I was meeting with some clients with whom we’ve had a long, ongoing relationship (designed and built their house, then an addition and a barn/garage, maintained both through the years) to review a just-completed inspection report. The house is 20 years old so we had produced a document outlining the major maintenance to come and predicting when various measures might make sense to do.
The house needs a new boiler, so it’s a good time to think hard about the best approach to heating and cooling for the next 20. It needs a new roof so it’s the one chance they’ll get (for decades) to add insulation under the roofing. Is it worth it? 
Is now the time to add a solar electric system to stabilize long-term energy costs? A detailed energy evaluation will determine the answers to these and other questions.
When we discussed solar electric I was struck by a comment they made (I’m paraphrasing but I think this is close): “We do not want to look at that option as ‘making a statement’. Until our country makes a serious commitment to doing what we must, and we’re all in it together, we’ll base this decision on economics.”
I thought that was particularly well put – clear and simple. The implication: the massive political failure that has led to our current predicament is holding people back.
My friend Matthew Kiefer recently wrote an essay in the University of Colorado Law Review called “Toward a Net-Zero Carbon Planet: A Policy Proposal” in which he says that “the global economic adjustment now underway was in part caused by a prolonged period of living on excessive credit – of borrowing from the future. In a similar fashion, we have borrowed the planet’s carbon absorption capacity to finance our economic growth, and after more than a century, the debt is coming due.”
He calls for a scientifically derived balanced carbon budget to replace the current arbitrary greenhouse gas reduction targets. 
Carbon sub-budgets could then be allocated to each nation, each region, each state, each city, each town, even each neighborhood. Those affected would have choices about how to implement.
My client would be part of something instead of feeling like a lone wanderer spitting into the wind if he puts some solar panels on his roof.
I should add that here in Massachusetts the Department of Energy Resources is about to announce a very strong solar electric incentive program that is likely to make many people install solar who previously might not have – like my clients. The economics will look better than ever. I don’t know the final details yet – more about this later – but the intention of the program is to encourage the installation of 400 megawatts of solar electric in the coming years. The current installed PV capacity in the state, after years of attractive incentive programs, is right around 20 megawatts. The 400 megawatt goal amounts to 20 times more in the years to come – quite a commitment, and a giant leap forward.
Unlike yesterday’s Massachusetts senate election, which was a backward stumble. Ted Kennedy’s none-too-happy about this one. Hopefully it will serve as one big wake-up call.
Kevin Ireton
John,
I share your (and your client’s) disappointment with our government’s failure regarding energy policy. And Matthew Kiefer’s proposal for carbon budgets sounds eminently sensible. However, I wonder on what basis you hold out hope of our government uniting in the interest of sensible ideas or global needs. Certainly not Copenhagen or the heath-care debate. Hence, I worry that we can’t afford to wait for the government to lead, or even for fellow citizens to unite, before each of us acts on issues of sustainability. Perhaps more than anything, though, I wonder how you think about the notion of personal responsibility as regards these issues. That concept is the one with which I now wrestle daily.
As I see it, one of the big problems in our culture is that we are disconnected from the consequences of our actions. Because the landfills, the denuded rain forests and the strip mines are not in our backyards, it’s too easy to miss the connection between them and the way we live. Unfortunately, much of corporate America (and thanks to their lobbyists, much of the federal government) is committed to keeping it that way.
I don’t mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist (in fact the statement above isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s just what, in this country, we call “good business”), and believe it or not, I don’t mean to preach or to suggest that I’m better than anyone else. Hell, I still buy bananas. The only progress I claim there is that at least now I feel guilty when I buy them. But I am trying to see the connections. And I am wondering how I might live a little more responsibly (and less destructively) as a result.
When most people suggest that they will decide about investing in renewable energy based on “economics,” they mean “payback.” They will invest in renewable energy, if the money they spend will return to them in a sufficient period of time. But limiting the equation solely to the issue of money is a failure to see the connections, a failure to see all of the other costs—to the earth and to other people—of building (and living) the way we currently do.
By such faulty accounting, one would have to eat every meal at McDonald’s because it makes economic sense. Fortunately, thanks to people such as Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver and Wendell Berry, we have begun to see the other costs of our food choices, the costs to our health, to our communities and to our land. And seeing these other costs, we’ve begun, however slowly, to eat a little less meat, to ask where that meat came from, or to pay more for vegetables at the farmer’s market than we might have paid at the grocery. We need to do the same with our houses.
