maybe you’ll put on a sweater. Maybe weekend jaunts will look a bit silly. I really miss the Cape, and want to go again before it’s submerged, but I don’t think I’ll go again unless I can stay for a few weeks, and likely I’ll go off-season. Beastly there when it’s really hot anyway. If I can stay that long, going by rail also begins to make sense. (Ish, it’s still Amtrak. Maybe post-Pete, we’ll see what kind of miracle worker he is or isn’t.)

Cell service: my kid and tenant know to email me if they want my attention timely. I will say, though, that the battery in my 4s is a champ. Still works fine after 10 years. I’m replacing the phone only because 3G is going away (and replacing it with one of my daughter’s castoffs). My quality of life has not suffered from my lack of latest iPhone. A few years ago I started sending actual letters again, and the response from friends old and young was basically confetti and horn-tooting. Everyone loved it, and some people even wrote back. Everyone saves the letters and pictures.

A lot of this stuff is easy for me because I’m old enough to remember when people just lived like this, in a pre-disposable economy, and the worst of it was too much wood-stove smoke permeating things and dogslobber afghans. Other than that? It’s winter, it’s cold; or, it’s summer, it’s hot. But it’s interesting, the curiosity young people have about these ways of living. If your first imperative is not “but you have to get rich off it,” solutions are all around. The main barrier for most people, I think, is that it’s not obvious how to do these things and still live reasonably. I’ve put the work and thought in for the temp engineering in my house, for instance, but this is not something you can or should expect from most people. It just has to be much easier, which again will mean that some few people will have to forgo making the environmentally expensive killings they really want to make. I am fine with that.

I’ll get back to the economy thing in a minute, but, fortunately, it’s as disposable an argument as the “raising the minimum wage will always crash the economy/kill jobs/make inflation skyrocket” perennial. (This gets threatened every time. What actually happens: nothing much.) Also, nuclear, really not a good idea. You want longterm bad problems, nuclear’s how to get there. Blasting the stuff off the earth in rockets: also a nonstarter.