Here’s a paradox for you to think about today…  Saving money burns more energy than spending it. 

(Now that’s not quite 100% true, but just go with it for a second, you’ll see where I’m leading you soon enough.) If you try to conserve energy by not buying energy intensive things you’re actually making matters worse because the money you would have spent sits in a bank and is lent out many times over to people who will buy energy intensive things with that money and businesses that will burn more energy with those borrowed dollars. 

Funny that an industry (banking), that produces no physical product, is, in effect, the biggest cause of energy depletion and pollution.  What a F@#%!’d up system we live under!  As I see it, there are only two ways you can reduce energy use. 

1. Reduce your income. 

2. Put your savings into precious metals that you physically posses and thus cannot be leveraged by a fractional reserve banking system. 

Of the two, the former works better than the latter as some energy is being spent mining additional resources, but if you want to remain wealthy, there is only one logical choice.

OK, OK, you say that there is a third way you can reduce energy use, and that is to buy things that save more energy than was spent producing them.  This, however, is a tougher strategy to pursue because of the amount of information required to make the right purchases and the incentive of people selling goods marketed as “Green”, for example fancy new LED Christmas Tree Lights, to mislead you.   Advertising will tell you these new items save energy, but do they save enough energy to warrant the energy spent producing the new set of Christmas Tree lights?  I don’t know, but I bet the answer is, in many cases, no. 

Some choices are pretty clear, a good example of a net energy saving purchase would be purchasing insulation for your home.  A bad example would be those Christmas tree lights or buying a new hybrid car instead of running an old civic or tercel.  When you add up the energy it takes to produce these items, the amount of energy they save over your old product is seriously in question.  The point is that there is a lot of gray area here and if you don’t have high levels of independent information but you want to be certain to be greener than you have been, the best thing to do is to not buy anything and keep your money out of the banking system.  …preferably in something like Gold that may offer some protection against inflation.

However, there is a rule I like to use to determine if a purchase is really a green purchase. This rule makes all the sense in the world to me and while far from being 100% accurate, certainly has a strong correlation.   The rule is if an “energy saving” purchase actually ends up saving you money, then it is probably actually a green purchase.   A new $30,000 Prius will never save me money over driving a 96 tercel that can be bought for $3000 and only saves a little on gas, definitely not $27,000 dollars of gas.  Part of the reason for that difference in price is the amount of energy that went into researching, producing, and marketing that Prius.    Likewise, spending $39 on a full set of new LED Christmas Tree lights will never save me $39 in electricity.  Those LEDs cost a lot because a lot of energy went into developing, manufacturing, distributing and marketing them.  The cheaper choice, is, more often than not the greener choice.  The reason this is generally true is that money, for all reasonable intents and purposes, is a universal unit of energy.  Money is what you trade to gain access to energy or the products of energy.  The markets, generally, price energy correctly in dollars.  Now, I know, we can come up with lots of exceptions to this rule because different forms of energy are more cost effective to access than others, but the bottom line is that most of the energy used to research, develop, produce and market whatever you’re buying comes from the same dirty coal and oil sources and so the strength of the correlation of dollars to energy is none-the-less very strong. 

Soooo….  If you don’t know better, just do the math.  Will it save you money?  Yes, then it might be green.  No, then it’s probably not green all things considered, and even so, it’s not in your financial interest to buy it.  But remember, unless you keep the money you saved outside of the banking system (e.g. in gold), it isn’t green at all!

But damn!  Now that you’ve done all that, the people you bought the product from have put the profit margin into a bank and now it is being lent out many times over, expanding the money supply and causing more energy to be spent and pollution to be generated!  You better have saved a LOT of energy with that purchase!

Maybe you should have just saved your money in gold.