[Greenbuilding] drying clothes

[Steven Tjiang]

More or less agree with you.  There is  only one thing that really works:
increase energy price and scarcity.  We can set good examples of what is
possible but to expect the rest of the north america to see the examples for
they are we need energy prices to go up.

---- Steve (KZ6LSD)


On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 8:17 AM, Reuben Deumling <9watts at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> 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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