Hands on Practical Experience

I didn't realize the media had covered the heat spell so much. I only knew people kept asking me about sleeping without air conditioning the past few days. Now that I looked up the news from a couple days ago, I see they were going nuts about a heat dome. All I know is that for the past three nights, I woke up sweating and had trouble falling asleep, even setting up a separate mattress closer to the window. There wasn't much breeze. Regular readers know I don't use air conditioning. Was I suffering? While, I won't deny discomfort, in my heart I wasn't thinking about global warming, the environment, or anything abstract like that. I was thinking of the people I would hurt if…

The left denies "the science" as much as anyone. It attacks the right, calling them "climate deniers" and says "compassionate capitalism" is an oxymoron. But it promotes what it calls "clean," "green," and "renewable" energy and "energy transitions" and claims to protect BIPOC and indigenous. The science and technology are clear, though, that creating electric power from solar, wind, nuclear, or (if it were ever to work) fusion is not clean, green, or renewable. Humans have not yet had an energy transition, if transition means it stopped using an old form. When we start using new ones, we use them and the old ones, not instead of. The left doesn't want its initiatives to destroy indigenous communities but they do. It claims individual action doesn't…

Want to read something frustrating about living more sustainably? Want to read why, when people ask the hardest part about what I do, I say it's the friction from people? I'm not saying I'm anything special, just that I've done things as experiments that work out. People say living more sustainably is impossible. When I tell them I'm already doing it, like that I dropped my impact ninety percent, they say what they just was impossible is easy, devaluing any struggle I put into it. I generally find the activity intrinsically rewarding, so I value the struggle, but I don't like being patronized. When I suggest if it's easy, they can do it, they say it's easy for me but hard for them. I don't…

After three or four days at least overcast, often raining, I got to charge outside today. Since I've also been charging through my window, today was my first time outside in longer than just since those rainy days. Unfortunately for me, it was 40F when I went out (4.5C), rising to 43F (6C) when I went home, but more challenging for charging was the wind. Panels are like sails in the wind, expensive sails that can break. But those challenges paled compared to the advantages of spring. The sun is close enough to overhead that I could lay the panels flat on the ground and the angle is close enough to right that the charging rate is fairly close to maximum without the wind blowing…