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| What war are you fighting? |
Part I: Taking Stock
Part III: Wringing Oil from Your Beverages, Food, Stuff, and
Heat
The American way of life is saturated with oil. Part I of
this series had a
nifty calculator to sum up your yearly oil use. If you
haven’t done it yet, give it a try. In
Part II, we looked at how to reduce
oil in our travel. Now we’ll examine how to lower the oil that directly and
indirectly permeates the other parts of our lives. For some, day-to-day
mobility may account for the lion’s share of their oil use; for others, food,
beverages, and stuff may be the biggest culprits. For those of you who heat
with fuel oil or propane, that’s probably the biggest oil slurper in your life.
In this part we’ll often talk in terms of weight. Roughly
6000 pounds of beverages, food, and stuff pass through our lives each year, most
of it requiring oil for transport, and some of it requiring oil in its
manufacture. Those 6000 pounds represent a remarkable number of choices that
can render our individual oil consumption high or low.
As we noted in
Part I, if you don’t mind supporting
ExxonMobil and Saudi Arabia, and if you’re perfectly OK with wreaking havoc on
the planet via pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, there’s no sense reading
on. If, however, you don’t like aiding and abetting fracking, tar sands,
beheadings, stonings, terrorism and environmental devastation, what follows are
myriad ways to put your money where your mouth is. As I mentioned in
Part II, I
receive no monetary or other rewards from any products or websites that I point
out. I just share what I like and have found useful.
Be warned: oil diets have side effects, including, but not
limited to, better health, a more resilient local food supply and economy, and,
ultimately, more money in your pocket. However, some of the changes may take effort
and attention on your part, at least at first, and some may require a small
monetary investment that you will recoup. I suggest you take on your oil cleanse as a hobby, one
that you spend four or five hours a month over the next year. With a little
concerted effort you can likely cut both your direct and indirect oil use in
half.
Oil in Your Beverages
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| Do you drink oil? Maybe |
The Institute of Medicine
recommends women drink 0.6 gallons
of liquid a day, and men drink 0.8 gallons per day. That comes to 219 gallons/year
for women and 292 gallons/year for men. Liquid is heavy! Each gallon weighs
roughly 8.4 lbs. That comes to 1840 lbs of liquid for women and 2453 lbs for
men. If you remember from the
on-line calculator in Part I, the average
American eats 2000 pounds of food a year and consumes another 2000 lbs of
non-food stuff. I didn’t include beverages in the calculator beyond ones
that come in plastic bottles, but I should have! Because any beverage besides tap
water (or beverage made from tap water) is oily, oily, oily, unless you’re
drinking milk from a cow grazing in your backyard. Remember, the more something
weighs, the more energy it takes to move it. If your beverages are shipped by
truck, they are dripping with oil.
Here’s a breakdown
of what Americans drank in 2013, gallons per capita. (Beer, wine, and distilled
spirits data from 2010. Bottled water data from 2014)
Carbonated
soft drinks—42
Tap water—39
(includes beverages made from home tap water)
Bottled
water--34
Beer—21
Milk—18
Coffee—17
Tea—8
Juices—7
Sports
Drinks—4
Wine—2.3
Value-added
water—1.5
Distilled
spirits—1.2
This only
comes out to 195 gallons/year, so either Americans are chronically dehydrated,
or there’s some consumption missing. In any event, how can we reduce beverage
oiliness?
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| Filter it. |
1.)
Drink
mostly tap water or beverages made from tap water. It takes energy to pump
tap water to you, but not all that much per gallon, and this energy is almost never
supplied by oil. Bottled water takes 1000 to 2000 times more energy to get to
you than water out of the tap, and much of that energy comes from oil. Forty
percent of bottled water is just tap water anyway, often at 2000 times the
cost. Especially stop drinking water that has been shipped to you over an
ocean. There’s no good reason on god’s green earth to do this. If your tap
water doesn’t taste good, get a filter. We have a
Berkey filter we like a lot. It takes out the chemicals, impurities, viruses, bacteria and parasites but keeps in useful minerals.
Don’t get bottled water from delivery companies. Filtering your water on site
is far cheaper and less oily.
