[robotcookies]

It's great that people are doing things like this to reduce their carbon footprint. But one thing that seems to get neglected is that changes in behavior and lifestyle can also significantly reduce your impact.

What if you moved closer to where you work so you wouldn't have to drive as much to commute (or could even walk to work)? How about buying a smaller house to reduce the energy you need to heat and cool it? These 'sacrifices' can often have more impact than spending $90k on solar panels and heat pumps.

And we often ignore less direct costs. The arstechnica article seems to ignore the energy used to make those solar panels and batteries (which is not insignificant). Some of these things also result in behavior that undoes any benefit. For example, recycling causes most of us to think we can use and toss out cans and bottles without any impact because they are 'recycled' instead of using reusable containers. We ignore the extra energy required to recycle these things.