Pushing against the tide

When you begin to explore making your own power at home, and especially when you commit to cutting back your energy use at home and on the road, you are pushing against the tide. Every week I hear experts on television, the radio, or in the papers practically laughing off the idea that alternative energy could provide America's needs. Of course it can't, at the escalating rates of per-capita energy consumption in America. Americans are using ever more gas in our cars and ever more electricity at home. The new federal energy bill continues to subsidize fossil-fuel production and makes only a few moves toward helping the alternative technologies. And it fails to address the main challenge: reducing consumption. Jim Jubak, the MSN columnist, writes that the country's new energy bill "keeps us firmly committed to the big-infrastructure model of energy production." (See his column at http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/P124407.asp.) Energy comes into our buildings through wires and pipes. It's like magic. It's so easy to waste it, and we do. But when you provide some of your own heat or power, you learn not to waste. You learn how little a household needs to live comfortably. I devote three chapters of my book to energy conservation in the United States. I explain why it hasn't caught on, and recount the few times in modern history when citizens have managed to cut energy use dramatically when faced with a shortage. Those of us who believe that the problem of providing energy throughout our children's and grandchildren's lives should depend partly on our curbing our wasteful habits are not the majority. Not yet.