2.) Jettison as many plastic bottles from your
life as you can. The vast majority of plastic is made from oil, and some plastic
bottles leach chemicals that are bad for your health. Stop buying
plastic bottles
filled with water, soda, sweetened tea, Gatorade, vitamin water, whatever. In
fact, cut out soda and sweet tea altogether. Both
high fructose corn syrup and
artificial sweetners are lousy for your body, and you don’t need the empty calories. Most
Americans eat ridiculous amounts of sugar, literally double what they should.
If you can cut the soda and sweet tea from your life, after a month or so, your
taste buds will readjust and you’ll find that the natural sugars in all sorts
of things, from carrots to milk to herbals teas, will taste quite sweet to you.
3.)
Cut
out beverages in cans and glass bottles as well. Liquid in cans and bottles is heavy and
takes oil to ship. Yes, you can recycle plastic, glass, and aluminum, and it’s
certainly better than throwing any of it into landfill, but even the recycled waste stream takes oil
to move around and energy to process. Better to avoid creating waste in the
first place. (We'll discuss milk under the food category.)
4.)
In
restaurants, drink tap water, beverages made with tap water, or beverages on
tap. Iced tea, lemonade, tea, coffee, local beer on tap, local kombucha on tap.
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| Favorite mug and bottles. |
5.)
Get a
stainless steel water bottle for you and every member of your household. Get
in the habit of bringing it with you. A double-walled, vacuum insulated,
stainless steel water bottle will keep drinks cold for 24 hours or hot for 12.
It will pay for itself in just four to ten uses. Bring a water bottle with you
wherever you would’ve previously bought a beverage—concerts, work, sporting
events. Travel tip: bring a stainless steel water bottle on trains and planes.
In airports, make sure your bottle is empty before security, then fill it up
after security and carry it on the plane with you. You’ll save yourself $3-$4
by not buying water (airport water bottle prices are crazy!) and you’ll be
plenty hydrated even if your plane sits on the tarmac for an hour.
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| Oil to the rescue |
7.)
Drink
local beer on tap and bring it home in growlers. Find out the nearest microbrewery
to you. What it has on tap is usually much better than anything in a bottle or
can, plus bringing home
a growler of it involves far less oil for its packaging
and shipment.
8.)
Drink
regional wine. Drink wine from
within 200 miles if possible. Second best is wine transported mostly by ship.
9.)
Drink
regional spirits. Yes, I know this is hard if you have certain favorites,
but there are local craft distillers springing up.
Besides indirectly reducing your oil consumption, changing
your beverage habits can save you enormous amounts of money. The average coffee
drinker spends $1100 a year on coffee. The average beer drinker spends $1270
per year on beer. High quality homemade drip coffee is 1/4th the
cost of Starbucks drip coffee. A cup of excellent homemade tea can be brewed
for 8 to 12 cents. Homemade sports drinks can cost as little as 60 cents/gallon
compared to $9-15/gallon for store bought, and healthy fruit-infused water can
be made for $1 gallon compared to $3.50 a gallon for bottled, chemically-laden,
“value-added” water that isn’t great for you anyway. And brew your own and
invite friends over. Homebrewed beer can run $3/gallon, less than a tenth of
what equivalent beer would cost in a bar. Take out beer in growlers is usually
half of what drinking it in the bar would cost. Last but not least, tap water
runs about ½ cents per gallon. If you drank only tap water and nothing else,
your yearly beverage total would hardly break $1.00.
If you can’t go cold turkey with your soda or Starbucks
habit, try cutting down to just five a week, then three a week, then one a
week. If you have trouble remembering to bring along your reusable water bottle
when you go out, I find that if every time I buy a beverage in a bottle or can
I tell myself I am supporting ExxonMobil and Saudi Arabia, the next time I’m
more likely to remember to bring my bottle with me.
Oil in Your Food
Large quantities of fossil fuels
are embedded in our current agricultural system, but much of it is in the form
of natural gas used to make fertilizer and natural gas to dry corn and other
crops. Though it varies by crop, farmers actually don’t use all that much diesel per pound of food they
grow. However, our food is commonly transported great distances, so that’s how
our food becomes oily. When a processed food has a dozen ingredients,
all with their own complex supply chains, it only makes it worse. The answer?
Here are some ideas.
1.)
