American electric bill insanity
I’m prompted to write today’s email from a story Heating Your Expensive Apartment Is About to Get More Expensive, that says: “the average New York City residential electric bill of 300 kilowatt hours per month is projected to go up 22 percent, from $95 to $116.”
300 kilowatt-hours per month?!? WTF? You don’t have to get it to zero (yet), but nobody needs 300 kwh per month. If that’s the average, many use more.
A friend told me he told a friend about my off-grid experiment, who responded that “too bad it doesn’t scale.”
Too bad she she is shortsighted. Polluting hurts people. Not might or sometimes hurts people. Always and for centuries for much of our waste today. Rich or poor, whatever one’s skin color, sex, background, etc, everyone benefits from polluting less. I know if you’re addicted to dryers and air conditioners, that polluting less sounds impossible, you’ll feel attacked, and you’ll want to counterattack that old people or poor people or some group that you aren’t need it, but then the intense defensive emotions that addiction creates will pass.
How about personal responsibility not to hurt people helpless to defend themselves from entitled, privileged polluting habits? Living by values like Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You, Leave It Better Than You Found It, and Live and Let Live don’t have to scale to make your life better by living by them.
But of course polluting less scales. Everyone can pollute less. The average American watches five hours of TV a day and around a quarter of American households have two fridges. Turning off the TV and dropping to one or zero fridges is available to everyone, progressively helping people with the least resources most.
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