So today Sonja and I were watching the snow storm in Armadillo, TX on the news. She lives in Nica now, but is from that foreign country inside US boarder - Texas. I said something like "I bet they don't have heated runways there like they do in places that get lot of snow all the time." She allowed as how even a few inches can really disrupt the whole area.
Then she talked about Sweden where she lived for a long time. In the cities in Sweden, no one has a water heater. The city burns its trash in gigantic incinerators. The heat from these burns heats the water for the city. The hot water pipes run under the roads with special bigger pipe areas at places like bus stops, then the hot water goes to homes and apartments. Imagine that! You get rid of trash, (your fuel) and you melt snow and clear roads, and you deliver free hot water to everyone.
Imagine that! What I am imagining is a place where the will of the population is to reduce energy use and solve persistent problems. I am imagining a society that can look outside of itself and see what works in other places and implement the solutions.
I like it that some countries have stuff like affordable, excellent, public transportation. I like it that some countries actually have taken the bull by the horns and everyone has low flush toilets, motions sensitive lights, windmills and solar stuff. We are still trying to figure out how to get rid of plastic bags. We could save ourselves a lot of expense and pain and suffering if we got behind ideas like not using so much energy and used our brains and that good old "can do" attitude that we were once famous for. If we can figure out how to do fracking, we certainly could figure out how to do without it.
Our country is too big to be smart , and operate like Europe. Look at Massachusetts we're small and still have a hard time operating efficiently.
ReplyDelete