Reduce
FMT—food miles traveled--by localizing your food. As we covered in Part I,
the average person in the US eats one ton of food in a year, and that food travels
on average 1500 miles before you eat it. Get that FMT down! Join a
CSA
(community supported agriculture) for both meat and vegetables, shop at farmers’
markets, select items at the grocery store that originate within 100 miles of
you. Best of all, grow your own! (Hint: greens are easy!) By buying local,
you’ll encourage local agriculture, making your community more resilient. By buying
directly from farmers rather than from large corporations you’ll keep more money
in your community and increase local prosperity. Patronize local farm-to-table
restaurants.
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| Convenient and oily. |
And stop (or significantly reduce) eating fast food unless it’s
produced by a local business with food from your local foodshed. If you eat
meat, try to consume from animals that are local and pasture-raised. Remember,
when thinking about oil, it’s not just the miles the meat travels to you, it’s
also the miles that the food those animals ate traveled to them. Yes, grass-fed
or pasture-raised is more expensive. The answer is to eat less but better meat.
(Americans eat double the meat they should anyway.) Besides, by not buying
soda, bottled water, nutrition-free snacks, or other processed crapola, you’ll
have more money to spend on healthy, great-tasting food that actually nourishes
you and won’t give you cancer and other nasty diseases a few years down the
road. Try to buy as much heavy stuff and stuff you buy in volume as possible from local sources. Light stuff—spices,
tea, salt, and coffee--has been traded globally for centuries and can come from
further away. None of your food should travel by air, so resist those Chilean
blueberries and eat frozen US berries or wait till local berries are in season.
2.)
Give
your milk supply attention. If you’re of a certain age, you’ve likely been
programmed that milk is essential to human health. It’s not. You can get the
calcium and vitamin D other ways. However, I admit I like a little milk on
cereal or in my tea. As noted above, Americans drink 18 gallons of milk a year. A dairy cow eats roughly a hundred pounds of feed a day in
order to produce 7 gallons of milk a day. If that feed travels hundreds of
miles before it reaches the cow, you can see how the milk gets oily.
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| Happy cows make happy milk. |
Try to buy
milk from pasture-raised (or predominantly pasture-raised) cows. Even in California
the cows can’t be in the field all winter so their diet will have to include
dried forages such as silage and alfalfa hay. Some organic dairies will also
feed them a certain amount of rye, triticale, flax meal and wheat. (Not corn!)
But cows that graze on pastures should be able to get over 50% of their
diet from the ground at their feet, reducing their feed oiliness considerably. In
terms of oiliness, local dairies are better than distant dairies; reusable
glass bottles, as long as they’re not being shipped too far, are less oily than
plastic jugs or cardboard coated in plastic. (Some dairies use cardboard coated
with soy wax, which is better.) As with meat, drink less milk, drink better
milk. Your body will thank you for it.
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| Words cannot express the wrongness. |
3.)
Eat
for nutrition. More than half of the calories in the average American diet
come from highly processed foods, much of it laden with sugar, unhealthy
additives, and empty calories. The more processed your food item, the more
ingredients it likely has, each one representing a supply chain dripping with
oil. Shop around the edges of your grocery store; the
interior is where most of the processed stuff lurks. Squeezing oil out of your
food may necessitate relearning how to cook, but with fresh ingredients it’s
not hard to make tasty meals. Remember, any prepared meal that you just pop in
the microwave likely has a heck of a lot of oil behind it supply chain-wise.
Eat in season. If you currently eat like an average American, you should likely
double the amount of vegetables and plant-based fats you consume while overall
eating less.
4.)
Eat
consciously, even for just the next two months. I know all this food stuff
can seem like a lot, but just becoming conscious of what we eat is half the
battle. For the next two days, write down everything you eat and where it came
from. When you don’t know where it came from, put down a question mark. You
will see a lot of question marks. Take it as a challenge to see how many of
those question marks you can turn into local food. Then, for the next two
months, just pay attention to what you’re putting in your mouth and make a
mental map of where each of the components of your meal comes from. Sure, you’ll
have days when this is nearly impossible. The point is not to be perfect but to
go from entirely unconscious to a heck of a lot more aware.
5.)
