Woodside - Energy independence: your everyday guide to reducing fuel consumption

Christine Woodside is an environmental writer and editor. Her articles on energy, conservation, and American life have appeared in many periodicals, including the New York Times, the Hartford Courant, the Washington Post, Audubon, Womans Day, the Yale Climate Media Forum, and others. She has spoken about citizen energy conservation to the employees of the National Renewable Energy Lab. She edits the journal Appalachia and lives in Deep River, Connecticut.

Copyright 2006, 2009 by Christine Woodside

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to The Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

The Lyons Press is an imprint of The Globe Pequot Press.

Designed by Sheryl P. Kober

The Library of Congress has previously cataloged an earlier edition as follows:

Woodside, Christine, 1959

The homeowners guide to energy independence : alternative power sources for the average American / Christine Woodside.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-59921-528-0

DwellingsEnergy conservation. 2. Electric power production. 3. DwellingsElectric equipment. 4. Ecological houses. I. Title.

TJ163.5.D86W674 2005

333.79dc22

2005028063

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

THANKS TO...

Holly Rubino, who edited this edition

Lilly Golden, who edited the first edition

Rene Ebersole of Audubon magazine

Bud Ward of yaleclimatemediaforum.org

Jim Motavalli of E magazine

Jim Schembari and Ned Kilkelly of the New York Times

Tom Condon of the Hartford Courant

Russell Powell of New England Watershed magazine

The editors of Yale Alumni magazine

Elizabeth Eddy for the hybrid car chart

Nat Eddy for the solar photovoltaic explanation

Darlene Mariani for research

Annie Eddy for advice and research

My mother, Gloria Woodside, for strong-arming bookstores to carry the book

Valerie Fales, Priscilla Martel, and Lynn Cochrane

Martha Lyon

Bill Chatman

In the three years since the first edition of this book appeared, a kind of citizen energy consciousness has rooted itself in America. We now know too much to make fun of alternative energy as something for latter-day hippies living in yurts. This latest energy awakening really started in the late 1990s, when electricity supplies faltered during high-use summer periods. Then in late 2004 the price of crude oil started to rise, and since 2007 it has shot into ranges previously unimaginable. The shock of $40-per-barrel oil in 2004 became $60, $100, and, by July 2008, above $140 before it began to slide again.

Travelers began the 2005 summer season with $2.10-per-gallon gasoline, which seemed low a few months later, when Hurricane Katrina pushed prices to more than $3.00. This, in turn, seemed a bargain when economic instability and the unresolved war in Iraq pushed the price to more than $4.00 per gallon.

Clearly we live in volatile times energy-wise. Although oil is still cheaper than harnessing most alternative forms of energy, like the sun and wind, the reality of cheap oil has started to lose its footing. This is not simply due to supplies and cost. The major cause of accelerated climate change, something we have observed for many decades, has become indisputable among scientists: fossil-fuel burning by humans. This leaves ordinary people and policymakers to ask how the consumer-driven way of life can scale itself back.

Many factors, from economic predictions to political tensions to war, influence oil prices. But one factor is coming into ever-sharper focus: The worlds oil reserves are dipping ever lower, and sometime in the next couple of generations, they wont be the cheapest and most efficient way to power the majority of society.

We have dealt with short-term problems, such as a few unusually cold winters when people burned more petroleum than usual just when oil producers tried to cut their costs. More ominous are the long-term trends. Petroleum, natural gas, and coal are all finite resources. Demand for them is ever rising, particularly as the world population continues to grow, China continues its roller-coaster ride into the first world, and the United States continues to use a quarter of the worlds energy. Political leaders have known about all of these problems for years. And yet, despite the great interest in renewable energy and conservation by ever-increasing numbers of ordinary citizens like you and me, the country seems stuck in a state of anxiety. We have yet to take major action.

Gas for our cars now costs more than the inflation-adjusted price of the late 1970s. Even when adjusted for inflation, crude oil in 2008 reached historic highs of $140 per barrel before dropping again to under $100. This volatility stands up to what we experienced in 1979 (when it cost $38 per barrel or roughly $107 in todays money) or in 1864 ($8 per barrel or about $134 in todays money).

How desperate do we want to be before we look for other ways to power our lives, keep warm, and travel? Ordinary people are starting to ask why we must rely on a supply of oil that will run out in their childrens lifetimes to provide basic needs like heat and hot water. Experts predict that in the next half-century, petroleum reserves will reach a point too low to yield a benefit. As we approach that point, petroleum will continue to cost ever more as demand rises and extraction becomes more challenging.

The United States relies on several other countries to supply our oil: Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Nigeria, Venezuela, and a few others that include Kuwait and Iraq, with which we have gone to war. Listening to the evening news can leave the average American feeling helpless about our dependence on foreign countries in unstable areas for that most basic needfuel.

So far I have been talking economicsthe supply, demand, and costs of the relatively near futureand making the argument that this instability should convince most of us to change how we plan to use energy in the coming years. There is a much greater reason, of course, for us to change our waysone that I sometimes hesitate to invoke because it can be tempting to believe only what suits us if we doubt the guesswork of even the smartest scientists. That is, of course, the toll the pace of modern energy use has exacted on the planet. First of all, we are using up ancient stores of energy too fast to show much consideration for the coming centuries. More important, the burning of fossil fuels is linked with the quickening trend of global warming. The Earth has gone through warming and cooling periods in its very, very long history, most of which doesnt involve us. But in the last century, a warming trend has accelerated dramatically. It is now an indisputable fact that this accelerated rise in the average yearly temperature on Earth over the past century is the result of humans releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by burning oil, coal, and natural gas. Most of North Americas electricity generation, home heating, and transportation rely on fossil fuels. Until we use and develop alternatives, we will continue to feed our precious resources into the hopper of unnatural, human-caused, accelerated warming.