I read my father in law your comments on his energy suggestions. He agreed generally and chimed in with Leila Abu-Saba on conservation–says that when his dryer broke down he did fine drying his clothes on the shower curtain– and agreed with Richard Witty's analysis of the big usage issues here.
He's been walking around scribbling down his 30 measures. Here are 3 of them:
1. Home heating conservation: curtains, clotheslines, shutters–great. If you turn off the dryer in your dishwasher, you are shutting down a very powerful element that sucks a lot of energy just to get your dishes dried in 10 minutes.
2, Enforce the 55 mile per hour speed limit. The savings would be tremendous. I said That would be a hard one, because cars are so well made and everyone's in such a hurry, they've gotten used to going 70 and 80 on I-95. My father-in-law countered that the key is to have the federal government monitor states' compliance here. Like the feds would go in and test speeds on a state's highways and if they were too high, it would penalize the state financially. The state would start enforcing the speed limits.
3, "But the most obvious measure, the slam-dunk," my father-in-law says, is to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. I objected, and he got exasperated with me. "The caribou like the pipeline," he said, "it's warm." I said, we don't know the consequences to wildlife of everything we do, look what's happened to polar bears with global warming."
My father in law said, "I can't talk to you about this. You will have objections to drilling in Alaska and John will have objections to the 55 MPH speed limit. So nothing will be done. I can only talk to people who are intelligent and logical. Everyone has an objection to one measure or another. And we don't do any of them because they got knocked out by interest groups. We have to do all of them if we are going to avoid a catastrophe that is comparable to losing World War II."
