Slowly but surely, I’ve been trying to go green and save a little bit of energy and some precious resources, too.
Most of what I’ve done has been little stuff. I changed the furnace filter, fixed the seal around our front door and always try to remember to shut off the power to my computers when I finish working so as not to let the monitors and printers continue to draw energy while I’m away.
Mrs. Griz has suggested a few more-expensive steps which involve replacing some older appliances like the washer and dryer. And perhaps I should, but the initial cost has been quite a deterrent even if there might be some cost savings in the long run.
I used to adjust the thermostat to turn down thefurnace in the winter and run the air conditioner a little less in the summer, but Mrs. Griz wasn’t always too pleased with my energy-saving efforts and often made adjustments more to her liking.
I’ve tried to cut back on the amount of material I print from my computers because, after printing things I considered important and saving them for a while, I found myself eventually throwing most of them away. It was just so much easier to do a search on the computer again than to thumb through old files and stacks of information I had saved for future reference. Of course, the savings has not been just in energy and paper; buying less ink helps a lot in the budget department as well.
Where I can, I’ve goneto electronic billing and payments, mostly because I get tired of all the paper to sort and eventually shred - I spent a couple of hours with the shredder on Saturday and ended up with a full trash bag of confetti. I’m thinking I need a tree shredder so I can just toss in whole boxes of junk mail at the same time and be done with it. With the little machine I use, I seem to spend more time clearing jams than actually sorting and shredding.
While some folks don’t like computerized banking and bill pay because of the e-thieves who try to gain access to accounts, I worry, too, about all the paper stuff with names, addresses, account numbers and other personal and financial information printed on it.
Perhaps one of the toughest going-green decisions I’ve had to make involved giving up my Chevy Trailblazer for something much smaller and more fuel efficient. I had figured when it was time to trade, it would be for a full-sizepickup truck. After all, I like driving a vehicle that sits a little higher than the rest and has room for a payload too. They’re so much easier for a big guy like me to get in and out of and there’s room in the back for the dog to ride without slobbering up all the windows.
But having a big pickup truck doesn’t do a fellow much good if he can’t afford to drive it anywhere, and gas prices could go back up again - at least, I expect they will and probably sooner than later. Anyway, I figured it was wiser to go green than end up deep in the red.
I had sincerely contemplated going 100 percent green and riding my bicycle to work every day. It would have been good for the environment, saved me a lot in fuel costs and been healthier for me, too. But Ifeared the benefits would be short-lived because odds are that someone would run me down as I peddled my bike to and from work. Any goinggreen savings would have been offset by ambulancefees, medical bills and fuel costs for continued trips to the doctor.
Of course, while riding a bicycle across town in Gentry might have been a possibility if I were willing to risk great bodily harm along the way, the truegreen option pretty much vanished away for me when the newspaper office was relocated to Gravette. If riding up the hill didn’t result in a fatal heart attack, making it safely down again without burning up my hand brakes and flying over an embankment wouldn’t be likely.
With the bicycle option out, I decided on the next best thing - a small car that can get me where I need to go without spending a fortune at the gas pumps. So now I’m going green with a Chevy Cobalt. My car payment is less and I spend a lot less at the gas pumps while saving the world’s fossil fuels and freeing up our nation from its dependence on foreign oil - well, a least I’m trying.
I’m getting used to maneuvering in and out of a car again without crawling on the ground and its getting easier. If I lost a little weight, my knees would be happier with my decision to go green, too.
While it’s not a pickup truck, I console myself with the fact that it has a five-speed manual transmission and is not an automatic. I missed that after spending so many years in a truck. I will admit that I’ve caught myself looking for a few more gears a time or two, but I doubt that Chevy makes a little car with a 15-speed overdrive transmission.
Why another Chevy? Well, I considered the options and decided it would be wasteful to buy another make of car and have to throw away my Chevy ball cap. It's still in pretty good shape and that wouldn’t be going green!
Randy Moll is the managing editor of the Decatur Herald and Gentry Courier-Journal. He may be reached by e-mail at rmoll @ nwaonline .com.
Opinion, Pages 5 on 07/07/2010