Dear Reader,
When we live in a normal modern house it tends to come ‘turn-key’, we step in and things simply work. It is an incredibly lucky and miraculous scenario to find ourselves in and we must remember to be grateful often for such luxuries in life. We can set our heating to exactly the temperature we feel most comfortable at, we can turn on countless plugs to run our electrical devices and we can cook beautiful spreads on five hobs with the oven blasting. Where does all this energy come from? It appears silently and is too easily unappreciated until something goes wrong- but do not fret- our provider will fix it when it breaks because they desperately want us using all the energy we could dream of, after all, that is their profits.
Energy use in the home is a fascinating portrayal of the story of human consumption over time. It really was not that long ago that none of these amenities existed and now they are invisibly built into our homes; we rarely even glimpse the pipe bringing it all to us and certainly need not consider the disturbing production processes of such on-tap abundance. We turn on a tap and water will flow forever! Water crisis? It certainly appears deniable. This secret of production processes is something I talked about in my post on The Truth of Violence and the requirement to hide the systems of production from our eyes is vital to the survival of these companies and the power they cling to. There is no way we could bring ourselves to use energy the way we do today if we were directly, personally the ones extracting oil and gas from under the feet of beautiful forests and creatures or if we had to watch the act as we left our heating on 24/7. I believe we should all set our moral minds to the tune of this reality. We are personally and directly responsible, it is just too easy to pretend we are not.
We have all heard and read campaigns encouraging us to change to efficient light-bulbs, turn off plugs when not in use and not overfill the kettle. It is all brilliant advice and worthy of the minimal effort it takes to perform these righteous deeds. If everyone was vigilant in these tasks, we could reduce our consumption enormously and that will only ever be a good thing for our planet. Frankly, we need to use less of pretty much everything to lighten the strain not just on the natural world, but also our own bodies and minds. Currently in the UK (not the world’s worst) we create around 2 tons of carbon per person per year through domestic consumption, so if everyone in the UK cut this by half, we would save around 66 million tons of carbon each year- the same effect as 5.5 million Brits living zero carbon lives, no insignificant reduction and a lovely simple way to achieve it.
Switch your provider to the best you can find in your area- I have provided some useful websites at the bottom- the only provider I have personal experience with are Bulb and they were brilliant. If the sustainable providers are slightly more expensive try to bite the bullet, the real costs exist somewhere, I believe we should take responsibility for them rather than ship them off out of sight to be paid by exploited staff, environmental degradation and future disasters (we can normally bring costs down by doing some or all of the energy saving tips we often hear about).
Here is a link (https://cotap.org/reduce-carbon-footprint/#home) to a list of the most effective means of reducing household energy consumption. Even if you switch to a sustainable energy provider there is still an environmental cost in their production process (producing solar panels, wind turbines obviously have all their own material and energy requirements to produce and maintain).
As I mentioned, Bulb are the only energy provider I have experience with- I highly recommend them. They have an offer where by me and the new user get £50 for switching. I have emailed them to ask them to see if we can organise that they donate my £50 to an environmental charity if someone joins up through this link (I will let you know what they say and if it isn’t possible I will find a way):
A useful website that handles the switch and shows you providers in your area: https://www.uswitch.com/
Some Sustainable energy providers:
Thanks for reading you Conscious beauties.
Love Ben
Thank you for this Ben - I’m really aware that since moving into our new house we have become high consumers (dishwasher and tumble dryer - we didn’t have these before!) and like you say it’s so easy to become complacent and detached. This is really helpful and we’ll look into more sustainable providers. Big love to you xxx