Intro­duc­tion

So.  World With­out Oil.  I have refrained from post­ing much about it because I could never quite wrap my brain around explain­ing it to peo­ple, but let me give it a try.  It’s a “game” that is less of a game and more of a thought exper­i­ment.  Let’s say that because of Peak Oil, war, lim­ited resources, or what­ever rea­sons, gas prices sud­denly sky­rocket.  There are lots of aca­d­e­mics and schol­ars that have all sorts of lofty things to say about the whole deal, but they are eas­ily glossed over by every­day peo­ple because they seem so lofty or so far in the future that nobody cares.  World With­out Oil tries to look at it not from a lofty point of view, but from an every­day man-on-the-street per­spec­tive.  They pose a lot of “what if” sit­u­a­tions.  If gaso­line was sud­denly $6.00/gallon, with lim­ited avail­abil­ity, what would hap­pen?  How would it affect you.  Yes YOU, read­ing this right now.  Would you be able to com­mute to work still?  Would you be able to buy new, imported things con­sid­er­ing the cost of ship­ping is tied to gas prices? If your local power plant runs on fos­sil fuels–how would you han­dle the fre­quent brownouts and black­outs?  And the most impor­tant ques­tion: what can/would/should you do about it all?  Peo­ple post their ideas and tips about con­ser­va­tion.  You can read, learn, and post your own.

A lot of the ideas peo­ple post are granola-munching hip­pie community-building and self-sufficiency plans.  The “hip­pie” part doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily say it’s bad, it’s just a label that con­ve­niently describes a par­tic­u­lar class of ideas.  For instance, the obvi­ous answers to an oil short­age and gas price hike are to bike to work or take pub­lic transit–or maybe buy a more fuel-efficient car.  For some, it might be to grow your own veg­eta­bles.  In Port­land, we are pretty lucky in that there are plenty of Farmer’s Mar­kets around with lots of organic locally grown veg­gies.  Else­where, that stuff needs to be shipped in by the truck­load, and if gas goes up, ship­ping goes up, so the cost of the veg­gies goes up.

Back­ground

Okay, so after all that buildup, the par­tic­u­lar tip I am post­ing today is not as lofty as, say, when I signed us up for wind power or rev­o­lu­tion­ary like some kind of at-home DIY biodiesel con­ver­sion kit for any make, model, or year of car.  It’s pretty hum­ble, but it adds up over time.

Dur­ing the work week, I eat out.  A lot.  Vir­tu­ally every day.  Yes, I can save money by pack­ing a lunch, but that’s not the point of this post.  I don’t eat any fast food (the grease turns my stom­ach into knots), and try not to eat at “nice” sit-down restau­rants too often.  There are a class of not-quite-fast-food and not-quite-sitdown around here, usu­ally Mom-and-Pop oper­ated joints, usu­ally with some­what healthy items on the menu, where you order at a counter and sit at a booth and either your name/number is called to pick up the food or they come deliver it to you–no wait­resses or any­thing.  Every­place has a soda machine, but I don’t drink car­bon­ated drinks (see: stom­ach into knots, above.) I’m always drink­ing water, but the water from those soda machines is not always the best.  It usu­ally comes from the same spout as iced tea or super-sugared-lemonade.  It’s fil­tered tap water, but some­times the fil­ter isn’t always so great.  Most of these places have bot­tled water, though.

The Tip

So that’s a rather long-winded way of say­ing that I like to drink water at lunch, but the only palat­able option, for all of the above rea­sons, is bot­tled water.  Up until about a month or two ago, I would always buy the bot­tled water, assum­ing it was my only option.  But that adds up.  A lot.  Con­sider some­place is sell­ing a 1L bot­tle for $0.99 retail.  Yes, you can get it cheaper by buy­ing a case at the super­mar­ket, but at a restau­rant or 7–11, it is sold indi­vid­u­ally.  That $0.99/L works out to be $0.99/0.26417 gal­lons.  Flip­ping that around shows bot­tled water priced at about $3.75/gallon.  That’s more expen­sive than pre-World-Without-Oil gaso­line!  And I was buy­ing it almost every day.  That raised a pretty big double-u tea eff.  And when you’re done, you are left with an empty plas­tic bot­tle that gets thrown into the trash because most restau­rants don’t bother with recy­cling them.

At that point, I decided it was time to bring my own water.  I have fil­tered water at work that is, effec­tively, free.  I have a nice Nal­gene bot­tle.  I tried car­ry­ing it to lunch a few times, but it is a lit­tle too large, heavy, and bulky to feel com­fort­able car­ry­ing the dis­tance I have to go to walk to lunch.  Then, I hap­pened upon a rather nice find at a local sport­ing goods store:

It was only a few dol­lars.  Now, I can com­fort­ably carry a full 1L bot­tle of water to lunch, slung over my shoul­der.  It saves I don’t know how many dol­lars (or hun­dreds) a year in stu­pid pre-bottled water.  Obvi­ously, the DIY’ers can prob­a­bly make some­thing sim­i­lar from scrap materials.

Like I said, it’s not an earth-shattering tip, but it has:
* ended up sav­ing me lots of money almost every day
* made the envi­ron­ment bet­ter by not throw­ing away a bunch of plas­tic bot­tles (and reduced the demand for those bot­tles by one, which may even­tu­ally help reduce the amount of their production–helping to save the envi­ron­ment on the front end, by not pro­duc­ing them, rather than the back end, by not throw­ing them away)
* made the air every so slightly cleaner, as the dis­tri­b­u­tion of those bot­tles is likely by a motor­ized vehi­cle (as opposed to a net­work of under­ground pipes) and there’s one less consumer

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy:

1. Late Morn­ing Adventures
2. Car Blog
3. Phys­i­cal Spam For Heat & Gardening
4. Top 10 Money Drains
5. A let­ter to my pen

Tagged as: ARG, ARGs, worldwithoutoil