Needed: A Suburban 'No Impact Man'

In 2006, author Colin Beavan had an inspired idea for his next book. After living la vida loca in Manhattan -- small child, working spouse, Greenwich Village high-rise apartment, take-out dinner in front of the big-screen television most weeknights, partying with friends on the weekends -- he would spend a year as "No Impact Man" and write about it.

Over 12 months, beginning in December 2006, Beavan and his wife and daughter learned to do without conveniences most of us consider essential: electricity, motorized transportation (including elevators) and a varied diet (all their food was grown or raised within 250 miles of New York City, limiting them to what was seasonally available). The family also avoided any purchase that would produce paper or plastic waste. This included toilet paper, a sensational detail that brought his project immediate attention and left some critics characterizing it as merely a stunt.

This is unfortunate because Beavan posed some serious questions: What can each of us do to improve the environment? How hard is it to change your lifestyle so that it's more sustainable over the long haul? To make a difference, do lifestyle changes have to be drastic?

Of course Beavan's answer to this last question is yes because he needed a strong narrative device for his recently published book, "No Impact Man" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). But, in point of fact, a household can make changes that have a big planetary payoff without affecting the lifestyle at all.

For example, if Beavan had been a homeowner who had spent his year as No Impact Suburban Man, he could have achieved the big payoff with only minor changes to his house that would be invisible to the untutored eye. Such a suburban saga would have been far less compelling, but it might have been one that readers would actually emulate.

The plot line to this story is energy use and its connection to global warming.

It's not widely known, but energy use by U.S. buildings accounts for about 40 percent of the greenhouse gases we collectively emit every year, and half of these buildings are houses.

Energy use by buildings produces greenhouse-gas emissions in two ways. On site, they are produced when fossil fuels such as natural gas are used in furnaces and hot water heaters. Off site, they are produced when fossil fuels are burned to generate the electricity used by the building occupants. According to data collected by the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration, about 32.5 percent of home energy use in 2006 powered appliances, lighting and other household electronics, and about 15.5 percent was used to heat water. The largest share -- about 52 percent -- went for heating and cooling.

Here's the kicker. In many older houses, 50 percent or more of this heating-and-cooling energy is wasted! This is where a No Impact Suburban Man can make his mark.

Why isn't suburbia focused on this? Many homeowners are aware of their energy inefficiencies but don't take action because they think any improvement will be too costly. The homeowners' line of thought in energy-related matters typically starts with windows. Because they feel cold air coming in whenever they stand near a window in the winter, they assume that windows must be the problem. But window replacements can cost thousands of dollars, so the homeowners try to ignore their discomfort.

Actually, the windows are rarely the problem, said Joe Kuonen, a home energy performance consultant in Little Rock who has worked on houses all over the country. That cold air is actually coming in through gaps around the window frame caused by ineffective caulking, worn weatherstripping or malfunctioning window mechanisms.

Homeowners rarely identify the sources of their biggest energy losses because they usually are in the seldom-visited areas of the house-- crawl spaces and unfinished attics. These should be heavily insulated, Kuonen said, but he often finds the insulation material to be degraded or entirely absent. During the cold season, nothing stops the heat inside the house from passing through to the great outdoors.