Ryan McFarland

For a few reasons i hope to be living oil free within three years. Weaning myself off of oil will provide a few gallons of crude less to fight wars and deplete natural resources. It will reduce my carbon footprint and probably help with greenhouse gas reduction. It should even save me money. Here are the goals.

Change household heat to electric. Our community has hydro power for all but a few weeks of the year. I might consider buying carbon credits to balance that use. Our electricity is plentiful and cheap. By using it instead of oil i support the local economy instead of foreign oil and distant refineries. I will keep a Monitor or Toyo stove in our house and the apartment though to help with resale value and in case of some emergency that calls for a long term reduction in electric use.

Drive a vehicle using an “alternative fuel”. I am hoping to buy an electric truck next year. If i can not afford it or they are unavailable for a while i will try to convert another vehicle to run on waste vegetable oil.

Switch my gas powered tools to electric ones. This is the only step on my list that i am not looking forward to. I have a good chainsaw, a brand new pressure washer, a powerful weed eater, and a lawn mower that all suit my needs quite well. Considering that all of them use perhaps 5 gallons of gasoline a year i probably could cheat on these. It really is not practical to use an electric chainsaw. Using a robotic mower would probably convince me to make that switch to electricity. The pressure washer was selected because of the pressure - electric ones tend to be far inferior. Electric string trimmers usually are adequate though. I’ll leave this switch to last because it will be the least expensive and also have the smallest impact.