Inconvenient Truth: I’m not that savvy about my energy consumption
Sarah revived her movie review blog as a movie-review/household-energy-report blog after we saw Inconvenient Truth. We’d really like to reduce our energy consumption to reduce production of green house gases and to save money. Some links that I found while researching.
According to findsolar.com, if we wanted to convert our household to solar energy we’d need about $14000 after tax credits.
I think our nation’s dependance on oil leads us into wars with oil-rich countries (you haven’t seen us spend $290 billion bringing democracy to the Sudan). So I wondered, how much is the war in Iraq costing me personally? First stop, the National Priority Project’s cost of the Iraq war site which says the war has cost us $290 billion. But how much of that was my money? I tried their Interactive Tax Chart which says I paid over $3000 last year to fund the military. But that’s not all Iraq specific. So I headed over to the CIA Factbook to look up the US Government’s revenue($2.1 trillion). From that I could determine the percentage of the revenue that I’ve contributed and then apply that to the cost of the war in Iraq. The result is that I’ve contributed over $1500 to the war.
The formula for calculating it yourself is (your single year tax contribution)/(government revenue: 2.1 Trillion)*(cost of war: 290 billion).
We’d been thinking of buying a more fuel efficient car and remembered my interview with John Davi of Calcars.org. They’re helping convert Prius’s into 100mpg super machines.
Also, I want to second Justin’s opinion that if Gore is really serious about getting the global warming message out, and not just using the movie has a tool for funding and publicising his next run for office, he should license the movie for free public use:
Once âAn Inconvenient Truthâ leaves the theaters, rerelease it under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Make it available via BitTorrent, YouTube. Allow people to re-edit it, excerpt it, put clips on their blogs. You may discover that people will translate it, subtitle it, annotate it, mash it up with other films. Allow this work to go farther than the theater.
