Inside we focus more on immediate concerns - ourselves, work, and our immediate family and friends - while outside we are often moved to a more all encompassing view where we can appreciate nature and the people in our communities and world.

The largest area for me currently is housing, though the area where I have the most ability to reduce my footprint is likely transportation. Some changes I could make include reducing dairy, walking rather than driving, and shopping second hand.

Well, obviously one can use the power of the sun through solar panels. But you can also "passively" use the sun by opening curtains on windows facing the sun when you need more light and heat, and drying clothes and hair in the sun, instead of using electric power to do so. In developing countries people sometimes use solar ovens or solar stoves, but those only work well for certain types of cooking and certain types of weather.

Unfortunately a lot of electricity in Wisconsin is still generated by coal and natural gas. The good news is that they have been steadily closing coal plants in the last 5 years, and steadily adding lots of new utility-scale solar. The bad news is that they're delaying one coal plant closing, and perhaps even building a new natural gas plant, due to concerns about new AI data centers being built in Wisconsin, and those needing a lot of power. The good news is that we personally get most of our power from the solar panels on our roof (sometimes the electric company even pays us, because we've made more energy than we used!). And when we need more power than our panels are currently producing, we're signed up for a "Green Power Tomorrow" renewable energy program that our utility offers.

I got a video about belly dancing out from the library and tried it out! Very fun, but my hips are definitely not practiced at moving like that!

One big thing was adding a heat pump - because they're moving heat, not creating it, they're a lot more efficient than pretty much any other method of heating your home. So I've now done that! Now I want to swap out the other heating appliances in my home for heat pumps - my water heater and dryer. But it's also just fascinating seeing what energy I'm currently using - I now have a way to real-time watch how many kW my house is using, and it's something being able to see the general background usage of lights, my fridge, etc., but then see the truly massive spikes when I turn on an oven, iron, or the heat pump. At least it takes a lot less power to keep an oven at temperature than to get it up to temperature, but I think I'm going to be a lot more careful about not letting my oven sit around, preheated, while I get distracted and haven't actually gotten the food into the oven yet.

It was a very difficult decision - it was the first time we've canceled a trip in our lives. We had been invited to a conference put on by an NGO in Kathmandu, Nepal, and we planned to go to promote clean energy and environmental action in the Himalayas. But then, due to civil unrest in Nepal, the conference was canceled. So the question for us was (we'd already booked our plane flights and a number of our hotels) - should we continue our trip and visit a friend in Bhutan and have a nice vacation, but travel 18,900 miles by airplane, round trip to do that? Or should we cancel our trip (losing about $1,000 in the process, due to cancelation fees, despite our trip insurance), because of our awareness of the environmental impact of such a trip? We agonized for several weeks, and finally decided to cancel the trip. Instead we'll take some small local get-away, using our zero-emissions electric car.