I was not prepared for how Americans waste energy. Yes, I knew they would be overweight and eat much more than necessary, (I didn't suspect they'd eat all the time), and I imagined they'd leave lights burning when no one was in a room, but nothing had prepared me for the kind of unbelievable wastage I experienced. I arrived in Florida, which has a warm climate, not hot where I was, as the temperature occasionally reached mid eighties but was usually low eighties high seventies. Yet, air conditioners ran constantly, even when the air temperature outside was the same as the air conditioned premises; seventy five degrees Fahrenheit. Further, central air conditioning was used in homes.
This meant that in unoccupied rooms the air conditioning ran. In empty bedrooms, unused bathrooms, at night when the family would be at one end of the house, the air conditioning ran in empty living rooms, the kitchen, the dens; when open windows would supply the same effect, the air conditioning kept burning fuel. As the people are fairly sedentary, there was no reason for the frosty environment, yet, they preferred to wear sweaters in doors than shut the cooling or open a window. Having televisions play to empty rooms was common, in fact rarely shutting anything off was standard. Driving everywhere might be necessary due to how a city is laid out, however the number of trips was without sense or plan.
Within an hour period, one person drove five blocks to buy a snack, another drove to the supermarket for one item, another drove to buy a desert, and two drove in separate cars to check the brakes on one of them. As to food, it is all eating all the time. And the quantities of food consumed left no doubt why so many Americans are so unbelievably fat. While dinner was being prepared snacks were being eaten. After dinner was eaten, more snacks were being purchased. There seemed no possibility of people sitting down without consumption of food. The amount of garbage on family produces in one day is more than a similar family in the third world produces in a week.
The garbage is not just wasted food, but the packaging which has such little use. Cell phones make up a great deal of garbage. People change their phones constantly. Everyone seems to have the most elaborate and expensive although they don't use the features. When new features come out or they change their provider, they throw away the phone. Nothing wrong with it, but it is treated like packaging; unnecessary. Where the rest of the world suffers with the high cost of energy, having to conserve simply because they can not afford not to, Americans have extremely low energy costs which virtually demands waste. If there is any truth to the dangers posed to our planet by the "green house gases" and "pollution", American wastage is clearly the culprit.
