I remember 20 years ago learning that styrofoam is one of the most recyclable materials (very little energy to recycle, can be recycled many times), and the waxed paper we make paper cups out of is one of the least. Yet the world switched to paper cups because styrofoam caused unsightly litter.
I remember 10 years ago having a friend tell me about a conversation he overheard between two co-workers. The upshot was that a woman was criticizing a man for driving a gas guzzling pickup truck. As the argument progressed it turned out that his 2 mile commute to his apartment in his pickup truck used much less gas than her 15 mile commute to her colonial in an efficient car. And she was so fixed in her view of the world that she couldn't accept that her desire to have a large house was less environmentally friendly than his desire to have a vehicle that he could use to carry a dead deer.
I can't count how many times I've heard environmentally active people talk about how the forests are the lungs of the world. Yet they are wrong. True, cutting down forests inevitably releases a lot of carbon. But mature forests are at equilibrium. They both absorb and release large amounts of carbon with little net effect. (This is especially true of jungles, slightly less true of deciduous forests whose leaves tend to become part of the soil.) The real "lungs of the world" that act as a carbon sink are the algae in the ocean.
I could multiply examples, but the trend is clear. When I hear someone start a lecture on what is good for the environment I first try to verify how much that person knows. Most of the time I'm able to ignore that person in good conscience.
Yet the world switched to paper cups because styrofoam caused unsightly litter.
I thought the real issue here was biodegradability. Since most disposable cups are not recycled, the ease with which they could be recycled matters a lot less than the fact that styrofoam is forever. Then again, in the absence of oxygen and light, I'm not sure that paper cups will ever degrade much in a modern landfill....
The upshot was that a woman was criticizing a man for driving a gas guzzling pickup truck.
I'm a pretty environmental fellow. But I cannot understand the psychology of someone who would harass a stranger about their choices. I mean, what business of it is mine how some random person decides to carry out their life. Even if I'm right (which this woman clearly was not), it is not going to make a difference -- it will just make people miserable.
When I hear someone start a lecture on what is good for the environment I first try to verify how much that person knows.
My personal favorite is that we must prevent any new construction in the city because we should be building parks and green space there because green space is more green and trees are vital for dealing with climate change. That's why we should ensure that there is no high density housing near public transportation infrastructure.
I'm a pretty environmental fellow. But I cannot understand the psychology of someone who would harass a stranger about their choices.
There are, broadly, two kinds of environmentalists.
There are the pragmatic environmentalists, who value the environment and seek to find the most effective ways to minimize damaging it through human activity.
Then there are the religious environmentalists. A new type of puritan, religious environmentalists seek to cast individual worth and goodliness in the frame of environmental impact. It's not about results so much as it is about intentions. It is an environmental sin to own a "gas guzzling" truck or SUV, regardless of whether that truck is used for extremely short commutes, or whether the SUV is used to carpool with 3 other people, or whether you walk to work everyday and only use the car on the weekends (and thus have lower per-person per day carbon emissions than the prius or smart car owner who drives alone and commutes from the suburbs).
As this very article shows, such religious fervor is built, as always, on a mountain of ignorance. And the faithful are zealous in spite of rather than because of any practical knowledge in the subject.
There are lots of pragmatic ways we can be reducing humanity's environmental impact, but the religious greenies aren't helping. They are building up resentment that may eventually lead to a backlash.
It is an environmental sin to own a "gas guzzling" truck or SUV
At times I wonder how much of the truck/SUV critique is really driven by environmental concerns. I know a lot of people that hate SUVs because they can't see around the damn things which makes driving more hazardous. And I've raged at trucks and SUVs whose regular headlights completely blinded me because they're set two feet higher than a normal car's. That makes me wonder how many people are enraged about those vehicles but frame their critiques in environmental terms because you can't yell at someone you know because someone else who drives the same vehicle pissed you off, but you can yell at them about a more generalized harm like environmental pollution....
Too many people think that SUVs are 'safe' because of stuff like this. They feel that they will buy it, it will be a 'tank,' and they can drive any-which-way, completely care-free (nevermind things like the higher center-of-gravity...).
It is an environmental sin to own a "gas guzzling" truck or SUV, regardless of whether that truck is used [...]
