Waste heat

During the summer, you have a air conditioner cooling your home. That air-conditioner dumps heat outside, and blows chilled air in. Inside your house you have a refrigerator. That refrigerator has a very similar system that dumps excess heat into your home. It dumps its waste heat into the space your air conditioner is trying to cool. Say you also have a clothes dryer; it has a pipe to expel its excess heat outside, and that is a good thing in the summer, but in the winter you may want to harness that heat. Modern homes are rife with such conflicts. Just dump waste heat outside. It's becoming a problem.

The waste heat generated by car engines, power plants, home furnaces and other fossil fuel-burning machinery plays an unappreciated role in influencing regional climates, new computer simulations suggest. By altering atmospheric circulation, human-made heat may raise temperatures by as much as 1 degree Celsius during winter in the northernmost parts of the world. Full article

This is a problem within our means to address--at least to some extent. How hard is it to build an energy efficient home? Governments are already touting insulation, and energy-efficient appliances. How hard would it be to build a home with a central heat pump? All the appliances could expel waste to the heat pump, and draw from it when needed. Some heat is still wasted, but a home designed from the ground up with the understanding that our homes need a holistic way of dealing with all our gadgets could minimize that waste. Some people are already doing it. Suppose that we married all the of underground home efficiency to a centrally managed heat pump and added personal wind or solar power production? We have the technology ...

Manifesto

We are not a rational people, but we are capable of being rational for brief intervals. Everyone looks at the world and sees the madness that rules it. Some of the insanity seems beyond repair, but maybe all we need is enough imagination to devise a crazy plan. Maybe we need to employ absurd rationality.