i will have to hold off on the other subjects due to lack of experience, but
these few i have seen firsthand (submitted topic first, then comment):
I got that, but there is also something else that my American
upbringing has a hard time understanding. Many Canadians view their
government as a partner in dealing with social issues. When a problem
arises, I hear calls for government action. As an American, I have an
inbred distrust of government that is very hard to explain. So when I
read the article its tone sounded very Canadian to me.
robert, i understand your position. if D.C. were to sink into the river
tomorrow, and take the entire governing body with it, i couldnt be happier.
governments lie-period.
I wanted to install a wood
gasifying boiler when we built our new house, but the municipality
prohibits the installation of wood burners because of pollution
concerns. What's ridiculous about this is the fact that a gasifier
produces virtually NO smoke, yet the municipality allows people to burn
their agricultural waste in HUGE bonfires that fill the entire valley
air shed with eye-stinging smoke. It's that kind of blindness that
irritates me!
try for an exemption. city governments are odd critters, sometimes you can
catch a trustee's ear and s/he will help you work out the details. it
wouldnt hurt to ask, anyway.
There are incentives to upgrade furnaces, but not boilers, and the
incentives are limited to natural gas appliances. Even if I wanted a
heat pump, I'd have to foot the (significant) cost of the installation
myself. And worse, the banks are not interested in financing ANY kind
of renewable energy. Here are two examples from my own experience as a
home builder:
1. I wanted to install a small heliostat for supplemental solar
hot water.
2. I planned a battery bank / inverter system as a grid backup,
and the foundation for renewable energy collection on my property.
When I approached the Credit Union with our building budget, they
deleted these two items from my list of expenditures, saying that there
was no market for this kind of technology and that installing these
things would add no value to my house. (I could upgrade the tile, the
laminate flooring and put in fancier fixtures, though!) If I wanted to
install these things, I had to pay for them up front. Now, how many of
us have extra money laying around when we're building a house? If I
hadn't needed the financing, I wouldn't have gone to the Credit Union in
the first place! (And trust me, the banks were WORSE! We eventually
removed our money and investments from the Royal Bank because they
treated us so badly.)
heliostats and sunchasers can be made from scrap fairly easily, there are
howtos and information all over the net. battery banks, although bulky and
sometimes ugly, can be hidden away in a tool shed or basement. check around
at heavy-lift repair shops. refurbished 36V electric hoist batteries are not
exactly *cheap*-cheap, but they are not expensive either.
(Using carbon as raw material to BUILD THINGS)
Agreed. Apparently there is a world-wide shortage of carbon fibre
now. Seems a bit surreal when we are apparently looking for ways to
create carbon sinks. (IMHO, sequestering is not a sink, it is
temporary storage.)
My eldest son was talking to me about our hybrid Camry the other day
as we were tuning my truck. He said: Shouldn't you sell this truck and
buy a hybrid truck, too? This gave me the opportunity to talk to him
about embodied energy. My truck was built in 1993 and has over 200 000
km on its odometer. Every kilometer that it drives down the road
represents more value for the energy that went into its manufacture.
my in-laws drove a 1939 chevrolet every day up until the fuel pump failed
about six years ago (havent got it back together yet). i wonder how many
times it paid for itself over sixty-two years on the road?
Our Camry is a delightful machine, and it's REALLY spoiled me, but it's
STILL made out of steel. It's as heavy as my truck, too, and while it
goes significantly farther on a liter of fuel than does my Ranger, it
will have to travel a LONG way before that improvement in fuel economy
makes up for the additional energy that went into its manufacture.
I'd like to see cars and bikes built out of carbon fiber, but in
reality, the biggest single contributor to North American energy use
from the consumer's point of view is the automobile. We need to move
away from it, and simply substituting steel for carbon and fossil fuel
for renewable fuel will not effectively address the underlying issues
that have put us into this mess!
SEE! SEE! i said so, too! well, not exactly, i suggested using compressed
ashes for structural materials, but it follows the same line.
- banning incandescents
in Oz, and parroted here in Ontario yesterday as being of interest,
but I already have some
