We seem so engrossed as we run in place, just to make ends meet, that we are not capable of standing back and looking at the bigger picture anymore. Why are we so grossly inefficient at the way that we run our lives? This must be a consequence of many years of relatively good times, when we didn’t need to worry about the sheer amount of petrol that our cars used, or the fact that we have become completely reliant our cars just to exist these days. A recession was something that we could barely remember or if we were young enough, we read about it in economics books. Perhaps it was time for a wake-up call, but time or not we have certainly received one.
We can see that we can no longer rely on mechanical energy to help us to do absolutely everything. Our energy inefficiency has led to gross amounts of greenhouse gas emissions and damage to our environment and we need to change now. We talk a good story about the benefits of renewable energy, but we are not helping the environment by diverting funds away from the research and development needed to actually make these options work for us.
This, “The Great Recession,” as it has become known, has now shown us how vulnerable we are to a downturn and how we all have little to fall back on in hard times. As such, we must be efficient in everything we do and this definitely includes energy use. We need to learn to turn things off, to think of alternatives and not to opt for the path of least resistance. We must review our transportation habits and not clog the roads with single occupant vehicles each and every day as we go back and forth to work.
At home or in the office, think of ways to save electricity and if you are the decision-maker, you must be the one to take action. Insist that your family turns off all the lights, turn up the thermostats by a notch and don’t allow them to be altered, make sure that all family members wash clothes at the same time and not individually and generally be a better keeper of the space that you occupy.
As we know, we cannot rely on our politicians to work quickly enough. Few seem to doubt the validity of those environmental claims, but political agendas are still getting in the way of making any headway. Just look at what failed to come out of that summit of “leaders” in Copenhagen – inaction once again.
We don’t have to wait around for politicians to try and force big business to solve these issues. If we all do our own bit, we can save ourselves money by steadily reducing our energy use and our own carbon footprints every day, and although we can’t get this all done by ourselves, we can achieve real results if we work together. ‘People Power’ really can achieve this quite easily, after all, there are billions of us, so let’s just do it – start right now!
