National Geographic Magazine has a habit of turning up at the right time. Lacking money to travel, my grandfather subscribed to National Geographic Magazine in 1919. He scoured those pages every month for images of worlds he felt driven to understand, and stayed put. As his collection grew, he bound the magazines, a tradition my parents continued, until National Geographic bound volumes covered an entire wall of our family home. When my parents down-sized, the collection came to us. A contractor assured us that the floors of our 230 year old house could bear the weight, and we built bookshelves to house the collection. We held the world in the living room of our home.
And now, National Geographic is telling us a fresh truth: Our living rooms - our homes - are ruining the world as we know it. In It Starts At Home, Peter Miller talks about going on an Energy Diet with his wife and some friends. Like any good dieter, the plan to lighten their Carbon Footprint begins with measurement. Miller and his team are heavily overweight from a Carbon perspective, and they have a lot of work to do in order to get into shape. Miller did a little bit of research:
So how do the numbers add up? How much CO2 could we save if the whole nation went on a low carbon diet? A study by McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm, estimated that the United States could avoid 1.3 billion tons of CO2 emissions a year, using only existing technologies that would pay for themselves in savings. Instead of growing by more than a billion tons by 2020, annual emissions in the U.S. would drop by 200 million tons a year. We already know, in other words, how to freeze CO2 emissions if we want to.
Miller, Peter, "It Starts at Home" National Geographic Magazine, March, 2009 (emphasis added).
Unlike the National Geographics of old that have been criticized for fomenting xenophobes by portraying the rest of the world as barbaric, this National Geographic strikes to the core of what is practical and do-able, emphasizing again and again that we can all take a few steps, and we are all in this together. We don't have to build solar panels on every roof, and we can forgive ourselves for an inability to do everything at once. "This movement starts at home with the changing of a lightbulb, the opening of a window, a walk to the bus, or a bike ride to the post office. PJ and I did it for only a month, but I can see the low carbon diet becoming a habit." Small steps, and a huge impact. For a wide array of examples of what individual home owners have started to do, check out the incredible photographic essay of Tyrone Turner accompanying the story. This much has not changed since 1919 - the photography is staggering and brings it all home. Home. Where we begin.
Comments
Peter Miller's article on Energy and Carbon Reduction makes a number of significant points. He states that just over 1100 million tons per year of green house gas emissions could be saved by various power industry measures including renewable energy.
Mr. Miller omits a critical discussion of nuclear power with reprocessed fuel rods - that generated about 70% of all electricity in France and could meat nearly all our electric power needs and still be green house gas free.
This isn't the place to discuss the relative safety of nuclear fuel and reprocessing compared with coal and oil with attendant military implications - but it is the place to say that such a discussion should be part of any long term energy policy.
Our present reactors won't "go away" and the nujmber of new licenses for nuclear power plants is growing - just over 20% of our power is fossil free nuclear power now. If we openly discuss it and make nuclear power and reprocessing part of any energy discussion, we are likely to arrive at a correct decision to this most important issue.
Posted by Stuart Bell on Mar 3, 2009 11:20am