I understand the point you are trying to make (energy consumption is an aggregate quantity so cannot be derived from instantaneous measurement), but of course it is annoying people like her which have caused the kind of changes that have resulted in a 50mpg family car as opposed to a 22 mpg car, and there's no reason to suppose that 10 years from now that guy won't be able to haul a dead deer in an SUV-sized vehicle that does 50mpg.
Sadly, it is often the over-bearing extremists that cause progress to be made.
> there's no reason to suppose that 10 years from now that guy won't be able to haul a dead deer in an SUV-sized vehicle that does 50mpg.
Increasing the fuel efficiency of vehicles is not something that can be achieved by will alone; it also requires the cooperation of physics.
First, the SUV could quite likely already do 50mpg if driven by a hypermiler, and maybe fitted with truck tires and a streamlining tail. But it would take twice as long to get back from the deer hunt, and it would be a bumpier and much less comfortable ride.
At a given speed with a given frontal area in a given density of air, though, you're really limited by how low you can get the drag coefficient, and at any speed you're limited by how low you can get the mass and rolling resistance.
it is annoying people like her which have caused the kind of changes that have resulted in a 50mpg family car as opposed to a 22 mpg car
That's partly true. But it's also true that it's people like her that are the reason for behemoth SUVs.
Back in the 70's such folk agitated for the CAFE regulations governing fleet fuel efficiency. It's important to note that these standards applied to passenger cars, as they quite clearly cannot be applied to 18-wheelers.
We got cars of greater efficiency, and one of the changes that led to this was the demise of large family station wagons. However, the consumers still wanted a way to drag around their families. This led to the evolution of the minivan, and eventually to the SUV.
While I don't have nearly enough data to know whether the net effect was positive, it's clear that at least at the margin, the effect of the CAFE regulations was negative.
You can't fool the market. It always finds a way to route around obstacles.
But it's also true that it's people like her that are the reason for behemoth SUVs.
You have some interesting speculation here but no evidence at all.
Growing up my family had a station wagon and a regular sedan. They had comparable gas mileage IIRC. I think station wagons were driven out of the market (heh) in part because people felt safer and more powerful in SUVs and when you're driving your family around, safety matters. I certainly knew a lot of people who got SUVs for hauling the family around specifically because the high altitude made them feel invincible and they assumed that the extra weight would help in crashes against smaller vehicles.
For whatever it's worth, I have an anecdote regarding safety in station wagons vs. SUVs. When I was young my little sister was almost killed in a car accident because she was in the back seat of a station wagon when they were rear-ended by an SUV. SUVs don't have the same bumper level that other cars do, so instead of impacting the designed crumple zone, the SUV rolled up into the back window of the station wagon. Another foot and she would have been decapitated.
Subsequently, I've seen a couple sources which corroborate this trend -- in high speed accidents between cars and SUVs the fatality rates where higher than two cars.
I thought the real issue here was biodegradability. Since most disposable cups are not recycled, the ease with which they could be recycled matters a lot less than the fact that styrofoam is forever. Then again, in the absence of oxygen and light, I'm not sure that paper cups will ever degrade much in a modern landfill....
I've never really understood why people get worked up over landfills. Digging a giant hole and filling it with trash is a perfectly rational solution. It isn't as if we're importing mass from space and converting it to trash...we're digging up stuff from the ground, using it for awhile, and then putting it back in a slightly different form. If we ever find a use for the styrofoam in landfills, we can mine it back out again.
I don't get worked up over landfills, but I do get worked up over all those bits of styrofoam that never make it into the landfills and hang out on the beach or in a park or wherever they happened to land - I'd greatly prefer those bits be replaced by something biodegradable.
According to this website (http://www.worldcentric.org/about-us/faq#pla6) it takes at least 180 days for a corn-based cup to biodegrade in a compost. Biodegradable or not, it's probably more efficient to hire people to just clean up the trash periodically instead of hoping for a biodegradable solution.
Modern landfills can actually be used as an energy source to some extent:
"More recently, it has been recognized that this landfill gas represents a usable energy source. The methane can be extracted from the gas and used as fuel. In the North Wake County Landfill, a company collects the landfill gas, extracts the methane, and sells it to a nearby chemical company to power its boilers."
