Going Green: Is the Market working?

Thinking about my own life, and the extent to which my family has gone "Green," and why:

I love big pickups. My Ford F-250 Supercab (12 mpg rolling downhill with a tailwind) was my pride and joy. I still miss it. I sold it 18 months ago when gas prices permanently got up over $2/gallon. Today on my 54-mile (each way) commute I drive a Nissan Sentra that is getting 36 mpg.

I like a lot of light in my house. My kids like it toasty warm or (in summer) cold enough to hang meat. Then electricity costs went through the roof, because we finally had to start paying something close to the real price of generation and transmission. I bought fluorescent light bulbs, not because they are ecologically sound, but because they now save me a bundle of money. I like money; I can get used to the fact that they take a few seconds to achieve full brightness. My kids can also get used to putting on some sweat pants, because the thermostat now goes no higher than 67 in the winter and no lower than 74 in the summer. When I get the chance, I turn the whole system off.

My family likes beef--steak, really. I used to buy really nice steaks, and everybody at the table got one. Some people chew down to the bone. Some don't. The price of beef started going through the roof. I buy meat that really shouldn't be called steak, and I have learned how to marinate and cook it correctly. I don't give everybody his/her own steak. I slice up two or three steaks (where there used to be five or six) and put the pieces on a plate. People serve themselves what they intend to eat. Everybody gets all they want, and there is usually just enough left for me to have a sandwich from the left-overs.

My wife is convinced that the tap water in Delaware is a major cause of cancer. My kids need bottled water for soccer games. I used to drink a lot of diet soda. The price of plastic bottled water and soda has inflated along with the gasoline prices. We bought some reusable plastic bottles (and we save the others that we sometimes have to buy on the road), a Brita water filter, and powdered diet lemonade mix. I get to have the pink lemonade when it's on sale. Everything tastes the same or even a little better, although I am still working on how to inject caffeine into lemonade.

The point?

None of these changes occurred because I was especially conscious of global warming. They occurred because, as scarcity and competitive demand forced prices up, I reached the point where the market drove me to make changes in my lifestyle.

I could have avoided these changes, but the opportunity cost was too high. We still got to take a 10-day vacation to Colorado this year because our electric bills, our food bills, and our gasoline bills, while rising in cost, haven't broken us yet. I took a vote (the kids each get one vote, I get four, my wife gets seventeen; anything that gets seventeen votes passes, regardless) and it was unanimous that we'd rather re-use the damn water bottles than miss summer vacation.

I have said it before, and I stand by the position: the market doesn't care about you, me, or global warming. And I am not enough of a Libertarian purist to believe that the market alone can solve a global economic/social/cultural/political problem.

But if my family's life is any indication, the market is making inroads.