[Greenbuilding] drying clothes

Reuben Deumling 9watts at gmail.com
Tue Aug 30 10:17:19 CDT 2011


On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 7:51 AM, Steven Tjiang <steve at tjiang.org> wrote:

> It is all true that "dryers" are not essential but claiming moral
> superiority or nonessentialness may work in this forum but it isn't going to
> work for the general public.

I'm glad you brought this up, Steven. This is a common enough theme in the
work that I do. Once upon a time principled advice was dispensed by the
likes of Consumer Reports, energy authorities, even our government. That has
gone out of fashion. Now we instead say things like 'let the market decide,'
or we (gov't, industry, consumer advocacy groups) go to great lengths to
align 'what folks desire' with 'what is good for the environment'--which
tends to mean 'what is energy efficient.' The problem in my view with
substituting this kind of a framework for one based on principled advice,
e.g., 'the world is full/the climate can't take any more fossil fuel
combustion/let's figure out how to wean ourselves off all this stuff,' is
that energy efficiency as a model for policy has no place for *enough*, no
external reference by which to judge the rightness or prudence of an action.

Energy efficiency as a framework has us marching like the proverbial
lemmings toward the cliff. Energy efficiency makes no difference to our
absolute energy consumption. It is oft argued that it slows the growth rate
of energy consumption but what the hell good does that do when (a) we know
we need to reduce by 80% relative to 1990/drop back to 350ppm and (b) we
don't have a long list of other strategies in our tool bag to achieve this
because we've so embraced energy efficiency as THE strategy by which to
'solve' this problem? Yes, I know, renewables are another key strategy, and
I'm glad we have it on the list, but I contend that both energy efficiency
and renewables are supply strategies, and that we've allowed them to
displace the myriad demand strategies we once relied on and knew intuitively
would work.
One of the key tenets of energy-efficiency-as-policy-framework is that we
are done with tradeoffs, done with Jimmy Carter's moral framework, done with
doing without: 'You can have your energy efficient ice-maker and drink the
chilled water too.' I don't think that is a good fit for the present
circumstances. I don't think it provides the tools, insights, political
space to effect the kind of change we desperately need. In my view we'd do
much better to explore (gently or not) the language of enough, of
sufficiency. Saying that 'Americans won't go for this' isn't in my view
adequate anymore, because sooner or later even Americans are going to have
to go for this, not because I want them to be miserable, or Bill McKibben
wants them to do without, but because we live on the same planet that
Germans and Italians and South Africans and the Chinese live on, many of
whom (and many of whose governments) have recpgnized that the 20th Century
Fossil Fuel Binge is over; and that we need to figure out how to do all of
this (clothes drying and such) in a way that doesn't require fossil fuels.


>  For that reason we do need more energy efficient dryers like the European
> heat-pump dryers.  But I don't see how that is going to happen until energy
> prices goes up.
>
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