Sate
your appetite with good fats. It’s hard to feel full by just eating
vegetables. That’s where fats come in. But it’s important to make them good
fats. Stay away from artificial trans fats of all kinds. Stay away from fried
foods (hello, this includes donuts and French fries!) and highly processed
foods. Foods with good fats: avocados, butter and ghee, coconut oil, good
quality olive oil, and foods with omega-3s, such as wild-caught salmon,
sardines, grass-fed beef, walnuts, flaxseeds, hemp seeds, and dairy products
from grass-fed cows. If you can feel sated while eating less, then you will
consume less food and less food-related oil.
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| Remember: Hara Hachi Bu |
6.)
Don’t
overeat. It’s not only bad for you, it also means you’re making poor use of food
likely trucked to you with the assistance of oil. Eat until you’re 80% full.
This requires listening to your body, regardless
of what is on your plate.
(If there’s
food leftover, put it into a storage container and eat it for lunch the next
day.)
Okinawans call this 80% rule,
“Hara Hachi Bu,” and it has been shown to keep them healthy and long-lived. Americans
consume far more calories per day than they need to, often because they eat
processed, nutrition-less so called “food” that is
purposely engineered to be as addictive as possible. Cut out sugar and artificial sweeteners, cut
out the additives and the junk calories, check in with your body as you eat,
and you’ll not only be healthier, you’ll spend less money on food, and you’ll
be responsible for less food-related oil use.
7.)
Compost
food waste. First of all, plan decently so you don’t create a lot of food
waste. But you’re inevitably going to have some, so compost easy-to-breakdown
organic items--like greens, coffee grounds and tea leaves--in your yard. You
can do a formal compost pile, or just chop the greens up a bit and then put
the food scraps near a plant under some mulch. I put crunched up eggshells out
in my yard as well, but I don’t put out fruit because then raccoons will rifle
through it. The food scraps disappear pretty fast that way, they help replenish
the soil, and no oil is to used haul this particular form of waste anywhere. (I actually do this with a large portion of my yard trimmings, too. Chop and drop.) If
your town or city has a compost program, use it for the harder to break down
food items like soiled paper, bones or fats. (And fruits.) I find even used tea
bags will break down directly in my garden under mulch as long as I remember to
tear out any little metal staples. If you live where the ground freezes in
winter, you can probably only do this spring through fall, but that’s still
two-thirds of the year.
8.) Don't grocery shop when you're hungry. You will impulse buy all sorts of oily badness.
9.) Buy in bulk to reduce oily packaging and the weight of packaging.
10.) Avoid petrochemical pesticides by buying organic. The active ingredient in most pesticides is a petrochemical derivative of some kind.
Oil in Your Stuff
As we covered in
Part I, Americans consume on average 2000 lbs of
non-food stuff each year. It not only takes oil to transport that stuff to you,
it takes prodigious amounts of oil to move, mine, extract, shovel, burn, waste,
pump and dispose of one million pounds of material in order to come up with
2000 lbs of finished product for you. It’s estimated all those activities
require ½ gallon of oil per ton of raw material, which comes out to 250 gallons
of oil embedded in the manufacture of the stuff you buy in a year. It also
turns out that much of your stuff is made with oil as a component or
ingredient, and that ingesting petrochemicals, breathing them, or absorbing
them through your skin is pretty much terrible for you. How can we reduce the
direct and indirect oiliness of our stuff? Let’s start with an easy one.
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| Favorite shopping bags. |
1.)
Squeeze
the oil out of your plastic bags and plastic wrap. Most plastic is
basically oil in solid form. Replace single-use plastic bags with reusable
shopping bags, produce bags, and wraps. Shopping bags can be made out of
recycled plastic, but my favorites are made out of cotton twill, repurposed sails, and
felted wool. I like
mesh produce bags for shopping,
muslin bags for vegetable
storage in the refrigerator, and
food wraps to replace plastic wrap and
baggies. Though your disposable bag habit might not
amount to all that much oil, there are plenty of other reasons to cut out
plastic bags, and since it’s so easy, why not?
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| Not a blithe spirit. |
2.)
Sate
the hungry ghost through tidying. Okay, I realize that sentence
might not make any sense to you. Let me explain. The Chinese have a concept of
hungry ghosts, spirits of people who had an evil life or a violent death. These
ghosts are inflicted with desire, hunger or thirst that can never be satiated.
