Recently Sean Penn appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show. He was promoting his film Into the Wild. He made a provocative statement: He said that our society had become comfort addicted. That statement made a deep impression on me. I had not looked at comfort as an addiction before, but his statement reverberated within me as a self-evident truth. And I instantly saw the connection between comfort addictions and global warming.

This can explain why some people don’t want to change their thermostat so that they can save energy. They just have a comfort addiction.

Human beings are addictive creatures. It’s true that some addictions, like reading the newspaper, are harmless. Some are deadly. Often people transcend one addiction by replacing it with another.

To replace drugs with alcohol is not an improvement except in the matter of legality. But to replace alcohol with coffee is an improvement. To replace coffee with exercise is better still. We need to trade up when it comes to addictions.

Could society possibly trade up a comfort addiction for one of saving the environment? Could we become addicted to caring about the future of the planet? Could turning the thermostat to a lower setting in winter become an addiction? Could protecting Mother Earth become an addiction that replaces the addictions that are leading to her destruction? I believe the answer is yes.

Harming the environment is harming every person on the planet, including ourselves. Until we wake up to that fact, nothing will change. To care for the environment is to care for people.

In our homes, the number one use of energy is the heating and cooling of the house. In the summer, if everyone could rise above their addiction to comfort, energy consumption could be reduced by turning up thermostats to 78º F. My wife and I did this last summer here in South Carolina and we were comfortable enough. Our electric bill was reduced significantly. I remember a neighbor saying that he would never do that. He had to have it at 72º F. Otherwise, it’s too hot, he said. He had an addiction to comfort.

Now as winter approaches, it is time to lower the thermostat. We haven’t turned the heat on yet and it is 62º F in the house right now. It’s a bit of a game between my wife and me to see who will give in first and turn on the heat. Games are good. They can even be good addictions.

The second biggest energy drain in a house is the hot water heater. If you have an electric hot water heater, you can turn it off when you don’t need it. Just flip the circuit breaker that controls it. You can also get a timer.

Think about this. Back in the days before electricity, water was heated by starting a wood fire. Do you think that anybody kept a fire burning around the clock just so they would always have hot water? If someone needed to take a bath, they started a fire and heated up the water. If they didn’t need to take a bath, or do the dishes, they didn’t bother with it.

In our house it takes one hour to fully heat the hot water heater. Then we bathe. After bathing, we flip the breaker switch back to the off position. It’s not really an inconvenience at all. It just takes a little planning. It saves energy and it also significantly reduces our electric bill.

If you are the type of person who thinks that is too much of a bother, then guess what? Only 20% of the world, according to the World Health Organization, has piped running water. So convenience is really a matter of perspective.

One way to break an addiction to comfort is to go visit a third world country. It changes your perceptions and your habits. And you realize how easy life is in a modern civilization.

I remember visiting a rural part of India and carrying a bucket of hot water so that I could take a hot bath. No big deal. On top of that, the water was so scarce that I could only take a bath three days a week. It made me appreciate it all the more. It also made me realize how fragile we are on this planet of six billion people, all sharing resources that many westerners, like my neighbor, think are unlimited. It’s such a delicate balance.

Another way to look at your energy conservation is to view it as an expression of love to the other six billion people on the planet. We need to realize the oneness that connects us all. We need to discover compassion so we can change the way we behave. We need to discover a new way of living – a way that honors life rather than condemns it.