Synapse

March 15, 2008

Renewable energy, green building, greenhouse gasses, conservation - all these things can appear as a tangled alder thicket when someone first comes upon them. But in reality they are just knotted together in a dense and energetically vibrating net. Even more intriguing, that net is interwoven with our communities. That's what makes this field so fascinating.

Consider your home heating choices. Oil, that demon everyone loves to hate, at least provides some local economic benefit. Oil truck drivers cannot be outsourced. Natural gas, on the other hand, that comparatively clean and semi-friendly fossil fuel, is forced into a pipeline somewhere, gets shunted robotically from place to place, and finds its way to your furnace. It is even metered wirelessly or by satellite in some places, profits sent to the corporate owners. And then there's wood. One of the dirtiest ways to heat a home. And yet the carbon released is relatively "new" carbon. It is part of the current carbon cycle and was just recently CO2 anyway. And you don't get much more local than a cord of wood!

Or consider those Chilean grapes at the grocery store yesterday. One pound of them required six pounds of jet fuel to get here, and resulted in almost 20 pounds of carbon emissions. That same amount of fossil fuel could have carried a busload of people downtown to work for the day. But it didn't. It brought a pound of grapes to the grocery store instead. And then we wonder why our society consumes so much energy.

These are the kinds of topics I want to explore here, subjects that are not directly related to Integrated Renewable Energy's business direction, but that certainly affect it and (I hope) are affected by it, subjects that close the synapse between technologies and communities, and form the complete thought.