An Idea to further Energy Conservation

through Max No Difference
27th April 2004

Years ago, at a party in Sydney (which I rode to with girlfriend on my motorbike all night from Melbourne - in the middle of winter - pissing rain ALL THE WAY!?) a young fellow put an idea to me about this, where we create a unit of measure of the expenditure of all our energy, across all our habits and physical practices.

Here are my latest thoughts on the idea.

Many of us are trying to conserve water usage these days, during the el nino drought, and the ‘water-meter’ idea attached to our water inlet at home etc, enables us to keep a track of how wasteful we have been.

But this slides into irrelevance when we consider the energy we expend in every other area of our lives.

Surely, if we were serious about saving energy (something the privatised energy corporations don’t want us to be), we would establish, across-the-board, so-to-speak, some way to measure all the energy we use, from buying and drinking a litre of water or milk, to employing a D-9 bulldozer to gouge-out a damn on the weekender-farmlet.

In other words, bringing all energy-usages under ONE UNIT OF MEASURE, similar to the bodily-energy unit of - the “CALORIE”.

This morning, a fitting name even came to mind for this unit – call it the “BURN”! The BURN is a unit of measure that can be applied to the BURN cost of all energy-uses.

How many BURNs are used during the manufacturing and use of one automobile, for the provision of one seat on an airline flight, to the making, shipping, selling and installation of one washing-machine, a computer, articles of clothing, shoes, roadways, footpaths, tram-lines, domestic and commercial buildings, a kilogram of beef, lamb and falafel mixture, vegetables, and in all imported and exported goods and services etc., etc., etc.

If we were to do this, Globally, surely we’d all be better able to tailor our lives to a more Sustainable Way.

I have a sneaking suspicion that an enormous amount of our usual, un-thought-out habits and financial expenses would be MOST POSITIVELY reduced to a very profitable end, for all endangered species, including Human Beings! I also suspect that that idea I heard about years ago, was quickly bought-off and buried by the ruthless energy corporations of-the-day.

But we are, in the 3rd Millennium CE, in a new era, of consumer-backlash, where such ignorance is no longer tolerated, are we not? And therefore, what with such powerful mediums as public radio, television, and the internet and-on, and-on, and-on, as well of course those numerous “pro-active” programs and reporters, politicians, Advocates and Generally Intelligent Humming Beings elsewhere, riding the Train-of-(Collective)-Reformolution, it’s time to reintroduce this Wise Idea to the Global Public Forum for debate, say what?

This email (when posted) failed in transmission.

Since then, I've dwelt on it, and realised that, to a quite realistic REVOLUTIONARY extent, this concept SHOULD BE the way Humans measure ALL OUR TRANSACTIONS and general daily fidgetings, rather than the quite deceptive monetary measure of dollars, pounds, marks, yen, etc., etc., etc!

Hmmm? Think about it!?