Hidden Costs of the Status Quo

by Chuck Hall

I get a lot of feedback from readers of this column. By far, the majority of these comments are positive, but I occasionally get negative ones as well. These negative comments almost inevitably surface when I write about global warming. There is a lot of intense anger about this subject out there. I’m a bit puzzled about why this is so, especially when you take into consideration the fact that the changes being suggested to fight global warming are chances that we will eventually have to make anyway if we are to survive on this planet.
I wonder if some of this anger comes from the fear of giving up convenience. The chief objection I hear about making choices for green living is that such choices take too much time and money. But do they really? Have we really considered the hidden costs of ‘status quo’ living?
For example, consider making your own biodiesel fuel. It takes an hour or so to make enough fuel for a week. This is an hour you wouldn’t have to spend if you bought fuel at the local gas station. Since biodiesel costs much less, you’ve saved more than enough money to make up for the lost hour, when you consider the amount of time you’d have to give up to your job to buy diesel from a service station.
The time value of money can even be illustrated by something as simple as washing dishes. Most people nowadays have dishwashers, for the convenience. They seem to save time, but do they really? I can wash a load of dishes by hand in about fifteen minutes. It takes another five minutes or so to put them away once they’ve dried. When we had a dishwasher, it took about five minutes to load, and about five minutes to unload. It would seem that the dishwasher saved about ten minutes of time, but the hidden costs include the amount of time that I had to work to buy the dishwasher in the first place, plus the amount of time I had to spend at work to pay the extra utility costs (electricity and much more water) to run the dishwasher.
The time value of money works the other way around too. For example, compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) cost four or five times as much as regular incandescent light bulbs. This sounds expensive if the only thing you’re considering is the up-front cost, but if you dig a little deeper, you find that while CFLs may cost up to five times as much as incandescent bulbs, they also last five to seven times longer than incandescent bulbs, and they use much less electricity. The average CFL can save you as much as $30-$50 over the life of the bulb!
There are many more examples of the hidden costs of status quo living vs. green living. Next time you pass up a more sustainable choice because you think it’ll take too much time or money, ask yourself first if you’ve considered all the hidden costs of both alternatives.