Tropical Resorts…

Posted on | April 28, 2009 | No Comments

What if I told you there was an island in the Pacific Ocean just south of Hawaii.  You’ve never heard of it, you’ve never been there, and you likely never will.  It’s as big as twice the size of France too.  It’s very exclusive, very few people get to go.  Oh, and it’s made of floating trash.  That’s right, there is an island south of Hawaii consisting of floating trash, your trash.  It’s a disgusting thought to say the least and it’s all our  fault.  It’s the result of debris discarded from ships, from landfills on the U.S. mainland among other countries.  It’s our  ravenous rate of consumption driving us to produce and consume more

As a country, we consume more than any other nation on the planet.  In fact a quarter of all the energy used on Earth is used in the U.S. and we don’t have a quarter of the population by a long shot.  We have got to change our ways.  We need to use CFLs instead of older, less efficient bulbs.  We need to drive smaller cars and save gas.  We need to build more efficient homes and use more renewable resources to build them.   We should be buying locally grown produce instead of shipping it from the other side of the planet just because someone there will pick it for two cents an hour.  We need to think about our consumption and not just continue to consume.

Today I’m going to the Honda dealership to look at a Honda Civic.  A brand new Honda Civic gets over 30 miles to the gallon and I know my previous Civic, a 99, got over 40 on the highway so I have high hopes.  My current car is a BMW X5 4.4i sport.  It’s eight cylinders and over 300 horsepower of pure German driving excitement.  The Civic would be literally the antithesis of my current car. It would be the anti X5.  So why get a Civic and not stick with my current car?  It’s simple, the Civic “uses” less.  It uses less fuel, uses smaller tires, and uses less of my money keeping it running well.  For all the genius those Germans put into the X5 it’s not a cheap car to fix.  The high tech traction control hooked up to the sweet all-wheel drive system makes short work of our Colorado snow, but it will cost an arm and a leg to repair.

A good friend of mine runs a 3D modeling website call the3dstuido.com.  He just bought a new server to run the whole operation and it’s dramatically more powerful than the last one and he emailed me all excited.  You see he wasn’t excited about the 16 cores, the gigs of RAM, or the huge hard drives.  He was excited that this server used about 100 watts whereas the two servers he’s replacing used a combined 500 watts.  It’ll save $20 a month he figures, it’s nothing but it’s reducing his consumption.  He plans to install solar panels as he’s out in Arizona where the sun shines 25 hours a day!  He wants to help reduce his energy consumption across the board.

The other thing I’m doing to help reduce consumption is allowing you to make money without lifting a finger really.  Crowd Rent allows people to offer their stuff for rent to their neighbors.  Imagine making a few dollars on your vacuum, your tent, or bike just sitting around.  Now imagine the reduced consumption from the people who didn’t buy a vacuum, a tent, or a bike because they rented yours? It’s not much when taken as a single event but when you do it over and over it gets to be serious savings.  The best part is it’s one of the few ways you can help reduce your impact on the planet that costs nothing to do and actually makes you money.  In business they like to talk about the ROI, return on investment.  It’s the time it takes to make back your initial investment by using some new tool, process, or other thing.  The ROI at Crowd Rent happens the first time we send you your money.  Make your money today.

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