GP: Syndicated Column: Sun, Corn and Conservation on $1 a Day

["Tom Gray" <tomgray@igc.org>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Center for a New American Dream [mailto:syndicated@newdream.org]
Sent: Monday, April 01, 2002 11:33 AM
To: Syndicated Column Service Recipients
Subject: Syndicated Column: Sun, Corn and Conservation on $1 a Day


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THE CENTER FOR A NEW AMERICAN DREAM'S
SYNDICATED COLUMN SERVICE
Consumption · Quality of Life · Environment · Values
*****************************************************

April 2002

Greetings from the Center for a New American Dream! In the latest offering
from our syndicated
column service, author Mike Tidwell explains how his family is fighting
global warming by shifting
their home energy consumption to completely sustainable sources. These
aren't millionaires dabbling
in overpriced doodads: this is a middle-class freelance writer in Maryland
combining sun energy,
efficient appliances and a corn-burning stove to lighten his impact on the
planet. His efforts are
visionary and inspiring.

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Laura Hartman
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syndicated@newdream.org
www.newdream.org/column


Column #9 - April 2002

Fight Global Warming for $1 a Day

By Mike Tidwell (1,091 words)

	It's a lovely, breezy, early spring day, temperature in the forties, not a
cloud in the sky.
Inside my house, the temperature is a toasty 70 degrees as I reach for a
cold beer from the
refrigerator while turning the television to a spring training game. Later
I'll unwind with a hot,
steaming bath while listening to classical music CDs.

	Just another glorious day of modern Western life -- and profligate energy
use -- leading
inexorably to runaway global warming, right?

	Wrong. All but a small fraction of my household energy comes from
renewable, CO2-nuetral sources.
The electricity arrives from photovoltaic panels on the roof, the heating
from a pot-bellied stove
that burns corn kernels, and the hot water from a separate rooftop panel
that converts sunlight to
infrared heat.

	I must be rich to afford such hi-tech extravagances, right?

	Wrong again. In my case, I'm a hopelessly middle-class, self-employed
writer with a four-year-old
son. My wife and I are spending the handsome sum of -- get this -- $30 per
month to pay for them.
That's all. For the cost of a cup of coffee a day we've gotten off the
planet's back almost
entirely. And here's the best part: Most of these planet-saving technologies
are available and
affordable right now for millions of American homeowners.

	Last year's bombshell findings of the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change
motivated us to plot a home energy revolution. Disastrous planetary warming
of up to 10.4 degrees
by 2100 is doubly horrifying each time you look out at your innocent son
playing whiffle ball in
the backyard with playmates destined to live till 2070. In the wake of our
government's failure to
implement even the modest reductions of the Kyoto Protocol, we decided to
take matters into our own
hands. If our leaders won't lead, we Americans owe it to the rest of the
world to get the job done
on our own, house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood.

	So we developed a $7500 budget, and borrowed the money in the form of a
home equity loan. Our
first step was to eliminate unnecessary energy consumption and to use more
efficiently the energy
you can't live without. We switched to compact fluorescent light bulbs,
bought an extremely high
efficiency refrigerator and we began drying our clothes on a line. With
these and other painless
changes, including never *ever* illuminating an unoccupied room, we cut our
electricity use a
remarkable 52 percent.

	It now became plausible to meet much of our electricity demand with our own
solar generation. We
found that we could go solar on a very tight budget. Our home state of
Maryland offers grants of up
to $3600 toward solar photovoltaic systems plus a generous tax deduction.
With a hefty grant in
hand, we went shopping for solar panels and got a big surprise: A solar
advocacy group - the
Virginia Alliance for Solar Electricity -- was heavily discounting the price
of panels thanks to a
subsidy from the U.S. Department of Energy. Taking advantage of these
programs and installing much
of the system ourselves, we were able to put 36 solar panels on our
southeast-facing back roof,
generating 70 percent our electricity.

	Amazingly, having tackled the big hurdle of electricity, we had almost half
of our original budget
still in hand to apply to our next big challenge: heating our house. A
typical American household
spends 44 percent of its total energy budget heating and cooling the home.
As for cooling, our
sturdy old house has high ceilings, partial shading from trees, and a nice
sleeping porch, so we
get by with ceiling fans. But in winter we spend up to $200 a month heating
with natural gas. Given
that our house was already reasonably well insulated, there could be no new
savings through
conservation. So we had to find a new source of heat.

	But what? Thankfully, a small company in Hutchinson, Minnesota answered the
question. American
Energy Systems engineered the first ever corn-burning stove designed to heat
modern homes. This
relatively small and easy-to-install stove easily heats a
two-thousand-square-foot home (ours is
1600 square feet).

	Burning corn contributes almost nothing to global warming. Like all plant
material, corn absorbs
CO2 as it grows, and, with this stove, the corn burns so efficiently that
the net CO2 released is
negligible. Moreover, corn is cheaper than natural gas -- we'll save
$200-$300 per winter -- and
it's easily purchased even by big-city dwellers at outlying feed stores.
Corn is an almost endless
energy source, it's good for farmers, good for the climate, easy to use,
saves money. No brainer.

	Even after all of these purchases -- fridge, bulbs, photovoltaic panels,
stove -- we still had
enough money to tackle our last major source of greenhouse gas emission:
Heating our water. And
here we got lucky. Our heroic local solar contractor stumbled across a used
but perfectly good 5-
year-old solar hot-water system and sold it to us installed for $1000, thus
closing out our
expenditures at just over $7500. The solar system "pre-heats" the water for
our natural gas heater,
so we're guaranteed hot water year round no matter what the weather.

	The bottom line: Except for a little natural gas to cook our food and heat
our water on really
cloudy days, plus the small portion of our electricity that still comes from
our local utility, we
now contribute nothing to global warming through home energy use. In the
process, we've reduced our
estimated CO2 contribution from 19,488 pounds per year to just under 2010
pounds, a drop of almost
90 percent!!

	We also do well by doing good. By conserving energy and switching to
renewables we save an
estimated $578 each year. That's $48.17 per month. Our monthly payment for
the $7500 loan is
$78.50. The difference is a little more than a dollar a day, a minuscule
price to help preserve the
planet. And that sum will quickly diminish as energy prices continue to
rise. In ten years, when
our loan is repaid, savings probably close to $1000 per year will go
straight into our pockets.

	Where's the catch? Actually, there is none. Other than occasionally loading
and cleaning the corn
stove, our lives of modern comfort are essentially unchanged. Except for one
thing: We now live
with greater hope for our son's future and that of the whole planet. If we
can make such big
changes so quickly and for so little money, the rest of the world, when it
finally makes up its
mind, can do the same.

Mike Tidwell is a writer and global warming activist in Takoma Park, MD. He
can be reached at
mwtidwell@aol.com or call 301-270-3722. This article is distributed courtesy
of the Center for a
New American Dream. For more information, click on www.newdream.org.

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Column #9-April 2002
AUTHOR:  Mike Tidwell
TITLE: Fight Global Warming for $1 a Day

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