Let’s jump to American culture where the average person, above all else, is a consumer,
plowing through 2000 lbs of new goods a year. Our drawers are stuffed, our
closets jammed, our garages so full our cars won’t fit in. Our houses are
larger than ever, but even so we can’t fit all our stuff in them and have to
rent 3.5 billion square feet of self-storage units to accommodate our
burgeoning mess. Do we need all this stuff? Do we even know all the stuff that
we have? I suggest the answer to both is no. Let’s be clear:
for the most part, not knowing we have
something is pretty much the same as not having it. Because if you don’t remember you have it and
it’s hidden behind volumes of junk, what’s the likelihood of stumbling across
it when you need it? So now comes the tidying part. Specifically,
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. This is a hilarious book on many levels, but
what Marie Kondo proves time and again is that she is the world's maestro of
tidying. Through her method, (which, for the price of her short book, she will
bully and club you into doing with pitbull determination) you will get rid of
all the stuff that you will never wear, never read, never use, and have never liked in the
first place. You will ditch the torn, stained, out-of-date clothing that’s
getting in the way of the shirt you do like in the back of your closet that you
completely forgot you had. The essential part of her technique is taking all of
one category of item and dumping it on your bed or on the floor. Once it’s out,
it’s more difficult to put away than get rid of, and so the dross will more
easily flow to recycling, Goodwill, eBay, Craigslist, or the garbage. When what’s
left is what you like and need, you will see, wow, I have twelve pairs of
excellent shoes, four of which I haven’t seen in two years, because eight pairs
of broken/worn out/hated shoes were hiding them. The reduced number of shoes will
fill your closet in a calm, orderly way, all visible to you anytime you open
your closet door, and you will see you have enough shoes.You will be sated.
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| Totally forgotten at the back of my closet. |
Or,
if you need a new pair shoes, you will know exactly what you need because you'll have a clear inventory of what you have. You won’t be buying out of vague,
anxious shoe-neediness. (I myself confess to sock anxiety and have been known to impulse buy them by the half-dozen.) This is the great paradox: by getting rid of stuff, you
need less stuff because you actually know and can access what you have. You’ll
no longer have to rent a storage locker; your car will once again fit in your garage. You will feel
lighter, calmer, and more in control of your life. You may think I’m joking,
but when it comes to stuff, less is truly more. Get this book or check it out
from your library. I bet you already have enough stuff that, after tidying, you’ll
be able to cut your new acquisitions by at least a third for the next five
years. That’s 83 gallons of oil a year out of your life and major bucks you
don’t have to spend. Plus, all your excess stuff that wasn’t doing you any good
can find a new home with someone who might have a real use for it.
3.)
Sate
the hungry ghost by avoiding advertising. What is advertising but a
means to arouse the hungry ghost in you? It’s designed to make you feel inadequate,
needy, insecure, unattractive, sick, fearful, and sometimes literally hungry.
It makes you want. And want. Things you don’t need. It messes with your mind.
It takes up your time. It creates mental clutter. Clear it out! The most
important step is to separate your entertainment from advertising. Record your TV shows and then diligently fast forward through commercials when you watch them. Even pay money
for your entertainment if you have to. What! Entertainment should be free, you
say! No, it’s not free. You pay for it, believe me, when
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| Manipulate much? |
your aroused hungry
ghost provokes you to buy toys or cars or even pharmaceuticals you’d really be
better off without. (Need I even point out just how bad manipulative
advertising is to your children’s psyches?) Rather than spend 20 minutes out of
every hour wasting your time with TV ads, pay $2-$3 to see the show ad-free.
The 20 minutes you save is not only worth $3, your peace of mind gets thrown in
as a bargain. Paying for your shows may mean you watch less TV, but that’s a
feature, not a bug. Watch just the good stuff, the stuff that’s worth paying
for. Besides, do you really need to watch more than two hours of TV in an
evening when you could be tidying your sock drawer? I think not. If there are
some types of programs (like certain sports) for which there are no ad-free
options, then at least mute the ads. That helps reduce the brainwashing power significantly.
Another useful strategy is to talk back to the ads and ridicule their
manipulations. Next, I’ll note that newspapers are putting in articles that
look like news but are actually promotions/ads for real estate/ cars/other
products. Identify and scorn such practices. Lastly, be aware that Facebook is inserting a lot more advertising in your newsfeed. They know your web history,
and they target precisely, rendering their hungry ghost stimulation quite
powerful. Beware and keep a skeptical eye on on digital media. Protect your mind, protect your wallet. Keep that
hungry ghost at bay.
