Green, schmeen
Christine the Curmudgeon is sick to death of being made to feel guilty for not being completely “green”.
I don’t care if people give me dirty looks in the supermarket for taking plastic bags, rather than buying those reusable ones. I’ll have you know that we take those bags for a REASON…they are the right size for disposing of used cat litter. It’s not as if we can flush it down the toilet, and even if we could, some tree-hugging nutjob would likely have something negative to say about that. So, I say, screw it, I’ll do what works best for us.
I was just reading this article in Slate, which discussed whether or not rolling down the car windows saves any gas over air conditioning. The tests done with behemoth vehicles show that it pretty much doesn’t, at least not at freeway speeds. And even the author of the article admitted that sometimes, there is no comparison between natural wind and air conditioning when it comes to comfort.
Even if there were any significant savings in not using the A/C, this is still one for the I Don’t Care files. Both me and Mike get very lightheaded when it is too hot. What good would it do if one of us were to pass out behind the wheel and cause a serious accident? When it is hot, we HAVE to have air conditioning. This is not debatable, and if it costs us more money, then so be it.
A few years ago, we went on The Vacation From Hell. We were headed up to Moosehead Lake, and the A/C in our old Ford Escort picked the day before we left to up and die. I might also add that we were in the middle of a serious heat wave. It seldom hits 90 up in the Moosehead Lake region, but the whole time we were there, it did. We tried to find someone to fix it before we left, but every place we tried was booked for weeks.
It took us forever to get there because we had to stop every hour or so, even if it meant getting off the freeway to find a place with A/C where we could stop, use the restroom, and get something cold to drink. Highway rest stops get fewer and further between, the further north up in Maine you go. Rolling down the windows does absolutely NO good when it’s over 90 degrees. The only reason to roll down the windows in this situation is so we didn’t literally roast to death in the car.
The tone of this article was less annoying and patronizing than I expected it to be…I was expecting a big lecture about how EVIL I am for cranking up the A/C, be it in the car or at home, when it’s very hot. I’m sure that there are plenty of other articles like that, though, that I just haven’t seen yet. These would be the ones who tell us that we must suffer in order to save the environment, and all that happy horseshit. If I do see one, chances are I will want to firmly place my size 11 menopausal foot up the author’s ass.
The main thing wrong with the Slate article, though, was this paragraph…
So stick with the rule of thumb mentioned in the first paragraph, and you should save a few gallons of gas over the course of the summer—though not nearly as much as if you decided to cut down on your driving a bit. You needn’t feel too guilty about bathing in the air-conditioned splendor of a mass-transit vehicle.
Obviously, this guy either doesn’t live in the Boston area, or he doesn’t use the public transit system here. I don’t take public transit that much these days, but I have ridden it on some rather hot days this season. NOT ONCE have I ridden in an air-conditioned vehicle. I think they keep it turned off as a cost-cutting measure (which of course they will say is a “green” decision, and not just being cheap (which it really is).
And the MBTA people wonder why some people still prefer to drive, even with $4.00/gallon gas.
