He pointed out that he doesn’t pay for data on his phone in a different video, and drives to the library to upload videos.
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Will Tiny House threads be the Knife sharpening threads of 2021?
Stay tuned to find out!
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If low impact living is your thing, far, far better to do it in the city, where most of the energy investment has been done already.
I’d challenge this a bit. Consider that 63% of utilities in the US still do generation with hydrocarbons: Electricity generation, capacity, and sales in the United States - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
If you were to move entirely to solar + batteries, then your generation goes entirely to renewables.
You can take mass transit, you can benefit from economies of scale. […] Out in the country, […] [y]ou must drive everywhere, pay full retail for everything, and everyone’s gotta own their own chainsaw/woodstove/bulldozer/etc.
If you’re driving an EV charged via solar, you’re really efficient. Full retail is relative, given that Walmart caters to rural areas. Walmart is certainly not the best company, but you’re not paying a lot to shop there. You’re probably not getting packages that you’ve ordered online, so you’re probably making one trip a week or so into town to deal with getting whatever you need versus having many trucks drop by your home.
Tool rental is still a thing, even in rural areas, and if you install a ground-loop heat pump that you run off solar, you can get really efficient heating and cooling year round, even in very cold places.
Now there are certainly costs here that you didn’t talk about. Clean water is a bit of a hassle, especially if you have to truck it in. Sewage can be done with a cesspool, but it’s probably better to collect it in a septic tank and have it pumped out with a truck.
Recycling things that are actually recyclable, such as cans and paperboard is possible with a bit of effort, but it would involve a drive somewhere.
You can certainly also come up with points where living in an urban area isn’t all that efficient. There is often so much cement and asphalt that it distorts the local weather patterns. Many municipalities mandate ornamental grass lawns that consume a lot of water to keep green, and then go on to treat that water after it enters a storm sewer. And while public transportation is awesome, most cities don’t have awesome public transportation, places like NYC aside.
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Walmart destroys local economies. Small businesses can’t compete, so they close, and town centers become just another stretch of abandoned and rotting buildings. Better to pay retail at the dress shop/hardware store/butcher shop than spend less and guarantee their demise.
And if you have an street address, you can get packages delivered. UPS or FedEx will deliver about anywhere, and I assume Amazon does the same now.
And that’s true even in the suburbs. There’s no corner stores, or bus lines to get to the shopping center.
From my experience, tiny-home-in-the-wilderness people aren’t city dwellers; they’re suburbanite kids who grew up to hate their parent’s life, so they take their parent’s money and build a twee space.
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In OP’s video, he makes a big deal out of saying “Anyone can do this” - which is different from, “Everyone can do this”.
Certainly, with enough money, the rich can afford to do things in a less destructive way. That completely sidesteps the issue of how the vast majority of us are going to be doing it.
In 1900, more human beings lived on the farm than in town, but that has been changing. Right now it’s 5 to 1 in the US, urban to rural.
It’s going to take a lot more than cheap photovoltaics to reverse that trend.
Sustainability has to scale, or it’s just a toy for rich white people.
Using a 20 acre (or so) piece of land to farm food and house a couple of people is immensely inefficient. That same land could feed thousands in a city with only slightly more energy input. There is nowhere near enough land for everyone to live “off grid” in this way. Efficient land use is critical to sustainability.
The problem with dreams of “low impact organic living off the land” is that, if you follow the thread, it necessarily requires a few billion people to cease to exist.
Efficiency is sustainability and efficiency saves lives.
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Walmart destroys local economies. Small businesses can’t compete, so they close, and town centers become just another stretch of abandoned and rotting buildings. Better to pay retail at the dress shop/hardware store/butcher shop than spend less and guarantee their demise.
You’re assuming that this hasn’t already happened, which it probably has if you live in a rural area. It’s not full price, but there’s also no choice unless you want to drive farther.
And if you have an street address, you can get packages delivered. UPS or FedEx will deliver about anywhere, and I assume Amazon does the same now.
You can get packages delivered, but depending upon your location, not even USPS will bring it to your door because it’s not cost effective. (For some of these locations, they do provide free PO Boxes if this is the case though)
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