Editorial note: If by chance you’ve been reading from the first article, you know that Green Old Home has taken a pretty linear trajectory from basic energy saving habits, to big-picture energy concepts, to how to air seal your home and the basic tools you’ll need to do so. Going forward, we’re going to continue to provide a steady stream of how-to articles for specific projects, but we’ll be alternating with other content, such as tips for living efficiently in your old home, quick improvements you can make while you’re not busy air sealing, and in-depth articles about specific weatherizing products and how to use them. Or in this case, a plea for thinking clearly about priorities.
Some family friends of ours recently had a baby shower for their new little one. They’re a lovely couple, and they’ve since been joined by their wonderful daughter. But something about their baby shower struck me as a little bit odd.
You see, they sent an impassioned message to their guests about how important it is to the two of them to minimize their impact on the environment—and for this reason, they had assembled a massive baby registry of items that had been vetted as “environmentally” or “eco-” friendly, “green,” etc.
Think about this. They had put together a carefully curated list of expensive, brand-new, boutique baby gifts in a world that probably already contains enough baby stuff that we never need to manufacture another rattle.
Buying new “green” products—with the best of intentions—is a pretty terrible way to be eco-friendly in situations where perfectly good used options exist.
Having majority-used baby stuff should not be difficult for people who have any social ties whatsoever. When people found out that we were having our first kid, we got baby stuff from everybody without even asking. My brother-in-law’s boss wanted to get baby clothes out of her garage. My wife’s coworker was going full Marie Kondo and offloading anything to anyone who would take it. And if we hadn’t had those people in our lives, I’m sure we could have found most of what we needed on Freecycle or similar sites.
Sure, we also spent some money ourselves. We mostly bought items related to safety that had expiration dates or where the standards had changed in recent years, but we purchased our share of cool outfits and things like that too. But a full registry of brand-new stuff? That would have been silly when there were so many baby items out there that we could reuse and give a longer life.
I don’t bring this up to rant about the baby product industry or to pick on our friends. I just think that their baby registry is an example of something I see all the time: people trying to make themselves feel better about their lifestyle and its impact on the environment by buying the right new things. And I see this same mistake reflected over and over in the world of green building and renovating.
Solar Panels and Moral Licensing
When I was just starting Green Old Home, I was doing something that website people call “keyword research”—that is, thinking about the words and phrases I hoped people would google to bring them to the site, and checking out what websites those words and phrases were currently bringing them to.
I was a little disappointed to see that one of the top results for many of the phrases I was researching—basic terms like “how to save energy”—was a website to help homeowners find a contractor to install solar panels.
What’s wrong with solar panels? Nothing! I love them, and I love that they’re getting more and more economical to install. I can’t wait to put them on my own house someday.
But I do worry about solar panels as a starting point. Somebody googling “how to save energy” should probably not jump straight to installing solar panels if they haven’t made any other changes to their house—or their habits—first. Just as I wrote that modern HVAC systems have allowed us to get into certain habits (e.g., wearing the same clothes indoors year-round) that make us a little more thoughtless about our lifestyles, I worry that solar panels can have a similar effect on people’s electricity usage.
There’s a phenomenon in psychology known as “moral licensing,” where basically after you’ve done a good thing—like install solar panels—you basically give yourself permission to do other things that aren’t so good. Like maybe leaving the lights on more, running your electric heat more, or doing more loads of laundry. You’re probably most familiar with this concept in the world of exercise: “Hey, I went to the gym today. I deserve some cake!”
Nobody does this on purpose, and I’m not suggesting that the costs of those bad decisions would outweigh the benefits of solar panels. I just think it makes sense to establish a baseline of reasonable home improvements and good habits before embarking on a project that might remove your motivation for ever making those changes in the future.
The Solution: Align Your Incentives
Fortunately, there’s a simple way to avoid falling into the trap of trying to buy your way to an environmentally friendly lifestyle. If you focus on the goal of spending as little money as possible, either on yourself or on your house, you will naturally find yourself making more sustainable solutions in most situations.
