The Recession is a Golden Opportunity

(OK, nothing posted for a month. Let's fix that.)

I found this piece by Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor -- the Archbishop of Westminster, published in the Telegraph. It resonates powerfully with me. His focus is on how Christianity requires that as we move through our lives -- in this particular case, as we respond to the current global recession, we strive to make the world better for the disadvantaged. First, I agree with him that this should be the paramount concern of Christians. It was the message of Jesus. But more, this message isn't just for Christians.

This recession is an opportunity. A friend of mine in New York was recently laid off and has taken to volunteering for some nonprofits. As Muphy-O'Connor notes, we can rebuild the economy, but rebuild it a little differently. Maybe this time we can help close the wealth gap between the top and bottom strata of our society. Here's a chance that we can make the world a better place.

Turn out your lights

I was a kid during the last — or some would say the start of the current, energy crisis in America. In the first grade we were thoroughly subject to energy-conservation propaganda. This is a good thing. I brought home from school these stickers with "Make Every Kilowatt Count" printed on their face and stuck them to our lamps and switches. You can be sure my folks loved that!

So I have this deep programming to turn the lights off. No one else in the house does. This is a point of contention and anxiety for me. I regularly get home from work to find that all the bedroom lights are on and have been all day. It makes my skin crawl. So, I was getting after my son who is a young teen to turn off his light and told him I was going to bill him for the wasted power. So I had to figure it out. OK, sixty Watts times nine hours times whatever our cost per kWh is comes out to about nine cents per day. Oops. Needless to say, he wasn't much daunted by the dime looming large over his head. But the incandescent bulb puts out a lot of heat too. We could count that. And amortize the life of the bulb... But really, this was simply the wrong approach. The truth is, it's just a drop in the bucket.

But how big is the bucket? What if every American changed their ways? How about everyone in the world? How big could our impact be?

The latest figures I could find suggest that the US consumes 3,717,000,000,000 kWh annually. There are over 305 million of us. So that divides to over 12,186 kWh that we're each consuming annually or a bit over 1,000 kWh per month. (I'm rounding down at every step to make sure that I don't overstate the issue.) 1,000 kWh is the equivalent of 16,666 60-Watt bulb hours. Now, to be fair, that includes all the electricity we consume at work and shopping and so forth. But still, given how much we have to account for, couldn't we each find a way to save maybe the equivalent of one such bulb for eight hours each day? For my family, that would be just turning off the lights regularly. Maybe for you it means spending an extra $100 on your next appliance to get the more energy-efficient model. After all, that's only 14.4 kWh monthly — less than 1.5% of our electricity budget.

And if each of us did that, we can leverage that massive population and note that as a nation we'd save 4,392,000,000 kWh. Sounds like a lot. But looking to understand what that means in more tangible terms and being concerned about both the global oil shortage and climate change, I decided to convert that number into barrels of oil. I looked around the net for figures and when I found some consensus, I went with it. The following numbers could be wrongish. I suspect they're close enough for back-of-an-envelope calculations and that I'm within an order of magnatude. A barrel of oil contains enough chemical energy to be the equivalent of 1700 kWh. But we have to get it out of the ground and move it to the refinery and/or generation plants and the conversion process itself is lossy — heat leaves the system during generation. If we use 38% as the net efficiency, we're still getting 646 kWh of electricity generated. That's at the generation plant. Some is lost in pushing it down the wire to your house — but we'll ignore that amount. So that 4,392,000,000 kWh that the US could conserve through relatively minor efforts and expenses (it seems to me) amounts to about 6,798,762 barrels of oil. Each year.

It's still just a drop in the bucket. Just like that dime that my son might pay when he leaves the light on. But it's something. It's a start. And it's that much less carbon in the air. That much longer that we have until whatever's going to happen, happens.

When times are tight, we buy less and make more

So I've been thinking about the moral/social/aesthetic value of making things by hand. There seems to be a renaissance of hand-craft in mainstream culture happening right now; perhaps a confluence of hippy-, hacker- and artistic-aesthetic. I like making things. I like the things that others make by hand. And it feels as if it is more than a mere preference. It feels like there is something spiritual about the act of making something; resisting entropy; carving a niche in the world of chaos; saying "no" to destruction.

It is clear that here in America — and in much of the world now too, our spending-power is dropping. And with market-instability many of us fear that it could begin to drop precipitously. As we look back at our 20th century history, it's clear that in response to the Great Depression and the rationing of World War II, ingenuity spiked with truck patches, victory gardens and the boom of the DIY industry. You can make stuff from relatively inexpensive — even second-hand, elements and save money while engaging in a higher pursuit.

So these ideas are rolling around in my head on a pretty constant basis these days. It happens that one of the blogs I read is the MAKE: magazine blog. It collects lots of cool articles on various fabrication methods from all over the net. But just today, it has two links that aren't about bending a synth-toy or building homes out of styrofoam. They're kind of reflective, philosophical and along these lines that I've been thinking. So here, I'll just point you to them:

An editorial about how the maker aesthetic can make a better world.

And a piece about the reality of self-reliance in a makerly and recession-proof way.

We've really gotten away from making stuff over the past hundred+ years as we embraced large-scale industry and automation. We buy stuff made all over the world. We go out for dinner. And most of us no longer have a lot of skills that would have once been taken for granted. If you accept that the world is made better when more things of care and beauty exist, then making things — nice things, helps to make the world a better place for all of us. Let's assume that you're not among the world's most handy 1% and already making stuff every day.

You don't have to be. Learn a skill. Do it today. Anything. Weave a place-mat, learn to cook, start working with electronics simulators, sew a blouse, make jewelry from pop cans — or anything.