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| | The Oil is Dumb Team at Earth Day 2009: (left to right): Tracy Bennett, Bryan Barksdale, Chuck Michelson, John Sorkness. |
Oil is Dumb was founded in 2007 by Chuck Michelson, a graduate
student at the University of Texas. It is founded on this simple idea: We all
know there are things we can do to conserve energy and live greener, but we don't do them.
Our Mission:
1. Convert vague "awareness" of energy and environmental issues into real, concrete actions that can be measured.
2. Help people see our energy world more clearly, by avoiding confusing propaganda and guilt, or focusing narrowly on our "carbon footprint".
3. Encourage Americans to make the improvements to our homes that will make our country smart about energy, including solar, wind, geothermal, and rainwater collection systems, attic insulation, and energy-efficient windows.
These elements of our company allow us to accomplish these goals:
Get paid to live greener
Oil is Dumb is not an awareness movement. It is an action movement. We issue a challenge once a month, called a No-Brainer Challenge, and pay you money to do it. We are the only company in the world to offer monetary awards for simple conservation initiatives.
Comprehensive environmental accounting
We take our environmental accounting very seriously. Carbon neutral is old news. What good is a company that offsets its carbon emissions, and then dumps mercury into a lake? (Not good.)
We added up all the carbon we emit in the course of doing business. And we offset it. That was easy. So we added some more categories to our accounting system, such as how much paper we use, and water, and so on. And we designed our No-Brainers to offset that as well. Easy. So we developed a system for accounting comprehensively across ten environmental dimensions of interest, called Whole Systems Accounting. All told, we offset more oil, paper, water, and natural gas than we use. We have net negative emissions of carbon, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, and mercury. We have produced a net negative amount of landfill waste, and our company has offset more electricity than it takes to run itself. We call this being eco-negative.
Understanding the value of conserved resources
What we are doing makes financial sense, too. Economists have been telling us for years that conservation is by far the cheapest way to produce new energy. But no one has put it to the test on the free market before us. For example, in January, 2009, we paid people $10 to agree to run their clothes washer on cold or cold / cold for two weeks. We estimate that this saved 32.5 kWh of electricity per person. At $10, we purchased electricity from those people at a rate of 30 cents per kWh, cheaper than solar. If we had asked them to do it for a month (and we now think people would), that would bring the rate to around 15 cents per kWh, cheaper than wind, and approaching the cost of traditional power.
Soon, we'll be having a No-Brainer challenge to check your tire pressure. We will pay folks $5 to show us a picture of themselves checking their tires. With knowledge about the average American tire under-inflation, gas mileage, and monthly mileage, we know that this will save between 2 and 3 gallons of gasoline per person. So we'll be buying gasoline at less than the going rate.
Rigorous and unbiased statistical research
We research all of our statistics by hand, including values from trusted sources such as the Department of Energy (DOE), the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the American Automobile Association (AAA), the Department of Transportation (USDOT) and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), and organizations of the United Nations such as the FAO, UNDP, and others. We also look at statistics from environmentally minded organizations such as Greenpeace, Environment America, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), while balancing it out with statistics from organizations who have an economic incentive that may go counter to our conservation efforts, such as oil companies and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA).
Eco-solvency
How we make our money. Our company catalyzes small conservation and green living initiatives through our No-Brainer Challenges. This allows us to catalyze larger changes by introducing folks to our green business sponsors, who advertise on our website. We research each of these companies by hand, making sure that we are offering our Oil is Dumb participants the best and greenest companies for fulfilling their needs, whether for ecologically friendly kitchen supplies, local and organic foods, home improvements such as passive and active solar installations, water re-circulation, window tinting, and attic radiant barriers. Our sponsors are willing to pay top dollar to be introduced to customers who have already shown they are willing to take smaller green living initiatives. We never share personal information with any third party company without your express permission.
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