1. Unplug all your “smart” appliances. They may be smart enough to turn themselves back on when you’re not there… The clothes washer giving itself a relaxing soak in the tub, the dryer going for a spin-cycle joyride, the stove deciding it wants to look “hot,” and the refrigerator trying to be “cool.” This can add hundreds of dollars a year to your utility bills.
2. Replace standard light bulbs with LED bulbs. Or just go without light bulbs and stick your fingers directly into the light bulb socket, which will light up your whole head.
3. Sushi preparation is very energy efficient, but don’t limit yourself to just raw fish. Try it with chicken and pork, too.
4. Cut your driving mileage with badly behaved kids. When you drop them off at school in the morning, just wait in the parking lot until they’re expelled. Saves one round-trip each school day.
5. Most gasoline is now at least 10% ethanol. (This is mandated by the government, so it must be good for the environment.) Keep and save leftover alcohol at your house – from beer cans, wine bottle dregs, and what’s left in the cocktail glasses after you’ve made a pitcher of martinis… Then pour it in your gas tank. If this makes your car stop running, that’s even more energy efficient.
6. Adopt 40 large dogs to cut down on winter heating bills.
7. Stop watering your lawn. Lawns consume 15% of the water used in the United States. Lots of things will grow without watering. Weeds, for instance. Buy a sheep to eat them.
8. If the 40 large dogs you adopted are all German Shepherds, and they start fighting over which one of them gets to herd your only sheep, congratulations! You’ve just conserved the Earth’s resources by not needing to build a fence.
9. Eat the sheep. (See Tip No. 3.) Let the weeds grow. They’ll conceal the house and it will never need painting again. This saves a lot of energy. (Yours and the house painter’s.)
10. Board up the house windows in the spring, to preserve winter’s cool temperatures indoors all summer. Then board up the windows in the fall to keep summer warmth inside all winter.
11. Air-condition your home without using any energy at all. Husbands, tell your wives, “I’m buying a Harley.” Daughters, tell your parents, “I’m dating a pot grower. He says legalization is coming soon.” The frost in the air will chill the whole house.
12. Hear that squeak from the exercise wheel in the gerbil cage? Why let this energy go to waste? Build a bigger exercise wheel, equip it with fan blades, and install it in your bedroom window.
13. Speaking of rodents, let mice insulate your home. I have examined fiberglass insulation, and I have examined mouse nests, and the two are highly similar – except that one is pink and itchy and the other is fluffy and smelly – but they probably both have the same resistance to conductive heat flow, or “R-value.”
14. Attract mice by leaving the door of your unplugged refrigerator open.
15. Wear all your clothes at once. The extra layers will allow you to turn your thermostat down in the winter while the evaporation of heavy perspiration will have a cooling effect in the summer.
Above cartoon masterfully inked by cartoonist Kevin “Kal” Kallaugher.
