A Thoughtful Post About Excess

Karen Street blogs at A Musing Environment. The subtitle of her blog is A Friend looks at (mostly) the environment. Karen blogs from the somewhat unusual perspective of a member of the Society of Friends who is not opposed to nuclear power. The Friends do not take "creedal" positions. However, as a practical matter, the Friends emphasis on Christian pacifism has (mostly) spilled over into an anti-nuclear stance.

A few days ago, I posted It's the Energy,Why I Love Nuclear about the importance of electricity to the third world. Karen commented as follows:

One of your graphs shows among countries with GDP per capita over $30k, kWh per capita is >2.5x for some than others.

I add this because it can sound as if people advocating for the poor are also advocating for my right to waste. A lot more people will agree with you if you make this point.

I think that energy gives us choices, no matter how rich we are, and I answered Karen's comment in my post Prosperity for Rich Folks. Late last night, Karen commented upon that by sending a link to her most recent post, a very thoughtful essay about the environmental and spiritual dangers of excess.

I have another post about those grannies scheduled for later today, and a very busy morning ahead of me. I couldn't reply immediately to Karen's post anyway; I need to do some thinking about it. However, I didn't want the link to her post to remain buried deep in the comments of an older post on my blog. So here's the link and I encourage you to read it.

Are we richer if we make perceived convenience the priority?

The image is a painting by Albert Anker: "Excess" From Wikimedia.