We are never going to solve the global warming problem if we can't even make the smallest sacrifices -- and that seems to be the case at least when it comes to hanging out clothes to dry. According to yesterday's Wall Street Journal, neighbors in Bend, Oregon are all up in arms because Susan Taylor wants to hang her clothes out to dry. The nerve! It might affect property values, you see, and what possibly could be more important than that?
Personally, to me a house with a line of drying clothes outside of it says here is a neighbor who is intelligent, economical, caring, and unselfish, and frankly the sight of a line of drying clothes invokes memories of how things were done back in the days of my youth. It would raise property values for me.
American electric dryers use the equivalent of 30 million tons of coal a year, according to today's Oregonian. That works out to 78 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per year, or a full 1.3% of US annual emissions. Just for drying clothes. And people aren't willing to make a few sacrifices for that? We will never solve global warming at this rate.
I stumbled upon this blog while checking a G alert on AI.
ReplyDeleteI never knew that drying clothes electrically could make such an impact.
In my country - a developing one - the general public does not use dryers. We dry clothes in long clotheslines drawn in the gardens or in the terrace of our buildings..... I suppose we cause global warming in ways other than this.
Interesting info, though.