“I’ll believe ‘carbon pollution’ is dangerous when people like Biden stop putting out so darned much themselves,” William Teach said. Why, I have to ask, don’t the people telling us we must reduce our CO₂ output ever do anything to reduce their own? Why wouldn’t someone from the Show Me State, such as Mr Teach’s frequent commenter Elwood P Dowd, want to show us just what and how much he has done, personally, to reduce his own carbon footprint?

What I have done isn’t much: we replaced our light bulbs with LEDs, not to reduce our energy consumption, but because when we bought the place, it had incandescent bulbs that were burning out anyway. In addition, as we remodeled the kitchen, we installed canister lights, and the much lower temperature LEDs are far safer in canister lights.

I installed a clothesline outside, which means that, in decent weather, our bedding and my clothes gets dried using solar and wind power. Admittedly, I did this because my darling bride (of 42 years, 9 months, and 7 days) likes the way the bedding smells after line drying, rather than any concern over global warming climate change, but it still saves on over an hour in the 220-volt, 30-amp electric dryer.

Of course, many of the urbanites who like to lecture us on reducing our CO₂ output don’t have yards in which they could install a clothesline, or, if they did, are stuck with homeowners’ associations which won’t permit it. But it is amusing to me that none of them ever seem to even think about it or mention it.

Our remodeled kitchen, including the propane range! All of the work except the red quartz countertops was done by my family and me. Click to enlarge.

When I added windows, I added double-paned insulated ones; you can see the large windows I installed in our kitchen remodel to the left.

It replaced one much narrower double hung window. I added another window in our living room, along a wall which had only one, and the room needed more light. As I had walls open, I added insulation to exterior walls. When we put in new kitchen appliances, we were buying energy efficient ones.

Perhaps my motives weren’t pure enough for the warmunists — Mr Teach calls them ‘warmists’ in his long-term, daily ‘If All You See‘ posts — but, in the end, my wife and I still did these things, and we’ve spent a considerable amount of money doing so; that kitchen window was over $700 just by itself.

Oil lamp and candles on the kitchen counter. Photo by Dana R Pico, on January 16, 2022, when power was lost due to a snowstorm.

Of course, we also added propane, to a house which was previously all-electric, because when the sparktricity goes out in our end-of-the-line farmhouse, it can be out for several days. I’m sure that has us near the gates of Hell as far as the global warming climate activists are concerned, but, then again, we didn’t freeze when we lost power for 46 hours in the middle of January.

So, what has the man from Missouri done, what has the Hirsute One done, to reduce their carbon footprints (feetprint?) that they tell the rest of us we must do? We already know that Mr Teach’s frequent commenter ‘Hairy’ is keeping his current, fossil-fueled automobile, and has no plans to trade it in for a plug-in electric, but, then again, he has told us he’s in his 70s and doesn’t ever plan on buying another vehicle. Being less than two months from my 69th birthday, I can understand that!

I don’t expect our high-flying government officials like the ‘Climate Tsar’ John F Kerry — a very wealthy man who made his money the old-fashioned way; he married it! — to stop flying around the world in his private jet, a Gulfstream IV, registration number N57HJ. But maybe, just maybe, some of the otherwise regular people advocating all sorts of restrictions on other people could spend a little time telling us what sacrifices they have made, what things they have done, to put their money where their mouths — or keyboards — are.

But at some point, those global warming climate change activists need to do more than just lecture others; they need to lead by example. That so few of them do says a lot about how seriously they take global warming climate.