Who Should Decide How We Save Energy

November 19th, 2009

15 – 20 years ago, life was very simple. We didn’t have the high power computers and video game console that kept kids indoors to get fat. We didn’t have the big screen tv that kept us in the living room. The only way you could get more than 3 channels is if you had cable. We played outside and used our imagination. Families took drives and walks together to an unknown destination. During the summer and warm seasons, everything was done outdoors. Incuding laundry. Some folks still have the old style washers where you can use outside and mostly, folks just hung their laundry outside.

In Perkasie, Pennsylvania, Carin Froehlich hangs up her laundry knowing that her actions annoy local officials who have asked her to stop. Say What!?! Make somenone stop hanging up their laundry. A town official asked Froehlich to stop drying clothes in the sun. And she received anonymous notes from neighbors saying they did not want to see her hanging laundry. “They said it made the place look like trailer trash,” she said. “They said they didn’t want to look at my ‘unmentionables.’” Froehlich has said that hanging her laundry saves her about $80 a month in electric bills.

Then there is California. As reported by Yahoo Tech!, “In a move that could spell the end of the plasma TV industry as we know it, the state of California agreed today to enact strict regulations on the amount of power televisions can consume, effectively outlawing most large plasma TVs as of January 1, 2011, with many more televisions set to be banned beginning January 1, 2013.”

I can see California’s perspective since that state does have numerous brown outs in a year. The people in Perkasie, Pennsylvania needs to get a grip. Perhaps what this country needs to do is for a couple of weeks in the summer or some other season is to live “neccessity” only.

Six states at the moment have passed regulations to restrict local authoritied from banning clothesline. Kudos to Florida, Utah, Maine, Vermont, Colorado, and Hawaii.