So you want to save the planet? What should you consider first?

April 22nd is Earth Day and you might be wondering what should we do? After all, the problem of global warming is huge and we have an administration that is worse than an ostrich in facing the problem. Yet, there are so many things we can do, that the question becomes where do we start?

Back in the 1970s during the oil shock that created long lines at gas stations, a man named Arthur Rosenfeld did some calculations and came to a surprising answer.

When the OPEC oil embargo hit in October 1973, Rosenfeld did a little math. He discovered that if Americans used energy as efficiently as the Europeans or Japanese, the United States could have been exporting oil in 1973, rather than sitting in rationing lines at gas stations. The solution, he realized, was not to bend the Arab oil regimes to America’s will but to end America’s thralldom to them by wasting less energy.

This discovery, that energy usage had a strong demand side component, put him on the road to a life long journey in looking at how we use energy. And it led to the invention of some simple, yet powerful technologies which we are still employing today.

OpEdNews