Should individuals take voluntary action to curb their energy consumption?

Yes

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by robertsloan2

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Yes, individuals should take voluntary action to curb their energy consumption. Global issues of population, resources, climate change and potential ecological collapse are not going to go away. So there are broad ethical reasons why individuals should curb their energy consumption.

There are also good sensible personal reasons why an individual's better off curbing energy consumption. Most of the ways individuals can curb energy consumption also save them money! They may contribute to better health if you're driving less and walking or bicycling more. They may save money at the grocery if you start growing some of your own produce in the yard, organically. If you recycle clothing by mending it or buying used clothing at thrift stores, your clothing bill will go way down.

I'm a disabled man living with my daughter, son in law, two grandchildren, a Siberian husky and a shaggy Siamese cat in a nice little suburban house in the Midwest. Outside these walls, our lives look pretty much like anyone's. The front yard's got clipped grass, a nice tree and some flowers in the spring and summer. The house is in good shape.

Doing maintenance on your house will seriously lower energy consumption and thus energy bills. Becoming a homeowner is itself good economic sense - each month's mortgage note paid is an investment in your own equity instead of dripping into a landlord's pocket, so frugality is served and so is independence. Homeowners find it a lot easier to reduce energy consumption because in apartment buildings, decisions like insulation or adding a heat exchanger are up to the landlord, not the resident.

One of the subtle differences between our house and others is the way we just plain generate less garbage. Trash uses energy to remove it, to process it, to deal with it. We're all do it yourselfers. This type of hobby makes for lower energy consumption and less spending, because time gets taken up making good permanent objects for use that we love and take care of and hang onto for years instead of replacing with the latest thing from the store.

We don't buy many packaged foods. My daughter and son in law both enjoy cooking, he likes to smoke meat and she's a pastry chef who used to work for a fancy New Orleans hotel and a good upscale bakery before she became a freelance writer. So we cut out things like breakfast cereal. How does that lower energy consumption? Look at the packaging and the amount of factory processing that goes into making a box of breakfast cereal - or those cute plastic wrapped packages of little individual serving boxes so that everyone gets to choose a favorite flavor.

Instead she gets flour, oatmeal, eggs, ingredients and we eat muffins, pancakes, hot cereal with any number of fancy toppings because it's simpler to just get raisins and brown sugar and cranberry sauce in bulk. For pennies on the dollar, we are all eating fancy restaurant breakfasts done to order to everyone's personal taste, versus eating an overpriced item that's not even seen as a luxury. Most people look at cold breakfast cereal as necessity, and forget that oatmeal is a breakfast cereal too.

The result is that our food budget dropped to miniscule compared to most people's, the quality of what we eat went up through the roof and we are using less energy. It does mean learning to cook. It takes skill to conserve energy and consumption to that level - but it can be deeply satisfying to start fixing everything the way you like it, not relying on the standardized tastes of food testers in a company that isn't even in your region.

Almost all of the things that can conserve energy are also frugal things that can save a person's budget and increase quality of life. Curbing energy consumption is not an either-or. It's not about giving up luxuries. It's about reducing inanities and paying attention to the real things in life, enjoying them for what they are.

Take car pooling. It's a simple thing, making some social arrangements, coordinating with other people who have to commute to the same general place you do. It cuts the expenses of the car poolers in half for necessary transit and it saves the environment because one less car is on the road, it reduces traffic. These measures to curb energy consumption benefit the individual immediately.

Big decisions like choosing whether to rent or own, choosing where to live and work, choosing occupation can be made with an eye to reduce energy consumption in the long term. All the little frugalities like passing up breakfast cereal and not buying anything we don't actually use and enjoy can add up to the means to purchase what you live in - and thus wind up in a better economic situation too. Working near or in your home is the ultimate energy saver. Anyone who can telecommute with a computer has also pulled a car off the road, and reduced the amount of energy used in the building the company's housed in, freed up that space - and gets to work in their shorts if they want.

Even when I did rent and work outside jobs, before my disabilities got this bad, I tended to choose apartments very close to my workplace to reduce the amount of time it took to get to work. I did that because I resented losing the time. Three hours a day wasted riding buses was not my idea of a happy life. But my choosing that for my own convenience and pleasure also meant that bus was less crowded on its longer route. If it became more of a factor in people's choices, public transportation would be less burdened. And of course if more people used that even when they can afford a vehicle, the pressure would be on for towns and cities to put in good public transportation.

We have toddlers in the house. Common sense applies to these decisions. We're not going to turn down the thermostat and risk the children's health or my health. But good insulation, good windows and caulking, good home maintenance reduces that - and cooking more in the winter adds to the overall heat in the house. It's as true today as it was in the 1900s that if you run the oven it will heat up the house too. Taking energy consumption into your decisions is a way to start noticing waste in general, and some decisions may be more practical for some people than others.

We turn lights out in rooms we're not actually using, but don't stint them when we do things that need light. Much of energy conservation is a matter of creating habits that become frugal, and the results show up in smaller bills every month. We're looking into getting a faucet-based water heating system that would cost a bit to put in - and pay for itself in lower energy bills in a few years, while providing unlimited hot water for baths, showers, handwashing and cooking. Science keeps coming up with greener technology, so newer can sometimes be a lot better.

My daughter recently had to replace the washer and dryer - and the new high efficiency ones use a lot less electricity. We have toddlers, those big machines run constantly keeping the children clean. We use cloth diapers. Disposables may be easier, but they're a huge source of pollution - and the cloth ones just need washing, not buying again and again. The money saved can go toward toys and food and games and things the children want as well as need. Once again, the environmentally sound choice is also the cost-cutting one!

So don't think of curbing energy consumption as some grim puritanical sacrifice. It's not. It's tightening the belt on things you don't want - garbage, long commutes, expensive yet poor quality clothing, boring standardized packaged foods, so that you can afford the things you do want and enjoy good meals, comfortable clothing, more time to enjoy your life and a better quality of life. Why bother paying extra for inconvenience just to wreck the environment? Most energy-cutting decisions work on all levels, and having more spending money is a better motivator than high ideals when it comes to changing habits.

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