Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Collective Iceboxes

My grandfather was "The Ice Man." He was the guy that sawed frozen blocks from the lake in winter and stored them in the icehouse for summer delivery. In his honor I present the following:

Refrigerators are the most energy consumptive home appliances. They throw out of gobs of heat particularly at the times of highest demand contributing to heat islands where there are too many refrigerators in close proximity. It's time to stop this wasteful practice of PORs. It is time to promote public refrigerators. Large community freezers capable of handling hundreds even thousands of households' daily cooling needs thus taking an equal number of wasteful PORs off the "grid." Additionally, because the poor tend to own the oldest, least efficient PORs, the community benefits by also subsidizing their participation. Sure the inconvenience will meet with resistance so we'll have to make the switch by introducing a few minor public policy inducements. We'll allow dwelling units to be built with kitchens too small for an adequate fridge. We'll use public money to build the collective coolers so that people will be freed from the burden of high purchase prices for owning one's own "reefer." We may even need to subsidize operations in order to meet participation goals.

Okay, by now everyone is probably thinking, "this is insane" and you'd be right but reread the above paragraph and tell me how it differs from how we approach transit in the US. Every comment above is straight out of every transit advocacy talking points manual I've ever heard.

1 comment:

SmellyPogoStick said...

First & Murst!