Energy Efficiency

Yesterday I enjoyed an hour catching up on New Yorker magazines. I read a number of thought providing articles, one if which has stuck with me.
This one: The Efficiency Dilemma - If our machines are more efficient, will we just use more of them?
The article clearly states that the answer to that is, "Yes!". The example provided about refrigeration has an interlinked story with other excess with it. Essentially, by the 50's the modern home had a refrigerator. That model would pale in comparison to our current versions - cooling less while using twice as much energy. Yet, 50+ years later, we don't have just one, energy efficient fridge. Instead we have the kitchen fridge, the spare in the garage, or maybe a drink cooler in the family room and a sub-zero to keep our Costco purchases frozen. So, yes, our refrigerator is more efficient, so we own more of them. Our energy usage is not less.

So, for the same energy bill, we can own two fridges which means we have to fill them, right? Trips to Costco help with that. We super size our consumption of food. The article notes, "the growth of American refrigerator volume has been roughly paralleled by the growth of American body-mass index." However, we don't eat it all. According to wastedfood.com, we throw away some 40% of the produce we produce.

This core issue has been bouncing around in my head. Yes, I struggle with cooking & eating everything I bring home. I hate to have something go bad. I do try to put what I don't eat into either the dog-bowl or the compost heap. I do have one weakness - take home food. Friday we had a pizza delivered and ate half of it. The rest is still there... staring at me, asking to be eaten. But with my expanding waist, I'm not keep to indulge twice in a 7 day period. I'm guilty of over buying and there are starving children in some parts of the world. You might think, it's just a pizza indulgence - get over it! Yet last week, it was left-over Thai food that sat in there wanting to be eaten for days. There is a pattern of waste in my life.

And it doesn't stop with the food. I know I'm evil by keeping the house at 70 degrees in the winter and, I'm not sure what in the summer. I ponder shade structures in the back yard to passively cool both the units & my house. My ever-so-efficient air conditioning units face west and bake in the summer sun - but really, that could improve their efficiency by 10%, would I then change the thermostat down 10% in the summer, evening out the gains?

In essence I'm American and living the American life-style. Unless I make radical changes, such as going off the grid or replacing my house with an earthship, are the changes worth it? They are small and mere drops in the larger sea of energy usage.