Guest Blogger Jack: Eliminate Burnable Fuels

We need to come up with a very powerful argument for renewable energy that eliminates need for ALL burnable fuels.

My wife and I have asthma. She’s had it all her life. I’ve only developed it in my late 70s. Fortunately, mine is not very severe.

I only have to take a puff of Flovent in the evening and a puff of Albuterol when I go for a walk. Mary uses these aerosols more frequently.

We live in Seattle where there are enough hills that a short walk is aerobic. I don’t run very often at age 80, but Mary still runs at age 66.

We have a cabin in San Juan County, WA, whose official heat source is wood burning, but we no longer use the wood stove. Wood smoke is very hard on the lungs. Our 32’x20′ cabin is so well insulated it can be heated electrically by means of one or two electric plug-in 1500 watt radiators. I installed three electrical outlets with thermostats when I wired the cabin, which we purchased without electric power. It was originally 16’x20′, and I doubled it’s size, starting in 2002. Here’s a photo showing the wood smoke and Mary on the new front deck before I added the guardrail and new windows in the old front section. By the way there are many residents of Washington state whose only heat source is wood burning. That leads to some days when wood burning is limited to only those people because of the air pollution. We have a fire place in our Seattle living room, but we no longer use it. We would like to put in solar panels on our Seattle house and maybe this one, but it’s currently beyond our means until we sell one of these houses. Before the ‘great recession’ we could have sold the island property for maybe $300,000. There are 2 acres total, consisting of two 1/2 acre lots and half of a 2 acre lot which we share with neighbors and is fully forested. We have a nice view of water and Lopez island from the front. We’ll have water front after global warming takes over and floods the lot in front of us. The roof on that lot is about 40 feet below our deck. Because of the 2×4 construction, we insulated the cabin with styrofoam, which is R-5 per inch, so the walls are R17.5 and the floors and roofs are R-30. I replaced the old single pane windows with large insulated glass windows, so we have nice views all around. Unfortunately, birds occasionally hit the glass and are stunned. I don’t know if their lives are shortened as a result. We sometimes put markings on the glass to prevent that.