I Am a Light Bulb

What if I told you that you could save 3 tons of CO2 if you just flipped a light switch? Wow!

Wait, what if I said it was 100 tons? Would you know the difference?

Here's a quiz. How much is a kilowatt-hour? Is it a lot of electricity or not very much? What if I said that if you put all the barrels of oil we use in a year end-to-end it would reach to the moon? How about the sun?

I'm convinced that most facts we hear about the environment are dumb. Because they don't mean anything to us. Here is a great one I recently read on an eco-minded website: "If everyone put an insulation jacket on their hot water tank, we'd cut CO 2 emissions by 900,000 tonnes - enough to fill around 182,000 hot air balloons."

What does that even mean? I'm pretty sure nobody knows.

Facts like this are basically pointless. How are we supposed to live in a way that's more energy conscious, and ecologically friendly, when the world is presented to us in this way? It's not that the data aren't there. It's just that they don't mean anything because they aren't tied to things we know. (Who has a good gut feeling on the size of a hot air balloon?)

So I'm going to start over. I'm going to wipe my mind clean of anything I think I know about energy and the environment, and I am going to start with something I am familiar with. And I'll make it the center of my understanding about energy and the environment. I'm going to start with the human body. I am one, so I have a feel for what it is.

Now here's a genuine and honest question. If I asked you to compare your human body to a household appliance, in terms of the energy it uses, what appliance would you say uses a comparable amount of energy? Most people say refrigerator. Or freezer. And some people say dishwasher. So here is the simple (and amazing) answer:

I eat about 2,400 Calories per day.
There are 1.163 Watt-hours per Calorie.
So I use 2,781 Watt-hours during each 24 hours.
And so my power is about 116 Watts, or just a little more than a light bulb.

Women use fewer Calories, requiring only about 90 Watts. So I'm going to kind of take an average, and just say that people's bodies use about 100 Watts.

So I am Chuck.
And I am a light bulb.

And that is my first energy lesson to myself.

Cutlery

So I went into the grocery store today to get some lunch at the cafe they have. Part of my lunch was a bowl of fruit. I asked the person at the counter for a fork, to eat the fruit with, but she said they didn't have just a fork, and hands me a plastic wrapped set of plastic utensils. Here's an exhaustive list of what was in the package: a heavy duty plastic spoon, a plastic knife, two individual packages of salt, and one of pepper, two thin napkins, and of course my plastic fork. All wrapped generously in clear plastic.

So then the whole time I was eating my fruit, I watched the opened plastic wrapper with the rest of the stuff in it, sitting on the table. It was a nice day so the sun was coming in the window and I was relaxing and enjoying myself while I ate, but the concept of the plastic bag being sealed up so you have to open all that stuff even if you just want to get one of the utensils out was still bouncing around in my mind. You can't return the rest of it, because even if you convince them to take it back, because it's unused and you're environmentally minded, they'll throw it away as soon as you turn to leave. And I can't take these home anymore, because my drawer at home is already filled with plastic knives and forks wrapped in plastic from just these kinds of occasions. But I don't think I've ever used any of them.

January, 2009 No-Brainer: Wash Your Clothes on Cold

Okay. I just posted the January, 2009 No-Brainer. This is the very first No-Brainer that I'm posting on the new blog.

I'm asking people to commit to washing their clothes in cold water for the rest of the month. I'm gonna pay $10. Plus I added an extra that says if you take a picture of your laundry machine on the cold setting and send it in, I'll enter you into a drawing for $50. Seems like a good contest.

The contest is here.

I'm hoping to get a lot of people to take pictures and send them in. I think it would be cool to have a page on the site where you can see a lot of people's washing machines all set on cold.

Simple

A thing about the name Oil is Dumb.  We complicate all this stuff.  But we don't need to.  We need to conserve and live smarter.  That's all.  So that's why I call it Oil is Dumb, because it's a simple statement, that expresses a simple truth we all know - that our fixation on oil as our energy source, and our incredible waste of it, and our incredible waste of many of our other resources, is dumb.  It avoids a complex assessment or gets into a deep debate about the exact right thing to do.  Those things are important, of course, but that's not what I'm focusing on.  What I'm saying is:  there are certain things that don't require a complicated solution.  We need to change our habits to conserve more and waste less.

So my goal is to be simple and dumb.

Oil is Dumb

Howdy folks. So I decided to start a blog. Because I have an idea.

For a while now, I've been frustrated about how our country uses energy, and how we waste precious resources like oil, and mess up the environment. At the same time, I'm excited about what opportunities we have for energy conservation and renewable energy. So I started a website a while back called Oil is Dumb. There are lots of environmental-ish websites out there, but I found that they mostly offer tips and tricks for doing things to conserve energy or live greener, which is great. But guess what I also found out? Nobody does this stuff.

Okay, not nobody. But the more I looked into it, the difference between what people know and what people do amazed me. Our awareness of environmental issues, our energy use, and our waste of oil and the problems it causes, are at an all-time high. And yet research shows that if you ask people whether or not they're willing to do such-and-such in order to use less or change our ways, they say no.  It's very strange.  To me, it seems like there is a bigger problem. Something awareness can not fix. To me the problem is action.  But I believe in people, and I think we can do it, we just need a push.

So here's what I'm gonna do:  I am going to pay people money to take action.

I'm doing a monthly contest called a No-Brainer, where I pay people cash to do a simple thing like cancel their junk mail, or fill up their tires to the correct pressure. I research these things to make sure I'm focusing on the things that give the most impact for the least amount of effort.  And so it's fun. My entire goal is to make this a sustainable business model, and then get people doing it.  So that's what I'm trying to do.

My website is www.oilisdumb.com.  I'll keep posting here to tell you more, and let you know how it's going.

Chuck Michelson

Writing from oil country in central Texas