I love those words together. They're just weird enough to make me pause and I really dig the idea behind it.
The Riot of Austerity was a project in 2007 by a couple of bloggers *really* intent on reducing personal consumption. The goal is to spend a year reducing energy consumption by 90% compared to a typical American in 7 categories: Electricity, Heating and Cooking Energy, Gasoline/Transportation Energy, Garbage, Water Usage, Consumer Good Consumption and Food Energy Consumption.
The folks behind the first one are relaunching in June. I think I'd like to play along. It will be interesting to see where Bill and I land compared with the average American, and how we can improve.
Anyone else interested?
David Korten's Keynote Presentation Now Online
15 years ago
Sure I am interested and willing to play along. But already I have my underwear in a bunch over the term "typical Americans" and how they could possibly get 7 values that fairly represent such an amorphous term.
ReplyDeleteThat's a failing on my part. She uses the more precise "average" and "baseline" As in: "spend a year reducing our energy consumption by 90% over the average American's." And: "I need to run a new set of numbers, as the data for the American baseline has changed."
ReplyDeleteHopefully there will be some explanation of the data - whether they take total electricity consumption and divide by number of households, or if it's the average of a sample of individual households or something else my soft, right brainedness hasn't conceived yet.
I'm excited about the easy opportunity to quantify some of our actions.
I'm in to see how we do. I am also very curious about the process and the data comparison. I am going in assuming that Carrie and I are way below the average in most consumption and usage categories, but we will see.
ReplyDelete