Sustainability is a State of Mind
No. I am not asking you to read my mind. I am not denigrating nor supporting global climate change. I am suggesting to you the things you do and how you think make a difference. The culture you live in depends on you to embrace it for it to continue, to make it sustainable. The economy you live in, global that it may be, is dependent on your participation in it for it to exist, to make it sustainable. The environment in which you live is a reflection of how you think and act relative to it, whether it is sustainable… in short, I am suggesting much of our success (or failure) in sustainable behavior is a state of mind, and more importantly, how we think about “things” is important.
It is like those story problems from primary school: If the United States consumed 101.31 quadrillion BTUs of energy in 2009 (http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/index.cfm) and if every consumer saved 0.01% of the energy they helped to consume in 2009, how much energy would be saved? First, recall one quadrillion is a really big number, one with 15 zeros behind it which looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000,000. A savings of 0.01% would move the decimal point four spaces to the right, so the result would have 15 – 4 = 11 zeros or 100,000,000,000 or 100 billion. These are all just really BIG numbers few of us can wrap our minds around. The mathematical answer of our story problem is 10,131,000,000,000 BTUs. Do all these zeros have your eyes glazing over?
Thankfully someone at SRI international (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil) came up with a way for us to wrap our minds around these really big energy numbers, by converting them to cubic mile of oil (CMO) units. If 1 CMO equals 152 quadrillion BTU, then the United States consumed the equivalent of two-thirds of a CMO in 2009. This is less than one, not so big, only 2/3 CMO. From this frame of reference saving 0.01% seems almost not worth mentioning, 0.0000665 CMO.
So what is your frame of reference?
If you can save 0.01% of what you consume by simply remembering to unplug your electric charging equipment when it is not in use, would you want to actively participate in saving your part of 10,131,000,000,000 BTUs?
What if your efforts computed to saving 0.0000665 CMO? It represents the same amount of energy savings. Does it seem just as important?
Let me suggest to you this:
Every BTU you help save is an important contribution toward controlling costs in the economy in which you live, even small savings add up over the life of your consumption. Revisit the story problem. If you could find ten small things to do every year for ten years, you and everyone else could save a noticeable portion of 1 CMO, about 4%.
Does that not satisfy your desire to contribute positively to the economy (and your wallet)? What if you invest in reducing your 2009 energy demand by making improvements that reduce your energy consumption by 10%? If everyone followed this scenario, we could save almost 7% of a CMO in one year (that is 10,131,000,000,000,000 BTU or 10.131 quadrillion BTU). Might this savings offset the cost of inflation in the United States? Would this savings make us more competitive in the marketplace? What if the ROI on our investment was less than three years, would you then add the savings to your IRA (an investment in the economy)?
So what is the state of your mind?


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