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Conservation Tips #6-12
6. Cool Your Water-Heating BillsYou can easily save money, and hundreds of pounds of CO2 per year, by lowering the temperature of your water heater to 120 degrees and washing clothes in cold or warm water instead of hot. You can save even more by replacing a water heater that's more than 10 or 15 years old.
7. Don't Wash the Dishes
Leave the job to a professional: your dishwasher. As long as you wait until it's full to run it, it uses less than a third of the water that you'd use doing the job by hand. And for extra points in armchair environmentalism, go ahead and scrape your dishes but don't rinse them before loading (if you can run the washer soon and not worry about bugs or smell). A good modern dishwasher should be able to do the job without your help.
8. Use a Laptop, and Let It Nap
Replacing your desktop and monitor with an efficient laptop that displays the Energy Star logo, and setting it to go to sleep when you're not using it, can save about 500 pounds of carbon dioxide every year.
9. Drink Tap Water
Instead of lugging bottles of water home from the store, leave the work to your local utility. In most places tap water is just as safe, much cheaper and more convenient. Replacing just two store-bought bottles of water every week with tap water from the faucet can mean 500 fewer pounds of CO2 emissions over a year.
10. Stay Married
Happy in your marriage? Turns out, staying together is better for the earth. Converting one household into two means bigger utility bills and, therefore, more greenhouse gases. Researchers at Michigan State University last year computed that the extra electricity consumed by divorced families amounts to 73 billion kilowatt-hours, which works out to about 6,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per household.
11. Consider Carbon Offsets, But Be Careful
The ultimate in lazy strategies is to pay other people to offset your emissions by planting trees or installing green technologies. In theory, the money you would spend at home could be put to more efficient use by experts in charge of larger projects. In practice, though, it all depends on buying offsets from a trustworthy organization (such as Climate Trust) that's doing the job correctly. You can find guidelines on how to buy them at rd.com/carbon.
12. Support Carbon Taxes
A wide range of experts, liberal and conservative, agree that imposing a carbon tax on gasoline, coal and other sources of fuel would be the simplest and most efficient way to reduce carbon emissions. This would be a surcharge imposed on users of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas according to the amount of carbon dioxide produced. Some have proposed easing the pain by returning all the revenues of the tax to the public, either through other tax cuts or direct rebates. My favorite scheme to keep the money out of Congress's hands calls for divvying it up into retirement accounts for every American.
The problem is that an equally wide range of politicians are convinced that voters would turn them out of office for even suggesting such a tax. A few bills to tax carbon have been introduced in Congress, but none is expected to become law anytime soon -- certainly not in an election year. For their part, voters, unfortunately, don't seem to appreciate how blessedly simple a tax would be, compared with the elaborate energy plans, regulations and incentives that are being enacted instead.
If the costs of gasoline, electricity and other products took into account the amount of carbon they produce, you wouldn't have to wade through calculations in articles like this one. You could choose the most convenient green alternatives just by looking at the price tag.
For an armchair environmentalist, what could be easier?
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