Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

Anyone who takes a step toward helping the environment makes me happy. I see people—even big businesses—making progress all the time. It doesn’t matter if it’s Wal-Mart or McDonald’s or one of my friends or neighbors. In the 10k of life, when a runner who seems to have been lagging behind sprints ahead, he deserves a pat on the back and assistance in the race.

I’ll help you discover some of the changes, large and small, that you can make. I’ve even marked these suggestions to make them easy to spot.

         EASY CHANGES. These are the low-hanging fruit. These are changes you can make almost effortlessly and at little or no expense—in fact, some may even save you money right off the bat! And virtually all of them will end up saving you money in the long term. These changes are noted with a symbol like the one at the left.

         NOT-SO-BIG CHANGES. These changes will cost you anywhere from $50 to just under $500 to implement, but while they require a bit more of a financial investment, each has a real, quantifiable payoff. You can spot these changes wherever you see this symbol.

         BIG CHANGES. Not surprisingly, some of the biggest payoffs require the biggest up-front investment. You may not be able to make a lot of these changes right away, but it’s worth knowing what they are as well as their benefits so you can make the best choices when it comes to replacing big-ticket items or doing significant work on your home. You can find these changes wherever you see this symbol.

Forward (and Onward)

I’m happy to report that I’ve seen a lot of progress since I first started on my own personal green campaign. In 1970 the air quality in Los Angeles was atrocious. You know how they have snow days back east? Well, in L.A., we had smog days, days when the air quality was so bad, children were told not to go to school!

Since then, the number of cars in the L.A. basin has quadrupled as the population and number of multicar households have grown. But you know what? The air quality has not gotten worse. It hasn’t even stayed the same.

It’s gotten better. We’ve got four times the cars and half the ozone. That’s really good.

That’s been over the course of nearly forty years, during a period when most people hadn’t even started thinking about how their actions might affect the environment. Imagine how much of a difference we can make in the next forty years, as people like you read this book and make just one or two or ten of the changes. Because this is a fight we can win in stages. Together, we can all get to the top of Mount Everest. Start with the low-hanging fruit, move on to the more significant changes, and before you know it, you’ll be living just like me.

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HOME

TAKING AN OLD HOME AND MAKING IT GREEN

I bought our house in 1988, a simple little two-bedroom house on a small lot in Studio City, California. Given my financial position at the time, it was a great move that has also turned out to be great for my career—I’ve never felt pressured to take a role I didn’t love just so I could make a huge mortgage payment. Of course, by Hollywood standards, this house is a shack. But by world standards, as I’m sure you know, it is a palace.

Retrofitting an Old House vs. Building New

Few of us have the resources to build a more energy-efficient house from the ground up. I didn’t have the money to do that, and I didn’t have the will to do that. Plus I liked my house.

So, I set out to make my home as environmentally sound as I could in every aspect. I knew that with insulation, a drought-tolerant garden, double-pane windows, an energy-saving thermostat, and solar panels I eventually put on the roof, I could make this a much more efficient structure.

Indeed, by the time I was done, I had made my home nearly as energy efficient as a new one. And you can do the same for your home, wherever you live.

The key to saving energy in your home is controlling energy use. Clearly, there are many ways to do this, from simple changes in what you do and how you do it to more-intense home improvement projects. Because so much of the energy used in your home is used to keep it warm in the winter and cool in the summer, we’ll start with ways you can control your heating and cooling needs.

And there’s another important point I want to mention right up front: You don’t have to own your home to make many of these changes. There’s a lot you can do even if you’re renting, or if you own a condominium or another type of structure where you might be limited as to the kinds of changes you can make.

So why bother making these changes? Because they’ll make your home more energy efficient, which means you’ll be helping the environment by saving natural resources. It also means you’ll be helping yourself and saving money—sometimes really big money. So no matter where you live right now, you can make some changes that will make a real difference.

A Fresh Filter

Perhaps the easiest thing you can do today is change the air filter for your heating and air-conditioning system. Many people think, “Filter? There’s a filter?” If that’s you, yours probably hasn’t been changed in a while.

Most central heating and air-conditioning systems have a filter at the air intake—on a wall or on the ceiling—and many window and wall-unit air conditioners have a filter element on the front that needs to be changed, too.

I usually change my air filter every other month.

I change mine regularly, sometimes six times