Your Creative Greenius has been working hard around my home and office to cut my needless electricity use. Not only do I power down my computers at night, but I now have four different power strips that get shut off too. The difference that’s made in cutting my “phantom energy use” has been serious in cutting my bill from SCE, not to mention my personal carbon footprint.
I also spend time volunteering for the South Bay Environmental Services Center in which I try to spread the energy savings and conservation message to everyone I come in contact with. All intelligent people know that if we practiced energy efficiency seriously in the United States we could save billions and billions of dollars and cut our greenhouse gas emissions by huge amounts. If you hear someone arguing against conservation and efficiency you know you’re talking to someone who is easily proven wrong.
But what if we each knew exactly how much energy every electrical appliance we plug into our wall sockets actually used? And what if we knew exactly how much each appliance cost us? Think you might use that knowledge and your lizard brain and start to use your electricity more wisely? Is it possible you could actually practice some cognitive behavior? Maybe you can’t do that in your personal relationships, but I bet you can if it saves you money on your electric bill.
Smart meters and smart electrical grids are coming, my friends, whether you know it or not, but what we really need are more smart users. You can’t be very smart if you don’t know the facts – just look at the Republicans in the House and in the Senate and the mess they’ve gotten us all into.
If only we could plug those dumb power users into this new brain-in-a-box from Sentilla:
A big Greenius “thank you” to our pal in New York City, Ms. Diana Mott, who we had the pleasure of meeting at the Maho Bay Eco Resort on the island of St. John in the US Virgin islands. “Princess Di” as she is known throughout the Metropolitan tri-state area, turned us onto this video and to its source, John Hockenberry’s “The Takeaway.”
I first heard and enjoyed Hockenberry when he was with NPR and I’ve dug his work ever since.
He’s one of the best reporters in the United States.
Since his show isn’t on the radio here in So Cal, I’ll be listening from now on via the website.
Creative Greenius 