As an example, think about buying an electric car. Just like I said about solar panels, electric cars are great, and I’m excited to see them keep coming down in price. I can hardly wait until it makes sense for me to own one. However, electric cars—like all cars—are still very expensive to own and use. And if your goal is to spend as little money as possible, a clearly better solution is to try to organize your life around walking, biking, and/or public transit. All of these options are better for your wallet and for the planet.
I have to give credit to Mr. Money Mustache for persuading me to become a bicycle commuter, which in turn impacted our decision in where to buy our house, and created a cascading effect of both money and energy savings. We now drive so little that it doesn’t make sense for us to switch to an electric vehicle until either our gas vehicle is beyond repair or there is a super-affordable market for used EVs. Right now, the purchase simply wouldn’t pay itself back in terms of money or energy savings for decades.
Similarly for your old home, the goals of saving money and saving energy are often totally aligned—which is why “save money” is the leading part of Green Old Home’s tagline. If I’m being honest, I was personally much more motivated to become more energy efficient by my first $500 heating bill than I was by any story I ever heard about climate change. Is saving money the most noble motivation? Sure isn’t! But to my way of thinking, if both motivations can get you to the same place, it’s more important to focus on the “how” than the “why” when it comes to energy efficiency.
So if you’re anything like our friends with the baby shower—or anything like me as a teenager—you’d be wise to rethink your relationship to new stuff. (Again, Mr. Money Mustache is great on this point.) Think about the sustain part of “sustainable.” When you have a piece of clothing, furniture, cookware, or you-name-it that’s served you well for ten, twenty, or thirty years—wow! That kind of thing gives me a tremendous sense of satisfaction, and I promise you that you can cultivate that feeling yourself.
Then again, if you’re the owner of an old home, maybe I didn’t need to tell you all that. You already understand the value of maintaining something that’s stood the test of time. I suspect the old home set are a more naturally frugal bunch, on average, than the folks who opt for new townhouses springing up on old farmland. And if you’re living in a home that was built using materials extracted 50, 100, or 200 years ago, you probably intuitively understand that the greenest building is the one that already exists.
If that describes you—someone who isn’t totally in the thrall of consumer culture—then what does it mean for you to align your incentives? It means focusing on the cost-benefit analysis of each energy efficiency project you take on. There’s a reason, for example, that community weatherization programs don’t usually replace windows for homeowners. It’s not the fact that windows are expensive per se, but that the windows won’t pay themselves back in energy savings for a long, long time.
And if that financial logic leads you to keep your existing windows, you’ll also be keeping your old windows (which are probably maintainable with a little know-how) out of the landfill and avoiding the energy costs of manufacturing new IGUs that have a service life of just a few decades—after which they will go to the landfill.
Unfortunately, a lot of the big-ticket items in the world of “green” building fall into this same category: maybe nice to have, but definitely not a smart place to start. As Green Old Home frequently emphasizes, you’re usually much better off focusing on the cheap stuff first—like air sealing your home and working on better habits—that will pay themselves off in no time. Once you’ve taken care of those things, then you can look at how much more room you still have for improvement and weigh your options. And with a well-sealed home and good habits in place, each further improvement will go that much farther.
You Can Do This
Finally, I want to emphasize: I am not a purist who totally refuses to buy new stuff. I love technology. I don’t put my family through the ringer when they want to make a purchase. I have an amount of respect for the people in this episode of This American Life who tried to get their families to make major sacrifices for the planet (say, never flying on an airplane again), but listening to that story has to make you question how scaleable that solution is. For my part, I just like to think that my family has managed to achieve a healthier balance for our lives than the average household.
And I think you should take the same approach to “greening” your house. The world is a big place full of interesting people, and I’m glad there are people out there trying to figure out how to go completely off the grid. But I might never get there, and I’m not asking you to. I’d rather have 1,000 people figure out how to make their lives 30% less wasteful—in terms of both money and energy—than convert 2 people to a totally carbon-neutral lifestyle. I suspect those 1,000 people are going to have a bigger net impact, and each one of them will have more money in their pockets to enjoy their lives.
Put another way, let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good. There’s a lot of space between trying to buy your way to a less wasteful lifestyle and being a totally self-denying martyr. And that’s the space that Green Old Home is here to help you navigate.