Why conserve natural resources?

Factual Questions
1

I need to convince someone skeptical about the benefits of conserving natural resources – specifically where it relates to building, renovating, or operating a home. How do I convince someone that a “greener” home is worth the money and effort? Basically, I need to come up with an answer to the question, “What’s in it for me?” Unfortunately, an appeal to the greater good – or saving mother Earth – isn’t going to cut it with this person. On the other hand, talking about how a tightly wrapped house will make it more comfortable and lower utility bills is an approach that might. Except, I need help on the resource conservation angle.

For example, the idea that preserving forests prevents habitat loss for fuzzy, endangered animals won’t work. However, talking about forestry practices that avoid clear cutting might – since good management could prevent a landslide that may wipe his house off of a hill. Such an appeal to his self interest might make him more interesting in buying FSC-certified wood. He’s not totally heartless. I mean, he’d be OK with preserving forests so that someone in California wouldn’t have to slide off a hill. It’s just that the impacts need to be something that he could actually imagine happening to him.

I need help explaining the importance of:
[ul]
[li]Resource conservation, such as forests[/li][li]Water conservation[/li][li]Reduced dependence on fossil fuels, such as coal that strips the top off mountains[/li][li]Creating less waste[/li][/ul]
I already have some ideas, but I was wondering if anyone had a few more good examples or links to websites that pull some ideas like this together.

My googling hasn’t been very successful to this point. I find stuff on how to conserve resources, but not much on why. Or at least not reasons that have an immediate, in-your-face, hit-the-pocket-book, preventing-runoff-so-some-pesticide-in-the-water-won’t-reduce-your-sperm-count sort of impact.

2

How old is he?

Does he have children?

If he’s young, or has kids, you can try to get him to consider a longer time frame - “Save the planet because {you|your kids} are eventually going to have to live with the problems”. If he is childless, non-altruistic, and old enough to start thinking in terms of “Well, I won’t be around when that happens.”, trying to get him to care about long term impacts may be a hard sell.

3

You are trying to use logic to convince somebody of something that is purely emotional, feel-good bullshit in the first place? Good luck!

4

Your local utility company can probably provide good statistics on the savings provided by things like double-paned windows, better insulation, CFL bulbs, low-flow plumbing, drip irrigation and the like. Those stats will have dollar signs attached and can be analyzed for payback period, cost-benefit and the like. They may even be able to point out the potential future costs for upgrades to those systems (new power plants, reservoirs, etc.)

But resource conservation for the sake of it? Or for the sake of children? Your friend is right to be skeptical. We need to use resources. Economic growth promotes prosperity. Prosperous people have fewer children. Fewer children means (eventually) lower demand for resources. We just happen to be in the middle of a self-correcting spike in demand and most conservation efforts will do little but make the spike into a slower, longer rise. In the long run, it’ll be like the people who believed in Thomas Malthus’ prediction of world-wide famines.

5

My wife used to advise places how to save energy. For them it was all about saving money, that was their main motivation in just about every case.

6

Ignoring saving money on bills is really going to hurt you in this argument.

Im not sure how defensible the conservation approach is to energy markets. Lets say I spend my life savings to refit my house to be as green as possible, but the lady next door has 8 kids over her lifetime. What exactly am I saving? My house maybe uses 20% less resources than their 8 homes. I think in the end you need to advocate population control, and a lot of people arent going to do that.

Energy scales. Perhaps not well, but it does. If all my neighbors had 8 kids, then we would be guaranteed a few new nuclear reactors in my state just to power everything. Thats a lot better than relying on the few dozen polluting coal ones in existence now. So you can have some pretty unconventional responses to not conserving.

I think in the end all of this comes down to dollars. If you cant see savings in your bills then what exactly are you doing? If some industry practice is hurting the environment its better to get rid of it altogether (get rid of coal and switch to 100% nuclear + solar/wind) than pretend driving a few miles less a year is going to fix anything.

As far as save the children approach goes, well, historically, weve been able to manage larger populations and larger loads on the environment via technology. Better sanitation, schooling, vaccinations, etc leads to city life. Arbitrarily assigning a limit may not work.

Of course there are scenarios where we cant see the future meeting our demands and in thsoe cases we’ll see stuff like they do in China with population controls. But now that China thinks it can handle more people it has started lifting some of these controls. Humans have a strong need to create lots of other humans and use up resources. A altruistic approach doesnt tend to work, strict enforcement of law and higher bills does.

7

[Moderator note]

This sort of comment plays no useful role in GQ. If you actually want to make the argument that there is no objective value whatsoever in conserving natural resources, provide some factual information to back it up.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

8

The fact is “what’s in it for me?” is a legit question.

If a massive hurricane comes in an wipes out the Endangerd Florida “CuttyPie,” a very cute bird, we say “Well that’s nature at work.” If I wipe it out so I can build a mall, people say “That’s awful.” Well the results the same.

Now I oversimplified to state a point, obviously in this case you could simply build the mall elsewhere, but it does leave open the quesiton.

