Car-free dreams

Everybody, I'm sorry I haven't been as active for this week as I would like to be, I'm working 10 hour days at a refinery and trying to make some money and get kind of an "inside scoop" on the real deal behind Big Oil.

Wish me luck, tonight I have a fight (and another one next Saturday) at Kalahi Martial Arts in Mount Vernon, Wa.  Hey, a guy's gotta do SOMETHING to keep himself sane, right?

I recently decided to eliminate my cars from the family budget and pocket the savings. My personal effect on the environment will be huge. As will the effect on my pocketbook and retirement plan.

For right now, we’re only getting rid of my wife’s gas-guzzling truck. I’m still going to be driving 17 miles a day to my security job. When I get back from Iraq, though, I’m going to get rid of the other car as well. We’re going to be spending our tax return on bicycles to get us around town. I think this will really go a long way toward making our lifestyle sustainable both financial and environmental.

To find out if you really need your car, you should do a couple of things.

1. Map out your dollar cost per day of running your car, and also alternatives.

2. Map out the time cost of driving and the time cost of alternatives.

3. Try it! For one week try using the bus to get to work. That’s 5 days, no car (I would say 7 days, but most people don’t ride the bus for work because they don’t seem to “have the time”).

4. Add the cost of insurance for the each driver into your cost of driving. Most people don’t do this, but it’s very important to add in all the costs associated with each plan.

So how am I going to get into bus-riding when I am driving more than 10 miles away? Well, I plan on switching to a completely car-free lifestyle when I come back from Iraq, which means I have the better part of a year to look for a job closer to home or find a good job somewhere else to move to.

I really think that that’s what it’s going to take—a change in lifestyle. I believe that “sustainable” means that you need to change your practices to suit a lifestyle of “minimal inputs, minimal waste, maximal re-use”.

I hear a lot about bio-fuels (currently a very trendy thing, which I have denounced for years) contributing to the global food crisis. In many gas stations they dilute their gasoline with an ethanol-gasoline blend. I don’t think this is a good enough (or even a halfway-decent) solution- people simply need to get rid of one car. This will put most Americans back in the situation they were in when they had to share a car.

Noimpactman does a great job of explaining why you cannot “buy your way to being green”.