4.)
Buy
higher quality stuff that lasts longer.
5.)
Buy
used. You will still accrue the oil embedded in the product (divided by
product life) but the first owner gets all the oil it took to deliver the
product, not you.
6.)
Take
care of your stuff so it lasts longer. The good news? When you have fewer
clothes (all ones that fit and you actually like,) it’s much easier to launder and store
them properly. (Hint: clothes dried on the line last longer.) When you have
fewer tools, kitchenware, and appliances (all of them used by and actually valuable to
you,) it's easier to take care of them properly.
7.)
Reduce
the endless stream of plastic and petrochemicals flowing through your life. If
you really want to get serious about plastic, I recommend browsing
My Plastic Free Life because that woman is the most committed plastic eschewer you’ll ever
likely run across. I’ll just mention some of the ways to get oil out of many
products in your life. Use natural materials, natural fibers, mostly stay away
from acrylic, nylon, polyester. Many cosmetics are made from petroleum. Use natural
cosmetics, lotions and other skin care products. Avoid “fragrance,” which is usually
made from petrochemicals, and look for essential oils to make things smell good
instead. Avoid room fresheners unless breathing petrochemicals appeals to you. Avoid
phthalates and parabens. Buy bread that comes in paper bags or no bags. These
days there are lots of
wool and
ecologically-responsible leather shoes you can choose from instead of
synthetic/plastic leather.
Drycleaning submerges your clothes in petrochemicals
and leaves a residue for your skin to absorb. Use CO2 dry cleaners or wet
cleaners instead. Vinyl is a petrochemical product. Tires are made from rubber
and petrochemicals. (Another good reason to drive less.) Buy carpeting made
from
bio-fiber or natural materials instead of nylon. (There’s one gallon of
oil per 3 square yards of traditional carpet.) Many laundry detergents are made
from petrochemicals and also leave residue absorbed by skin. Use plant-based laundry
products instead. Buy wax paper coated with soybean wax, not paraffin. Paper
cups, milk cartons, and ice cream containers are usually coated with
polyethylene but some organic companies are using soybean wax alternatives. Use
paper cups coated with corn-based rather than oil-based plastic, or better yet
use reusable cups. Watch out for paraffin wax on vegetables such as cucumbers,
eggplants and bell peppers. Cheap chocolate that doesn’t melt on a hot day
usually has a good dose of paraffin wax in it, something you really don’t want
to eat. You also don’t want to ingest mineral oil, which is often used as a
preservative in packaged baked goods. As for
Olestra—don’t even get me started
on how evil it is. Avoid, avoid. (It sometimes goes by the name Olean.) It can
be found in fat-free potato chips, french fries, and corn chips, but you’re not
eating that stuff anymore anyway, right?
Artificial colorings, usually made
from petrochemicals, are wicked bad for you. A heck of a lot of household
cleaners contain petrochemicals---methylene chloride (stain removers),
monoethanolamine (oven cleaners, tub and tile cleaners, laundry pre-soaks,
floor strippers, carpet cleaners) naphthalene (mothballs, deodorizers),
parabens (widely used in cleaning products). Canned goods and canned sodas usually
have a plastic lining inside the cans. Stay away from styrofoam anything. (Styrofoam
packing peanuts should be banished from the earth.) For sunscreens, avoid
oxybenzone. Use zinc or titanium as an active ingredient instead. Better yet,
wear a hat. Vaseline is a petrochemical product, as are asphalt roof shingles.
Don’t use paraffin wax candles; they produce soot and fumes you shouldn’t
breathe. Use soy wax or beeswax candles instead. Crayons are made from paraffin
and most chewing gum has some kind of petroleum derivative in it.
There are beeswax crayons and natural chewing
gums out there. Seek them out. If you live within a dozen miles of an ocean like I do, eschewing plastic is especially important since the plastic we use has a nasty habit of making its way to the water and
devastating marine life.
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| Simple but awesome. |
8.)