You see this all the time though. Why do people vote the way they do? We have a healthcare debate, yet if I walked up to someone and said “Look at that person having a heart attack, should we call 911 or let him die?” Very few people would say “let him die.”

If something does effect you why do you care?

If man wiped out the dinosaurs we’d have been upset, if a comet does it, “well that’s nature.” Either way if the dinos weren’t all killed off, the mammals wouldn’t have been able to outcompete them leading to us being here now. (Yes there were mammals with dinos but they were filling tiny niches)

Lastly you can’t change the world, but you CAN change your part of it.

Too often well meaning people look only at small parts that add up to nothing. Let’s say (an again I’ll oversimplify to make a point), I want to stop pollution. I point out, if we all used recycle bags at grocers we’d save a billion units of pollution per year. But supposing companies in the USA a putting out 100 billion units a year and companies elsewhere in teh world are putting out an additon 500 billion units of pollution.

You’re saving a mere billion units is worthless. It’s like saving pennies and at the end of the year coming up with $100, sure it’s a lot of money you might not have had but if you owe $20,000 at the end of the year, the hundred dollars isn’t going to do anything except buy you a dinner to celebrate your upcoming bankruptcy.

9

Recently we had 3 local McDonalds get torn down and replaced by new buildings that are “green”. One of them even added stations to recharge your electric car. My guess is this is for saving energy and also a lot of good PR. It would be interesting to know if they track how often the car chargers are used.

10

I was told a long time ago to never appeal to a persons good side… they might not have one. Appeal to their pocketbook and self interest.
Rande…

11

He has adult children. But I think the long term impacts are still a hard sell.

12

I’m not planning on ignoring this point. Saving money on utility bills is an excellent argument for energy efficiency upgrades. There are quite a few that are relatively inexpensive and pay off rather quickly. Not to mention the comfort of a nicely temperature controlled home. From my reading, however, there are multiple aspects to a green home, and energy-efficiency is only one of them.

Indoor air quality is another. And that’s pretty easy to address. There are studies showing how VOCs impact health. It’s not tough to convince someone to avoid vinyl flooring in favoring of something that isn’t releasing as much nasty stuff into the air.

Then there’s resource conservation. Green homes tend to include water conservation features such as low flow faucets, xeriscaping, and so on. But water use is not metered in his location, or mine for that matter. So there is no savings to calculate. Green homes also feature recycled, reclaimed, renewable, or FSC-certified products. I don’t see savings for a single homeowner with these either.

Are there only altruistic arguments for resource conservation?

13

I’m also going to go with “money”. Do a cost benefit analysis to determine how much energy you will save vs the additional cost of putting in “green” materials and whatnot.

14

My first questions would be… what happened to the waste material from the torn down buildings? Where did the material come from to rebuild the building? How about the energy to make the building products? There are environmental impacts to that as well. Do the “green” improvements offset the use of resources to replace an existing building?

Although I opened this thread, and I’m reasonably convinced of certain “green” efforts, I do realize that there are many questions remaining about the reasons and efficacy of going green.

15

Payback time is important to many people who want to cut energy use. For example if they save $500 per year and the cost is $2000 the payback time is 4 years. Sometimes they will only fund projects with a payback time of less than a set number of years. Some places want 4 or less years, others may go out to 7 or longer.

For the green McDonalds they recycled a good amount of the torn down buildings. And they used recycled products for the new buildings. I don’t know the overall impact of what they did but I know that the one with the electric car chargers is going for a LEED certification which is not easy to get. If you want to know more about LEED here is there site:

LEED certification for neighborhood development | U.S. Green Building Council

LEED is a voluntary process that is not run by government.

16

I’ve done that, actually. For myself, not for him. But I could sit down and crunch the numbers again. Assume a 5% increase in cost for a green home. Spread it out over a 30 year fixed rate mortgage. Look at the HERS rating and estimate the monthly energy savings based on local utilities. When you do that, the projected monthly savings on the utilities can add up to more than the increase in the monthly mortgage payment, depending on various factors.

What I’m stuck on is resource conservation. And maybe there’s no good argument for that, beyond saving the world, blah, blah, blah. Is there?

I appreciate the comments on energy conservation and the savings that come with that, but I’m more curious about good examples on the benefits of resource conservation.

17

Article about McDonalds that is hoping to be LEED certified

http://www.qsrmagazine.com/articles/exclusives/0709/mcdonalds-1.phtml

18

I think you’re on a loser if you pursue the issue of conservation as conservation. Try instead responsible long-term management. Take Easter Island as an example of how not to do it, and game reserves as the way to do it - they’re now culling elephants. Maybe soon they’ll be able to harvest the ivory. On a shorter time-scale, you can review the massive increase of productivity that followed the introduction of crop rotation.

For cutting back on fossil fuels and other emissions, you can highlight air pollution, the ozone hole, and the like.

19

OK, that’s pretty cool. Maybe it’s irrational, but I find that stuff really sexy. Forget diamonds and shoes. Come on… somebody buy me a ground source heat pump. Oh, yeah. :cool: