Liberal Talk Radio

Malcom Gladwell has a great anecdotal post on his site about how his dad installed a geothermal climate control system in their house.

As William Saletan reminds us how air conditioning is cooking the planet, it’s good to know that there are alternatives out there. I was in Las Vegas this last weekend, and it was about 116 outside, but a constant 65 degrees in our suite. That’s a 51 degree differential. When you’re dropping the outside temperature by over 50 degrees, that’s no longer air conditioning, that’s refrigeration. And that’s what those enormous casinos are: giant walk-in refrigerators with gambling and fine dining (I can only imagine what their A/C bills are. And if you think they’re using eco-friendly Hoover Dam hydro, think again. Hoover predates the casinos and only supplies about 4% of LV’s power. The rest is dirty, dirty coal trucked in from West Virginia and Wyoming).

A/C aside, the larger point is that there’s a lot of slack in the system if we just decide to apply it. Not only in terms of energy conservation, but also relatively easy solutions like bioswales, which collect rainwater and filter it through the earth so that it doesn’t need to be processed by the sewer system. Costs nothing, saves energy and water. We just need the will.