To put it another way, I think the whole effort to frame environmental policy as a matter of personal virtue is both ineffective and cruel. Lecturing people is not an effective way to change their behavior. And in many cases, people make environmentally poor decisions because they don't have much choice. Many many jobs in the US effectively require that you have a car. Many affordable residences also effectively require that you own a car and drive a lot. People need jobs and they need shelter, and for many people their existing jobs and homes lock them into having one car per adult in the home.
In other policy areas, we've decided that an issue is important enough and should be taken out of the realm of personal virtue and placed into the realm of social action. My brother is disabled. He doesn't have to go around begging for coins so that he can eat this month. There's no opportunity for you to demonstrate your personal virtue by donating cash to him. Instead, we've all decided that seriously disabled people shouldn't have to go around begging to survive, so everyone is going to have a chunk of cash taken from their paycheck used to cover Social Security Disability Insurance. We lose a bit of cash, but in exchange we get to live in a society where severely disabled people don't die on the street because they can't work. We've taken a policy problem out of the realm of personal virtue.
We should do the same thing with climate change. Greenhouse gases are bad. So put a tax on them and let the market find a way to reduce them. Then we won't have to harass random people who make lifestyle choices we don't like; instead, people will make choices that in aggregate are more effective at mitigating climate change. In the story above, the truck driving apartment dweller would have more cash to spend than the car driving McMansion dweller, which will be far more effective in getting the McMansion dweller to change her behavior than any amount of lecturing, no matter how technically correct it is.
Trading sanctimony and self-righteousness for policy effectiveness seems like a huge win to me.
We've taken a policy problem out of the realm of personal virtue.
I'm glad that your brother is now able to live a more rewarding life without having to degrade himself or wonder where his next meal is coming from.
On the other hand, I'm sad that as a society, we seem intent on removing opportunities for personal virtue. In some ways, I can no longer be as virtuous as I might like: I have less money to give because it's been taxed away from me to give to others; or I've got less time to give, because my time is dedicated to earning that money that is being taken from me.
I have no evidence to support this, but I sometimes wonder if the fact that so much of virtue is taken away from us, that we're not in the habit of being virtuous, and that in turn makes it more difficult for us to make bigger overtures. Just a thought...
This applies in the negative sense as well. Because the law compels me to morality (e.g., in the kinds of things I say in public, refraining from hate speech), I don't have the opportunity to be virtuous of my own free will. Since I must behave this way due to the law, rather than my innate goodness, can I still consider myself virtuous?
we seem intent on removing opportunities for personal virtue
Really? I do not see any evidence for this intent anywhere. Certainly, the point of SSDI is not exclusively the removal of an opportunity for personal virtue. There is also the fact that everyone here is one car accident and brain injury away from being incapable of working or caring for themselves. And while some people will purchase disability insurance, some will not and those people will become a drain on the public purse. Better, both in moral terms and in economic efficiency to make everyone pay for a baseline insurance package.
More to the point, there is nothing stopping you from volunteering to help the disabled or anyone else. SSDI provides a minimal standard of living, but we all prefer to live on more than the absolute minimum. There is more to life than a small monthly check can possibly provide, so there is ample opportunity for you to express your virtue by helping disabled people.
This applies in the negative sense as well. Because the law compels me to morality (e.g., in the kinds of things I say in public, refraining from hate speech), I don't have the opportunity to be virtuous of my own free will.
I think you're conflating morality and law. The law compels your behavior. It cannot make you moral. There is no law against being a bigot or even saying bigoted things per se.
Since I must behave this way due to the law, rather than my innate goodness, can I still consider myself virtuous?
As I understand it, hate speech is only a crime in the US when it occurs in conjunction with a systemic campaign of discrimination or a violent crime. I'd say that if the only thing keeping you from launching into long diatribes about how various racial groups are genetically inferior (while either discriminating against them or assaulting/murdering one of their members) is the possibility of legal sanction, then you are not actually a virtuous person. And this lack of virtue really cannot be blamed on society. Or the law.
The impact of any one individual's environmental choices on my life is basically zero. People in aggregate matter, but individuals have minuscule effects. At least, for the people that I interact with. Things might be different if I spent a lot of time chatting with Senators. But I don't.
Besides, this claim proves too much. Everything that everyone does can in some possible way affect me. Want to live alone in the woods cut off from human society? You're depriving us of your wisdom so the next generation will grow up more ignorant.