Years ago I read an article about quarrying limestone, and an image from that article sticks with me. A man who worked at a quarry in Indiana was giving the author a tour. He pointed to a huge hole in the earth and said “That’s the Empire State Building.”
Every building that we construct, including every house, represents a hole in the ground. In most cases it’s not as big as the one left by the Empire State Building, and in fact, it’s seldom one big hole. More often it’s a little hole here—for the granite countertops, say—and a little hole there—for the concrete foundation. But once you’ve built 120 million houses, as we have in the U. S., the aggregate hole gets to be pretty big.
However, the size of the hole represented by a home’s construction is nothing compared to the hole in the earth genarated by a home’s operation over time, it’s consumption of fossil fuels. Clearly we can’t continue to use up this place at such a rate, or at least not for much longer.
And while I can see plenty of public policies, laws and codes that need to change in order to address this problem, I also think that I need to take personal responsibility for the damage that results from my behavior, whether it’s buying a banana, driving a car or flipping a light switch. I need first, unceasingly, to seek out the consequences of my actions, however obfuscated they may be, however far away in place or in time. Then, I need to look, unflinchingly, at those consquences and decide whether I can live with them. If I can’t, I need to change how I live.
I don’t yet know how to do any of this (beyond composting kitchen waste and turning down the thermostat), or even if I’m capable of such effort and change. But I find that I can’t let myself off the hook.
Kevin
jabrams
Thanks for such a thoughtful response, Kevin – it’s always a delight to read anything you write.
Kevin knows a thing or two about these issues, and about houses – he’s the former editor of the magazine Fine Homebuilding.
I think there needs to be plenty of room for both points of view, and room between as well. Some would even say that those of us who do much more than others (I don’t yet count myself among them, at least in my personal life, although I aspire to be one) through a commitment to individual change play into the hands of those who work so hard to maintain the political status quo. I don’t know –it’s hard to say.
It’s not that I can see any evidence of widespread political change – it’s my certainty that it is so essential to our future. Yes, Copenhagen was a great disappointment. In a Nation article Naomi Klein quotes Matthew Stilwell of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, who says, “Ten billion a year from the developed world to the developing world to help the transition to a carbon-free planet? Rich countries are trying to exchange beads and blankets for Manhattan. . . This is a colonial moment.” Sad but true.
But only a robust national commitment – I think – will inspire all of us to act. The Pearl Harbor shock in 1941 triggered a vast nation-wide mobilization that amounted to a government-led industrial revolution, an historic economic transformation. Saul Griffith, the founder of Makani, a company trying to harness high altitude winds with gigantic kites, has done some amazing numbers to demonstrate what it will take to produce our energy carbon-free. Griffin says it’s like the whole of World War II, only with all antagonists on the same side this time. Damn near impossible, but necessary. And the world has to decide to do it. And we, in this country, must lead the way.
Meanwhile, for some of us, like you, Kevin, we need not wait.
At South Mountain one of our goals is to make all operations carbon neutral in 10 years. We don’t fully know what this means yet, but we are working toward this still-elusive goal. But so what? How does our fumbling little drop-in-the-bucket matter?
It gives us hope. Vaclav Hamel, the former Czech president, says this about hope:
“Hope. . . is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
This is the reason we do what we do – the conviction that it makes sense, regardless of its modest impact. We are only one small bit player of many doing this work. And the many enlarges each day as more and more of us turn our attention to this Great Work of saving the planet which can only succeed – in the end – by combining the modest efforts of each and every one of us.
In the end I see a variety of reasons that might compel us to make personal progress in advance of political progress. It may be one of the following, or it may be a combination:
1. Economic viability – payback, as you say;
2. Risk aversion: energy conservation measures and renewables stabilize future costs in the face of certain energy cost increases;
3. The desire that you express so eloquently Kevin – to re-connect;
4. Hope – the sense that our modest contributions “just make sense.”
You’ve taught me so much, Kevin. Thank you; you’re an inspiration. I suppose we all just have to figure out for ourselves where we belong in this spectrum of personal responsibility.
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