American energy independence

7.50 American energy independence

7.50.USA-14 Annapolis, Maryland – Severn River with Naval Academy beyond the left bridge Highlights Relevant to Sustainable Design:

Learn from sailing.

Sailing is about as ecofriendly as it gets when it comes to transportation over water. I grew up sailing in and around Annapolis decades ago, and I now use the “active awareness” aspect of sailing as an example in describing active awareness for inhabiting homes. We can always default to smart controls that do the work for us, such as lights that turn off automatically when we leave an office-building restroom. However, there are other layers of consideration regarding outdoor influences.

Since winds shift, we designed our house with casement windows and alternated the hinge sides so that we can naturally ventilate the house by opening up a few windows at different times of the day. We have air-conditioning backup, but for a good portion of spring and summer, we do not need to use it. Plus, when we need it, our solar panels help cover the cost of electricity.

Sailors keep an eye on the direction of the wind, and when we moved into our house outside of Philadelphia, I noticed that in the fall the wind would start in the morning coming from the northeast and then often shift in the afternoon to the northwest. The fallen leaves in our backyard would shift slightly from east to west and back again through October and November. Our neighbors would dedicate time or resources to blow the leaves, and I fell in line. I soon realized that the time and carbon emissions output of the leaf blowers was antithetical to the spirit of our sustainable design life. So I used local fieldstones to build multiple planting bed walls along either side of the yard. We were in the process of renovating the house and digging out our “bank barn” family room into the hill, so I used the extra soil to regrade key areas of the yard. This enabled me to set the planting beds from ankle to shin depth. I designed them as leaf traps, stepped down below the grass lines.

Now, between Halloween and Thanksgiving, the wind helps “sweep” the yard clean, and I traded my old carbon-output leaf blower to a neighbor for a carbon fiber race bicycle.

Closing Perspective on the American Experience

We started America with thirteen colonies that each had varying degrees of sustainability and reliance relative to each other and to England. In 1776 when our founding fathers signed our Declaration of Independence, we fought for autonomy from England but not from each other. We literally teamed up to beat a common foe and in so doing established this great nation that is our United States. With fifty states and almost a quarter millennium of history under our belt, we have the opportunity to increase our prosperity and lead the world in the twenty-first century.

13      1776       50          

Some states are rich in natural resources, while others have thriving commercial hubs. Some have more human capital and education resources, while others have harbors, rivers, or other transportation assets. The free market is the best engine to align these resources, and the latest domestic fossil fuel discoveries may shift our dependence on foreign oil. When the colonists opened for business prior to the American Revolution, they did not rely on imported oil. In fact, we were a net exporter, selling more whale oil overseas than we consumed. Over the beginning of the twenty-first century, our dependency on imported oil has been about 40 percent, but the latest discoveries may shift that down to 20 percent.

In the United States, we currently use about 40 percent of our energy for buildings, but the 28 percent of our energy used for transportation drinks up most of the oil.[i] In thinking about transportation, I wanted to share something that most readers may have in common. Before we started driving cars around age sixteen, we each most likely learned to ride a bicycle. The stepping-stone to a two-wheeler is often a tricycle. This may not seem relevant to fossil fuels, but the following insight on rethinking our earliest form of transportation may spark some ideas about challenging preconceptions. I bought a special two-wheel bike for my son when he was just two years old. I was intrigued by the bike design that my mother had seen used in Germany, because it did not have pedals or training wheels. It is now referred to as a children’s “run” bike, because the little kids run along and learn to balance before pedaling. This is the opposite of a tricycle that teaches pedaling before balance. The net result is that we never needed to buy tricycles for either of our kids, and they were both riding two-wheeled pedal bikes when they were just three years old. Perhaps we can rethink single-passenger and public transportation at a more aggressive level.

Twenty-First-Century America

Moving forward, we can advance sustainable design and challenge the status quo in sectors ranging from vehicles to buildings and from consumer goods to food production. In this century, America has the ability to eliminate our dependency on foreign oil. We can learn from other countries, and hopefully the drawings that precede and follow this chapter shed some new light on the opportunities at hand.

We can elevate American democratic independence from the eighteenth century to American energy independence in the twenty-first century and build a sustainable future for more generations to come.

Author and illustrator: Charlie Szoradi is an architect, inventor, and the CEO of Independence LED Lighting. He writes about many other topics related to design, transportation, and American energy independence through his extensive travels around the world.

If you have found this posting online, it is an excerpt from Mr. Szoradi’s book Learn from Looking that served as the inspiring seed content for this drawing share resource. For additional drawings and insights on innovation and opportunities for American energy independence, we hope that you enjoy exploring LearnfromLooking.com. You can search via general terms such as sustainability as well as narrower terms such as American energy independence.

[i] Oil for Transportation: USA Conclusion:

In the United States, we use 28 percent of our energy to move people and goods from one place to another. Source: http://needtoknow.nas.edu/energy/energy-use/transportation/.

 

 

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