When my fellow council members and I toured some area libraries a few weeks ago, we visited Timberglen library—a satellite library in Dallas. Timberglen was chosen because it was a Silver-level LEED-certified building. It was a disaster—the natural-cork flooring was buckling up all over, the automatic-dimming lights automatically kept the building too dim all the time, and the rainwater-dependent toilets…well, that speaks for itself.
There was some discussion, also, about making Keller’s new fire station LEED-certified. Ideas included a geothermal heat pump and—get this—a system to recapture the water used to wash the fire engine. Lovely thought, but when we’re paying $1.50 for a thousand gallons of water, how long will it take this thing to pay for itself?
Since there’s nothing voluntary about the tax revenue we receive, I think we should leave these trendy experiments to the private sector. Government can then adopt the tried-and-true technologies.
I disagree with our continued watering restrictions (no watering between 10am and 6pm, instituted during 2005-2006 drought) because we’re starting to sound like the little boy who cried wolf. If we keep a perpetual state of emergency going, it’s going to be hard to get buy-in when there’s a real emergency. (Of course the City of Fort Worth dictates our water policy, and doesn’t much care what I think.)
On a planet 70% covered in water, I can’t help but think that if we spent half as much time teaching our kids engineering and chemistry as we spent frightening them about resource depletion, we’d have all we need and a clean planet, too.
I am an avid recycler, but I suffer from no delusions that I’m ‘doing my part to save the planet.’ I recycle because I hate waste, and if something useful can be made from the things I throw away, I’m willing to pay a little more to do that.
As for manmade global warming, I’m more worried about the intellectual climate.
