Energy Efficiency

Energy efficiency provides tremendous opportunities to lessen several significant environmental problems facing us today, including climate change, acid rain, urban smog, and habitat destruction. Improving the energy efficiency of our energy-consuming processes is generally the most cost effective way of lessening emissions of the pollutants, such as carbon dioxide chiefly in the case of climate change, that lead to these problems.

Energy efficiency can play an important role in multiple facets of our way of life. We can greatly improve the efficiency of our automobiles and our buildings, combined the biggest users of energy.  Low- and even zero-emission vehicles are now being produced, as well as traditional vehicles with vastly improved fuel economies. By constructing our homes and office buildings with better attention to solar orientation, insulation and equipment choices, we can greatly reduce their energy consumption as well.

Other avenues for cost-effectively reducing energy use also exist, such as improving the efficiencies of equipment like computers, furnaces, washing machines, and light bulbs.  By simply being smarter in how we design the energy-consuming devices we buy, we can make a significant impact.

More importantly, though, we must also be smarter in how we live. The biggest reductions in energy use can be attained if we live close enough to walk or bike to work, buy only those things we need and always try to buy from local sources, reuse and recycle everything, and construct our buildings thoughtfully.