BOB KENYON
Special to Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — A Net Zero home produces as much electricity as it consumes.
If you’ve been following this series, you have learned you need a solar system to get to Net Zero. You will need to optimize your envelope. If those steps fail to reach your goals, you’ll want to consider consuming less electricity.
While I’ve shared how to get to net zero, I’ve only insinuated why (why = pourquoi en français) you might seriously want to consider it. There are at least two reasons: One is to save money. If you don’t pay to heat or cool your house and charge your EV from your solar system, your budget is far more manageable. I haven't pumped gasoline since August. I charged for free at Midwest Ford then at my new house with the solar system. I’m driving on sunshine - And don't it feel good!
The second and personally far more important reason to be net zero, is to fight climate change, yup I went there. Pulling less electricity from the grid means the electric company will burn less coal and thus pump less carbon into the atmosphere. To the climate deniers, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. While there is a mountain of evidence that the climate is changing and that humans are the cause, I’ll focus on just a few things.
If you view the time lapse photography from NASA of the Arctic Sea ice cap from 1979 - 2022, you can see the ice cap reduce from 7 million square kilometers to 4 million square kilometers - nearly cut in half in just 43 years.
Source: https://science.nasa.gov/resource/video-annual-arctic-sea-ice-minimum-1979-2022-with-area-graph/
Your response may be: who cares, it doesn't affect me that the ice caps are melting causing the oceans to rise. The folks in Miami might beg to differ. According to a University of Miami professor, Harold Wanless, about 60% of Miami-Dade County could be underwater by 2060. On the Grenadian island of Carriacou, even the dead are now climate victims, as graveyards are being swallowed by the sea.
Melting ice caps means the oceans are getting measurably warmer. Warmer oceans make hurricanes more powerful. Two massive hurricanes have caused enormous damage to our US Southeast a month or two back. The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season was very active and extremely destructive. The Atlantic hurricane season inflicted at least $220 billion in damages and 400 deaths. I recently bought homeowner’s insurance and the rates have gone through the roof (assuming you still have a roof). Rates are skyrocketing to cover the costs of these storms. We are all paying the price for this crisis. These hurricanes were rated “once in a thousand year” storms. Kinda makes you wonder why we had two once-in-a-thousand-year storms a month apart.
For my 50th birthday I went scuba diving off the coast of Belize at their stunning coral reef. The colors were magical pastels that spanned the pastel rainbow. I returned a couple years ago and saw the reef is now bleached white - nearly dead from the warmer water. Scientists in Australia are scrambling to create genetically modified reefs in aquariums to survive warmer water as the Great Barrier Reef is dying as well.
At the risk of sounding “preachy”, I feel that fighting climate change is part of my spiritual journey, a sacred obligation, if you will. At my church, we often pray: "Give us all a reverence for the earth as your own creation, that we may use its resources rightly in the service of others and to your honor and glory." from the Prayers of the People in the Book of Common Prayer.
“John 3:16 says that God loves the whole cosmos,” says Professor Copeland of Boston University, who directs the Faith and Ecological Justice Program, which helps students prepare to do faith-based ecological work. “And Genesis 1 repeatedly says that creation is very good. So, the idea that we can just destroy it, or use it up, or neglect it seems irreligious to me.”
As a Boy Scout many years ago, our mantra was that a campsite should always be left better than how we found it. Surely your parents instructed you to be a courteous guest when you visited friends or relatives. Shouldn’t we be courteous guests while on Earth?
In the words of Cat Stevens: “Oh very young, What will you leave us this time? You're only dancing on this Earth for a short while.”
“If future generations are going to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave more than the miracles of modern technology, we must leave them with a glimpse of the world as it was when it was new,” President Lyndon B. Johnson, Wilderness Act 1964.
Sir David Attenborough is credited as saying: “How could I look my grandchildren in the eye and say I knew what was happening to the world, and did nothing?”
Let’s leave our grandkids a habitable planet.
Comments? Questions? Drop me a line.
Previous articles:
● What I Learned in First Two Months of EV Ownership
● Did I just buy a Net Zero House?