The Reality of the Slacker Environmentalist: No pain, no change
I attended Al Gore’s keynote at Embedded Systems last year, and it was what I’ve heard described as a real come-to-Jesus meeting: A persuasive, charismatic speaker (yes, this was Al Gore, but Al Gore on fire), a generally professional audience already concerned about climate changes and conservation, and a resulting warm and fuzzy feeling on my part that yes, change needs to happen.
However, when I look back over my actions for the past year or so, I don’t see any significant changes in my behavior. Yes, I’ve bought CFLs (with mixed results) when I happened to see them on sale at Costco and Home Depot, and yes, I’ve thought that my next car really should get over 30 mpg, and I’ve even toyed with the idea of pushing the home energy bills down into the cheap kWh range with some solar panels, but when it comes to significant lifestyle changes – well, no.
So I wasn’t surprised to see an article in the WSJ, For All the Ecological Concern, Economy Drives Energy Use that confirmed that my behavior is not confined to my own hypocritical, slacker self:
“For all the talk about global warming, what is prompting Americans to rein in their fossil-fuel use isn’t the effect of their consumption on the planet. It is the effect on their pocketbooks.”
The article goes on: "The U.S. is at a "tipping point," with people beginning to factor energy use into everyday decisions, says Lee Schipper, who has studied energy consumption for decades, earlier for Royal Dutch Shell PLC and now as a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. But the driver isn’t ecology, he says. "Sadly, it’s economics. No pain, no gain.""
I was reminded of this article when I saw a comment on a post I wrote (see note below) about the practicality of Toyota’s plan for putting a solar panel on the Prius’s roof: The commenter’s point was that even if the best that the solar panel could contribute was a mere 10% of the power the Prius used for air conditioning, that 10% carried across the millions of cars in the US was significant savings of gasoline.
But keeping in mind that Toyota isn’t going to give you that solar panel for free, and judging by solar panels installations in general which depend on government subsidies to make them economically viable, I’m thinking, based on my newly-formulated Law of the Slacker Environmentalist, that solar panels on cars will not catch on until they actually return more in saved fuel costs than they cost the consumer.
Is it right? I don’t know. But it’s real.
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[Note: The comment was on the article summary contained in “This wEEk in gEEk” here. The original post was Here’s a (weak) justification for including a solar panel on the Prius that is well-worth reading for the comments alone, which include practical instances of solar panels used as trickle chargers, as well as a couple of Shakespearean allusions. We may be cheap, but we’re cultured here at PowerSource.]
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