I have always believed in green energy and a future of affordable home-grown electricity that’s cleaner and safer for us and our environment. And I still do even if green energy is never cheaper. Yet it seems misguided to put all of our hopes in electric everythings when this technology is still not ready. We need to be honest with each other that it delivers much less than it promises while even placing our health and safety at risk.
The recent letter to the editor on banning gas-powered leaf blowers is maybe the smallest example of this. Yes, I have one and it works for me. But it is disingenuous to say that everyone can stop using gas-powered leaf blowers when no electric leaf blower will ever run all day every day no matter how many batteries you swap into it. And electric cars can not road trip without heavy wear on their batteries and a lot of waiting in charging lines. Towns bragging about their new electric-powered fire trucks have just overpaid for a nightmare of technology that is not ready for prime time when they can never keep up with a serious fire and our needs for reliably protecting human health and safety. Then heat pumps cost twice as much for half the lifespan and utility of a proper furnace. And that’s before we talk of how winter temperatures below zero quickly rob us of their promises.
I will make the radical claim that “green living” has very little to do with how electric your life is. Green living means the radical choice to live with a lot less in much smaller little homes at lower temperatures with more Jimmy Carter-like sweaters using old outdated computers and driving around much less in much smaller simpler cars that are always full of car-pooling family and friends. The largest carbon savings come from simply buying less and making do with little. These are bigger carbon savings than all of the carbon that went into anything new that you buy that was newly mined, manufactured, marketed, shipped and sold to replace what already works or was never needed. So we can wait for better green machines while we still save more carbon than ever before.
Stefan Topolski, MD
Shelburne Falls