jrusch’s Recent Comments

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  Buy Used

  You forgot the greenest thing of all, buying things used. The most eco-friendly site in the world may be craigslist classifieds. Let's keep all the things we've already made in circulation for as long as we can.On Easy ways to cut your energy use, one day at a time posted 2 years ago 11 Responses

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  Correction

  Our medium sized Absocold uses 330kwh/yr, not 300 watts, as I said. Modern full size fridges (20 Cubic ft and up) seem to use between 450 and 550 kwh/yr, mostly.On Umbra on refrigerator downsizing posted 2 years, 4 months ago 34 Responses

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  If it's big, you fill it

  It's kind of like a closet, if you have a small one, you think more carefully about what clothes you really wear, and get rid of the rest. If you have a big one, well, it'll soon be full of weird stuff.

  I don't think it's about country vs. city access to supermarkets. It's more about prepared/packaged vs. raw/non-packaged food. Frozen pizzas take up space. My wife and I are in the country, with a Trader Joe's half an hour away, and a small market/farm stand 15 minutes away, yet we get by just fine with an intermediate "apartment sized" fridge of about 10 cubic ft (by Absocold, that uses about 300 watts, about a third less than the best full size fridge). We rarely fill it up, except for the crisper, and we cook every meal at home. My parents, on the other hand, somehow have two full-sized fridges, the main one more crammed than ours. The difference is my mother, knowing she has the room, buys lots of frozen things in boxes, multiple large OJ containers (I prefer frozen OJ), and more variants (3 kinds of bread?). We eat lots of fresh fruit that we don't refrigerate, and have a hybrid of Asian and Mediterranean diets based around vegetables, rice, pasta, with basically no packaging. Beyond that, it's a mystery, but we certainly eat well, and wouldn't want a bigger fridge if you gave us one.On Umbra on refrigerator downsizing posted 2 years, 4 months ago 34 Responses

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  People are different, eh?

  People have varying sensitivities to all sorts of things, and we've just got to respect that. I'm a male who is sensitive to both ficker and color (I'm a graphic designer by trade.) My wife is sensitive to hum (a musician.) Some people are sensitive to neither, of course, lucky them.

  I've changed our CFLs multiple times this very year (new house, and yes, I did it, not my wife). I took half of them back, because the problems the industry says it has solved are still there for me. The flicker can be pretty subliminal but still give me a quite measurable headache. Color in some bulbs changes over time as the bulbs heat up, ending in a cold blue that is quite depressing at night (and makes people look pretty depressing, too.) Kelvin ratings are clearly off, warm white isn't, etc., lumens estimates are all over the map compared to incandescents. It's a mess. I fear a new wave of backlash if the industry doesn't get its act together stop overpromising, and uniformly label its products according to standardized testing methods.

  You'll dismiss me as a crank, but it's not for lack of trying to do the right thing on my part, given three trips to three different hardware stores, including two big boxes and a lighting specialty shop. Headaches and depression are real, measurable effects of lighting that vary from person to person, so blanket statements like "change to CFLs" are a bit simplistic...

  If anyone knows of a good web site devoted to this, let me know, thanks.On Not tonight ... your CFLs give me a headache posted 2 years, 6 months ago 27 Responses

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  Just remove the subsidies

  Just remove the effective subsidies to Walmart, so well documented, and the "Walmart just gives consumers what they want" argument dissolves. Without subsidies their prices would be much higher, giving the small guys the chance to compete on proximity, service and ambience. Then it would suddenly be the small guys "giving the consumers what they want."

  The "we can't stop Walmart anyway" argument is like saying we can't stop tax evasion through enforcement, or unnaturally cheap oil through taxes, or cheap foreign labor through trade agreements, or construction and maintenance of all those big highway/boulevards through rezoning, etc.-- all things that are indeed under our control. We can stop Walmart, even under our current free market rules, we're just choosing not to.

  My guess is that under the above unsubsididized scenarios, a higher priced Walmart would still be useful for a lot of people, just a lot less often, and the country would be healthier for it.

  Excellent article, I'm going to buy the book!On The impossibility of a green Wal-Mart posted 2 years, 7 months ago 27 Responses