Half Your Heating Bills and Save
The price of oil may have fallen, but the long-term costs associated with burning fossil fuels continues to threaten both economic and environmental stability around the world.
Though energy awareness has grown, people are still unsure of how their carbon footprints. Christine Woodside has made it her business to provide practical ideas for how regular folks can go green without giving up their favorite creature comforts.
Woodside is author of the book, Energy Independence, a guide that energy-conscious consumers can use to build more sustainable lifestyles. An environmental reporter by trade, Woodside spent years writing for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor before she began work on her first book, Living on an Acre: A Practical Guide to The Self-Reliant Life. She took a moment to speak to MainStreet.com.
MainStreet.com: Experts, scientists and politicians have said that energy is going to be of profound importance to consumers in the 21st century. Are regular people as concerned about energy as policymakers are?
Christine Woodside: People are beginning to care a lot more. Certainly, when I go to the library to give a talk and see 50 people in a back room in the cold, you know people are thinking about it.
Did people only start to care about energy when the price of oil increased to $140 a barrel?
CW: I think that the public first started to take notice when the Pentagon released its report on climate change. Then there was Katrina(), which experts attributed to the changes brought on by global warming. People are a lot more educated today. These days people are coming up to me saying, “I’ve insulated my house, I’ve got a wood stove, what do I do now?”
Wood stove? Burning wood may be cost effective, but is it really environmentally responsible?
CW: Well, wood stoves have come a long way. If you’re burning wood in the old wood-burning stoves from the 1980’s, you’re definitely spewing some stuff into the air. But the new ones—and by “new,” I mean stoves from the 90s that conform to the Federal New Source Performance Standards—burn hotter, so there are fewer particles in the air. Now I’m not going to say that you don’t get some pollutants but, either way, it’s a lot better than relying on coal.
