some healthy reading on efficiency--or lack thereof

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/26/green_monster

The above discusses the movement to transform the military "green."  At some point the author states the military consumes 1 million barrels of oil every three days.  If my memory serves me correct Saudi Arabia's production capacity is around 12 million bpd. 

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/

.Gov means its from official government sources.  However, it is a fairly independent government agency.  Information and statistics laden.

http://energyoutlook.blogspot.com/

Great blog post discussing pitfalls of tauting "green jobs"

My first post...efficiency, its common sense!!!

Humans impact the environment.  There’s no doubt in that statement.  Any questions on that, all one has to do is take a stroll through downtown Bardstown. 

I think the bigger question, however, should be what is the magnitude of that impact?  Does our interaction with nature negatively impact the surrounding environment?  Are our constant interactions sustainable? 

The sustainability of our lifestyle has been brought into question.  This is what I seek to discuss. 

With discussions about climate change, so controversial, I would argue we need to shift that discussion.  We need to, instead, talk about efficiency.   

I’m not going to inundate you with numbers or studies.  This is more based on common sense.  It’s a common sense approach to our over reliance on foreign oil and rising energy prices.  The bottom line is we need to start using less.  Unnecessarily spending billions of dollars is not conducive to long term economic growth and stability.

Our energy consumption remains high.  Whatever it is we decide to use--oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar—it’s not going to be cheap.  We can ill afford to keep our consumption high.

Surely, the initial costs will be high.  But the long term benefit will outweigh those costs.  The money we save by becoming more efficient could allow us to be more flexible financially.  We could allocate our already scarce resources to paying off our debts (public and private) among other things.  That’s a novel idea--actually paying off our debts.

On a global scale, our reduced consumption of fossil fuels—in this instance I’m speaking about Oil and its by-products—would reduce our reliance on foreign countries for means of producing energy.  It is no secret that many countries exporting oil to be sold on the global market are un-democratic.  Going further, many of these countries have foreign policies that do not benefit our own.  It begs the question why continue to send money their way? 

However, I do recognize shifting our purchases and consumption to more efficient modes would create other problems.  Companies producing efficient products may—after experiencing a surge in demand—see a drop off in production, which could then lead to lost jobs. 

This is a serious flaw in my argument for more efficiency.  I’m not sure how we can overcome this.

I do recognize that this shift will take many years—during that shift we can overcome the above problem.  It will more than likely require significant amount of incentives from the government (i.e. tax credits, raising minimum requirements, etc).  With the recent movement to a more grassroots approach to solving problems, this may cause some rancorous responses from private citizens.  However, I see this as a problem we can all work together to solve.  No one person has the answers.