Heinberg on what to do at home
Preface. A quick summary:
Best investment: insulate exterior walls, ceiling, and floors for energy savings. Other good changes were to plant a garden and fruit-and-nut orchard, and buy solar hot water heater, solar food dryer, solar cooker, chickens, energy-efficient appliances
Lessons learned: It is expensive, especially energy storage. Solar cookers work mainly in the summer.
In the future there will ll be more bikes and ebikes than cars. There needs to be much more local production of food and other goods to shorten supply chains.
Bottom line: there’s very little we can do as individuals, we can’t mine for the minerals we need, few of us can grow all of our food, despite all these investments Heinberg still heavily depends on the greater world for food, electricity, and clothes, cars and most other objects in our lives can’t be home-made. What is required to make a transition is much bigger than most people imagine.
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Richard Heinberg. 2020. If My House Were the World: The Renewable Energy Transition Via Chickens and Solar Cookers. Resilience.org
For the past two decades, my wife Janet and I have been trying to transition our home to a post-fossil-fuel future. I say “trying,” because the experiment is incomplete and only somewhat successful. It doesn’t offer an exact model for how the rest of the world might make the shift to renewable energy; nevertheless, there’s quite a bit that we’ve learned that could be illuminating for others as they contemplate what it will take to minimize climate change by replacing coal, oil, and gas with cleaner energy sources.
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