Greenpeace

 The United Nations is meeting this week in Bali, Indonesia, to discuss action on global warming.  National elections in Australia just reversed that country's position on climate change, catapulting it from being one of the only two industrialized nations not to have signed Kyoto, to a potential new leader on this issue.  The number of Cool Cities in the US continues to grow, and we just gained our first Southwestern Cool County outside of California, with Clark County, Nevada's passage of the Cool Counties Declaration.  Want to get in on the amazing climate-saving movement that seems to have engulfed the world?  Then this is a great time to start air-drying your laundry.

Air-drying wet clothes is becoming more and more common in this country, especially in sunny areas.  However, you don't have to live in Florida or the Southwest to save on energy bills this way.  I've been air-drying my laundry all fall - and I live in overcast, rainy western Oregon.  The trick is to do it indoors; hang a short line in a large, open room, and you're good to go.  Thin, non-cotton things, like sheets, should be dry in a few hours.  Even cotton clothing will dry out if you leave it over night; but if that's too much of a hardship, then use the old electric dryer for cotton items, while air-drying anything made out of fleece or synthetic materials, to cut back on the number of loads that go into your dryer.

The electric dryer is one of the worst electricity-guzzling appliances we have; dryers use up a full 6% of household electricity in the United States, and eliminating all this energy use would have a significant impact on greenhouse emissions.  And besides - you save money on electricity bills.  How can you do better than that?