I just finished reading an excellent book dealing with global warming and so forth: Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert. Wonderful writing, very accessibly, mixture of anecdotes and theory put together in a way that's a pleasure to read (well, the underlying story is not a pleasure to read, but the writing is). The first part of the book deals with what's happening in nature; the second part deals with what people are thinking about doing about it. It covers much of the same ground as An Inconvenient Truth, but with different anecdotes. (The chapter about the Netherlands is particularly interesting; so is the discussion of all the different things that could be done to try to slow or reverse the build-up of CO2. Also, there are references to the sources of some of the graphs that Gore used.)
I'm really glad to hear that California is allowing people to sell electricity back to the power companies. I don't think that solar power is the entire answer to the problem, but I think it's got to be part of the solution. And a lot of the problems with solar have to do with the amount of space that it would take up, and with the changing amounts of sunshine and clouds in any place. It seems as though those problems are minimized if we could put solar panels on every roof possible -- just think of all those flat roofs on big box stores everywhere in the country! All that space absorbing sunlight anyway... might as well put it to use. (And if we covered every Wal-mart parking lot with a roof made of solar panels! The space is wasted for anything else anyway...)
I hope that the rural electric co-ops move in that direction, as well. Windmills could provide some extra income for farmers across the plains, from Montana to Texas. The wind might not blow everywhere all the time, but widely dispersed windmills wouldn't rely on local weather in the same way that a centralized wind farm would.
As for my house: shades, shades, shades. Close the shades in the summer during the day, and the winter at night. I've got south-facing windows and live in a sunny climate (with hot days and cool nights), so I can manage a lot of my heating and cooling by opening or closing shades at various times of the day. That only works in the right house and the right climate, though. (My biggest concern is water use: we've got a community well that goes dry every now and then. If the house didn't have a fairly new washing machine, I would replace it with one of the front-loading ones that uses a lot less water. I've got lots of little tricks, but appliances that are designed to save water would make a huge difference.)
I would love to do a serious re-model and put in solar panels and LED lights. (Has anybody here used an on-demand hot water heater? I saw them in Japanese homes when I visited Japan sixteen years ago, and they seemed like a good way to avoid wasting water when heating it. But I don't know what the drawbacks might be, or whether it would be hard to retrofit an American house to use them.)