Ditch
the fabric softener and dryer sheets. Both are
full of petrochemicals that
stay on your clothes and get absorbed by your skin. I’m giving this its own
number because the solution is
wool dryer balls that are just so great everyone
should get half a dozen now, this instant. They soften your laundry, deal with
static electricity, and will last a thousand loads. They also decrease drying
time by a third, so they’ll pay for themselves within a few months. (After your
refrigerator, your dryer is the second biggest energy hog appliance in your
house.) I dry my clothes on a line and just do the last five or ten minutes in
the dryer, but when I have a rainy week, wool dryer balls are a godsend. If you
must have fragrance in your laundry, add a few drops of essential oils to the
balls and you’ll be far better off than breathing the faux fragrance of
petrochemicals.
9.)
Less
oily package delivery. This was covered a bit in Part I. The United States
Postal Service is your best bet because they’re coming to your house anyway.
Because they service so many homes on relatively compact routes, USPS is
actually pretty fuel efficient on a per delivery basis. Of course, if you have
electric bike UPS delivery where you live, snap it up.
10.) Anytime you buy anything, ask yourself, "Am I buying this, or is it my hungry ghost?"
Oil in Your Heat.
Replace heating oil
and propane with a heat pump. If your household is one of the small percent
of US households that use heating oil or propane for heat, this is easy,
just a straightforward technology switch. First seal and insulate your home
(never any sense in heating the outdoors.) Then put in a heat pump. In frigid
climates, put in a cold-climate heat pump. Heat pumps are so efficient that the
cost of your winter heating will drop by half and the heat pump will pay for
itself in three to six years. Many states and utilities have tax
credits/incentives/rebates that will make the payback even faster. If you live
in ultra frigid territory you may need some kind of electric resistance heat
back up for your coldest days. If you have the money, put in an
ultra-efficient
ground-source heat pump system. It’s substantially more
expensive but also substantially more efficient and you’ll have no worries about
ultra low temperatures. Once you’ve made the switch, that’s nine hundred or so
gallons of oil a year out of your life. You’ll be doing it sooner or later, so why
not sooner?
Seems Like Oil, Oil Everywhere
 |
| I now know I have enough socks. |
So you've just read through a heck of a to-do list. Do I do all this stuff
perfectly? Not even close. I don’t even do it as well some people I know. Whereas
I consciously chose to become an urban bike rider to reduce my oil consumption,
many of the actions listed above I decided to do for health reasons, to save
money, or out of a general concern for the environment. Reducing my household’s indirect oil consumption was just a side
benefit. Don’t try to make all these changes in a week or even a month!
You’ll exhaust yourself and give up. Making your life less oily is a marathon,
not a sprint. Just keep plugging away, item by item, perhaps ticking off the
big ones or the easy ones first. By the end of 2017 I guarantee you will be
healthier, and probably happier and wealthier too. Give it a whirl.
Want some more good news? You can substantially reduce your oil use (and your de facto support of
ExxonMobil, Saudi Arabia, beheadings, stonings, fracking, and the Dakota Access
Pipeline) regardless of how dysfunctional
Congress is and regardless of who is
President. March, protest, resist. But squeeze the oil out of your life,
too.
Continue on to Part IV: Helping Others EschewOil
The EIA Electric Power Monthly report came out Friday. Being
an energy nut, I read this report each month the day it appears, but the
report in February is special because it has December year-to-date data, closing
out the year. As I perused the monthly reports over the course of 2016, I noted
renewable capacity increased only in dribs and drabs, causing me to doubt that
the US would even reach 2015’s renewable capacity additions. Lo and behold a
prodigious amount of solar panels and wind turbines were brought on-line in
December. Indeed, 56% of all 2016’s wind turbines came on-line that cold, dark
month, as did 36% of all utility-scale solar arrays for the year. Those
installers must’ve been working around the clock. In any event, 2016 solar and
wind capacity additions squeaked by 2015 numbers, but not by much. Utility
scale solar installations were 8% higher than in 2015, and wind installations
were only 2% higher. In 2015 China’s solar and wind capacity installations were
double and triple ours, respectively. I expect we’ll find that in 2016 they outpaced
us even further. 
The good news is that there were significant renewable
capacity additions in states that have largely been renewable sluggards up
until now. Ohio, Nebraska, Missouri, and even West Virginia put in wind farms.
Both Georgia and Florida installed significant amounts of utility scale solar.
Even South Carolina and Mississippi installed a tiny bit of solar to start
taking advantage of their prodigious sunshine. 
