[Greenbuilding] low flow shower heads

[Speireag Alden]

Reuben wrote:

> On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 3:01 PM, Steven Tjiang <steve at tjiang.org> wrote:
>> We can lecture, admonish, encourage all we want.  The easiest way to get the desired behavior is to make energy more expensive.
> 
> That seems very difficult to me. Unless you follow Kat's advice and charge your guests for the hot water. Taxing gasoline or adding surcharges to electricity are both looked down upon by a lot of different constituencies and usually by elected officials, too. Although this is lamentable, I would not conclude from this that encouraging, talking about, helping folks find the hardware is necessarily harder. At least not in my experience. 
> 


	Steven is right, if by "easiest" he means "simplest" in an engineering sense:  one elegant change to produce maximum broad effect.

	Reuben, practically speaking, you're right.  Elected officials believe that if they raise energy prices at all, the resultant stink will get them ousted, and so they don't.

	Doesn't mean it's not the best course.  It may just be politically impossible.  I could make an analogy about a train, a cliff, and a group of people arguing that we should not apply the brakes because they are unnecessary and make an unpleasant squealing noise.

	But I won't.

-Speireag.


-- 
Here lies, extinguished in his prime
a victim of modernity:
but yesterday he hadn't time --
and now he has eternity.
--Piet Hein, poet and scientist (1905-1996)