Editor,
Our president - a former oil company CEO, a man who once said the United States needed an energy bill that encourages consumption, a man whose vice president is also a former CEO of an energy company - is now begging the American public to conserve electricity, carpool, use public transportation and not travel at all.
If you're like me, you probably take this plea from a prominent anti-conservationist as a sign that, hey, we had better start conserving energy. If you're like most of the country, though, and you don't really pay attention to what the president says, consider the following: Oil costs three times as much as it did three years ago, natural gas costs twice as much as it did one year ago, hurricanes Katrina and Rita knocked out a massive amount of the United States' natural gas and oil production and these disasters may lead to heating shortages this winter.
Obviously, energy conservation is in your interests whether you care about saving money, saving the environment or saving finite resources for your children and grandchildren. But are UNM students doing enough to conserve energy? Is the University administration? From the looks of things around campus, the answer is a resounding no. Perhaps I can offer a few useful energy saving tips to the administration and student body.
- Eliminate the leaf blowers. They're loud, they emit noxious fumes, they waste fossil fuels and they could easily be replaced by rakes and brooms.
- Eliminate or drastically scale back the shuttle system. The buses are loud, they emit noxious fumes, and the fuel for some of them - natural gas - costs double what it did last year and the shuttles could easily be replaced by students' legs.
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- Administrators, staff, faculty and graduate students should turn off their computers, printers, fax machines and other electronics during non-working hours. Although these devices eat up only a small amount of energy, we sacrifice next to nothing in turning them off, and cumulative energy savings could be tremendous.
- Tone down the air conditioning and heating. There's something severely wrong when my friends and colleagues are forced to wear jackets indoors when it's 90 degrees outside because the air conditioning is pumped up so high. Similarly, it's ridiculous to force people to take off all their layers in the winter because it's sweltering indoors while it's 40 degrees outside.
Energy conservation requires change, but it doesn't necessarily require life-altering sacrifices - indeed, the change can be for the better. Take the money we spend on leaf blowers and give the grounds crew a pay raise. Eliminate the shuttle and decrease parking fees. Save electricity around campus and lower tuition or improve campus facilities. Money and energy are precious commodities, and we needlessly throw far too much of them down the toilet every day.
Josh Tybur
UNM student
