Edge City by Terry and Patty LaBan for April 28, 2024

A lesson here? We could buy new appliances instead of new clothes for you. Vacations. Electronic toys.

Carly: “We can also hang our clothes to dry instead of using an electric clothes dryer.”

Followed by sound of Mom tearing up her assignment paper.

Got a flyer in the mail. I can save a lot of money on fuel if I buy a new furnace for $7000. Wow! How good is that!!

It’s almost like people are creating, exploiting and profiting from this.

Well one way to reduce your carbon footprint is to park far away from any store you’re visiting instead of riding around for 10 minutes trying to find a closer spot, it’s also good exercise to walk. Another is to recycle and try not to be wasteful. Use something over again instead of tossing it and bring your own bags to the grocery store.

Many of us have already replaced and modernize our appliances, updated, added, or replaced our insulation, reduced our heating requirements, added heat pumps…etc. ..and you know what…It didn’t make one bit of difference either for the environment or the pocket book. It only made the vendors and the perpetrators of the biggest scam on earth richer…by all means protect the environment, do what you can, and ease the load on mother nature but for the right reasons…not because you’re following the crowd who have no clear idea on the outcomes that they hope to achieve.

Yes, buy a refrigerator that has to be repaired every 2 or three years to save 12 bucks worth of electricity.

I’ve heard you never save enough on new stuff to make up for the energy used in making it, transportation, materials, etc. Nothing is as green as the house that’s already built.

Baby steps, Carly. This is the sort of thing better done as you retire and replace old appliances as they break down and no longer work, rather than all at once on a whim. Besides, I’ve found most appliance manufacturers are slowly veering more and more green (there’s a market for it now, clearly), so odds are the next appliance you get will be more green than the one it replaced anyway, even if you don’t deliberately search for it.

I already said this before earlier in this arc, but I might as well say it again—at this point in the “going green” game, it’s less the individual consumers that need to make the change, and more the manufacturers who produce all the products the consumers buy that need to change. Partly because its the manufacturers, not the individual consumer, that leaves the biggest carbon footprints, but also because the consumer can’t go green anyway if none of the products they buy are also green. So manufacturers going green would, in turn, lead to consumers going green too.

Basically, the REAL way to solve the “going green” problem is to tackle the matter at the real source, not try and push off responsibility onto the consumers who can’t make up the difference alone just so the CEOs can give themselves a bigger Christmas bonus this year.

There is so much wrong with this whole story arc. Yes we should all be more environmentally conscious and seek to lower the negative effect we have on the environment. But what kind of family actually takes assignments from an elementary school teacher? And what teacher has the audacity to tell a kid’s family how to live?

Odd that when Jump Start’s Sunny is on an Earth day kick it’s sweet and charming.

Absolutely not. Especially if you’ve got appliances from the 70s that are still working. They are eternal. Buy a new one today and you’ll have to replace it in 2 years thanks to “planned obsolescence.” And anything from Sears is the WORST – mercifully, they’re just about all out of business now – as they deserve to be.

Carly needs to give up her cellphone, TV and home computer, not to mention mom driving her to her after school activities and all playdates. That is one heck of a carbon footprint reduction.

If it works don’t replace it. The new stuff is crap.

Honestly, the lightbulb idea is great. In addition to using less electricity, I can’t remember any of the new ones ever burning out!