I AM Going to Sell Carbon Offsets

I have occasional sport with our homegrown Boulder County granola Marxists, but I realize how sheltered I am from these people.. The link takes you to a NYTimes story about a woman in a gated community South of LA. She is experimenting with a linear, entropy-powered clothes dehydration system:

I decide to rig a clothesline as an experiment. My mother died many years ago and the idea of hanging laundry with my own daughter, Isabel, who is 13 and always busy at the computer, is oddly appealing. I’m also hoping to use less energy and to reduce our monthly electric bills which hit the absurdly high level of $1,120 last summer.

Tim Blair links to the story as a defense of his own clothesline usage, but the gem is Lileks's comment:

Imagine you’re an editor at the New York Times. It’s the apogee of the profession. You’re in a brand-new skyscraper, built at great expense. You’re editing a piece about clotheslines, which are good because they’re nicer to the earth, and you’re all about being good to the earth. (You don’t get on the elevator to go up to your 45th floor office unless there are at least eight others in the car.)

You read this line:

In the meantime, our electric bill has dropped to $576 in March from its high last summer, reflecting a series of efforts to cut energy. (That’s still too high, so we’re about to try fluorescent bulbs.)

You get on the phone. “Kathleen?” you say. “Reading your clothesline piece, and I love it. Just wondering, what was your electric bill before?”

“Before what,” she asks.

“You say your electric bill dropped to $576 in March from its high last summer. What was your high last summer, and do you have an air conditioner?”

“I don’t see how that’s important,” she snaps.

“You’re right!” you say, and you hang up.

Ah, time for lunch!

I run my A/C foolishly long in the summer (MS patients tend to be very sensitive to heat) and a $200 utility bill is an eyebrow raiser. Who are these people of four-digit monthly power consumption? I don't care but why do they write NYTimes articles begging for us to praise their conservation? A few fluorescents, and she'll get that baby down to $523.50.

Environment Posted by John Kranz at April 17, 2007 7:42 PM