Hot & Cold

I spent part of the 4th of July at my younger brother's. My younger brother is my closest friend in all the world, I love spending time with him, but he and his family do all the little things to use more energy than we should need to. Saturday in the Northeast it was certainly warm, temperature got up into the 80s, but it was very low humidity, and really the kind of beautiful summer day that we'd all like to have lots more of. Unless you're out working really hard in the heat of the day in the sun, it's just not that uncomfortable. Quite the contrary, really. Yet, my brother's house is air-conditioned to 72º for the entire day. He's out for little league practice, he's swimming at a neighbor's pool, he's bbqing at the neighbor's for dinner and the ac is going. I was hanging around the house but can assure you I didn't need the ac, but it's also not my place to go turning it off. And then there are the lights that are left on, including the lights in the kitchen that don't even give much useful light but do generate a ton of heat. There's the TV my nephew left on when he headed out to go swimming.

As I discussed here, I'm not without my own energy-wasting foibles, like not flying in coach if I can avoid it. I don't think we'd suddenly stop needing Saudi oil if my brother didn't leave his AC on all day when it arguably wasn't needed at all. But there's so much damned low-lying energy fruit in this country, and Saturday was a prime example of it. And it's not sustainable, it's just not, to keep going as a society without working on even the lowest-lying fruit. And we have to start that from within ourselves.