I'll admit it. I dread this hot, sticky weather. Give me a cool autumn-like breeze any day, even if it means wearing a sweater in July. But I also hate using a lot of energy, including electricity for air conditioning. So, what are our options for staying comfortable in the summer with little or no use of air conditioning?

Here are a few suggestions:

As I write this, crude oil has hit another all-time record price, above $145 per barrel. Heating oil is over $4.50 per gallon today, with some local pre-buy contracts above $4.70 per gallon--almost double my pre-buy price last winter ($2.60/gallon). It doesn't take a math degree to figure out that this sort of price increase will hit hard this coming winter.

Over at the New American Village blog:

Excerpted from a post titled "The Unclear Origins of Oil" on Kevin Kelly's CT2 (Conceptual Trends and Current Topics) blog:

Some heating fuels that used to be quite affordable, such as heating oil, have risen in price dramatically, making competing energy sources such as electricity relatively less expensive.

It seems odd to be thinking about next winter's heating already, but a lot of us are. While the pre-buy contracts for heating oil last winter were for about $2.25 per gallon, it looks like the price this coming winter will be double that, and local companies aren't even offering pre-buys. So you could be paying even more come January or February. Filling a 275-gallon oil tank today costs over a thousand dollars. It's scary.

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On June 20, a briefing about straw-bale construction organized by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) was held in the Russell Senate Office Building. Laura Bartels (President of GreenWeaver Inc. and member of the Builders Without Borders Building Team), Sandy Wiggins (immediate past Chairman of the Board of the USGBC), Bob Gough (Secretary of t