I'm not the only one

There are a lot of interesting sustainability blogs. TreeHugger has a lot of good articles that run the gamut of the built environment. Most time I read an article there, I find myself thinking about lighting; I'm cursed not being able to get rid of it from my brain.

This article is really a whopper. Not only does it discuss why we stupid Americans build 2X the house we can ever use (well, not me, we own a 1300 sqft townhouse), it has a great phrase at the end; "... we need to properly price energy to create an incentive to conserve". Read that again. Think about it.

I have said this for 4-5 years. If energy was dollars per kWh instead of pennies, then everyone would have no choice but to stop using it. "We" focus on stupid concepts like ethanol in order to offset gasoline in cars when there is no way we ever solve the problem that way; it is a bandage on a shotgun wound. That logic leads us to twisty CFL "bulbs" that everyone seems to hate (mostly out of ignorance), but they use 1/4 the energy. Band-Aid. Why is the first step not mandatory occupancy sensors? Who cares what you have installed if you don't ever turn it on?

Right now, as much as the pundits would argue otherwise, I say we are still in an early-adopter phase of "green". Most people are doing anything along the sustainably intelligent lines because they want to hug trees. Global warming, blah blah blah. Who cares if it is real? Who cares if we are causing it? No matter what, we run out of coal. We run out of oil. We run out of natural gas. Doesn't matter if any of it is causing global warming. We. Run. Out. ... and your kids might be alive to see some of it. Your grandchildren certainly will be.

What we need is a different economic process. You want to keep your 100W incandescent? Fine by me. That will be $50 to buy it please. $49.50 of which goes to fund thin-film PV or something else. Why do we only have a ban on new probe-start metal halide? That causes phase-out in what, 20 years ... only happens when the pulse-start retrofit kit (or does LED leapfrog that?) is cheaper than the probe-start ballast that keeps failing. How do you get adoption of a more efficacious technology?

"... we need to properly price energy to create an incentive to conserve"