Also who cares if the hybrid is more fuel efficient? If we all drove hybrids we'd pump the last liter of oil out of the ground 20 years later? Whippie!
If these people actually cared about the environment they'd buy a used car, or bike to work.
How would a used (as opposed to new) car help? Used cars tend to be old, so would have a lowe fuel consumption than newer cars. Surely the most fuel effecient are the newest cars?
That's cute - my 1981 Toyota Tercel still gets 35+ mpg.
I must disagree.
Edit: To clarify, I'm not poking fun at you per se, but the idea that our technology will 'always' trend toward more efficient engines is one that we've pretty much failed at until very recently, which is still arguable.
The eco-friendliness of a car does not come down to its MPG only. You also need to look at how much greenhouse (and other) gases come out from the combustion. New cars tend to do better.
But on the other hand, building a new car requires lots of energy, so maybe in the end we're better off driving old ones... ? It's all so complex, I don't know what to think, personally!
If we're talking about greenhouse gases, then MPG is the only important measure. For one, the vast majority of the gases coming out of the tailpipe are going to be CO2 and H2O (aside from pre-existing constituents of the atmosphere). All of the other gases aren't going to have a significant impact on the greenhouse effect.
So to a very close first approximation: MPG = carbon emission per mile = greenhouse impact per mile.
Indeed, a more polluting vehicle (say a really dirty old diesel engine) would if anything have less of an effect on the greenhouse. Since it's particulate emissions would promote an offsetting cooling effect.
Are you certain about that? I know a car emits much more CO2 and H2O than most anything else, but as an example, I was pretty sure the smog over L.A. was a direct result of oxides of nitrogen. Or was that only toxic, and not greenhouse, and thus not part of our consideration?
According to http://www.epa.gov/oms/climate/420f05004.htm cars also produce significant amounts of methane and nitrous oxide, which are both greenhouse gases. However good old CO2 represents 94-95 percent of the greenhouse potential from your average car.
So no, it is not all CO2, but the rest is a rounding error.
Nitrogen oxides are both toxic and greenhouse gases, but in the quantities that they're emitted from tailpipes, the toxicity is a much bigger problem than the greenhouse effect.
Any pointers for the "insane amount of energy"? I vaguely remember the local tech/car newspaper writing that after something like two years of driving (used 80s car v.s. brand new efficient car) the new car has spent less energy per kilometer. Or was it even less...
What I hear most often is 80% of the energy consumed by a typical car is used during the manufacturing process.
It's also worth noting that many 80's cars got very good gas mileage. My first car, an '86, got low 30's, and with a tune-up some owners got higher than 35. So, be wary of the studies you read comparing new car mpg to old car mpg. My car got better or equal gas mileage compared to everything but hybrids like the Prius and Insight, and those are not representative of modern cars. I would bet the studies you have been reading have been comparing Insights (70mpg, and actually made since 1999) to 80's Corvettes (14mpg) or something along those lines.
states that direct tailpipe emission of CO2 accounts for 68% of the average vehicle lifecycle carbon emissions, with 21 percent linked to production and delivery of fuel, and 11 percent are due to manufacturing, including materials production."
You can get an approximate answer by looking at the cost of the car. A new car costs say $30,000. Gas costs $2.75/gallon, so a new car is equivalent to about 10,000 gallons of gas.
The cost is not all energy though, so at best that is an upper limit. Furthermore there are cheaper sources of energy than gasoline (eg coal), so it is not even an upper limit.
This might be completely rational if there was an excess of perfectly good used cars out there, but there isn't. Cars hold their value incredibly well compared to almost any other consumer product. We're not talking about $30 DVD players. Any used car worth a damn will get sold and bought up. There is almost always someone willing to take up the slack and keep a car running for decades. Therefore, by buying a new car, you're simply decreasing the demand for used cars slightly and lowering their price, which will just mean that someone will just get a better deal.
The only way to effectively reduce carbon emissions on the production side is to drive less person-miles. Buying used or new doesn't change much.
In the US at least, efficiency improvements over the last decade or two have generally been offset by safety and performance improvements. Modern engines are more efficient, but they're also more powerful and they're driving heavier vehicles that are more likely to keep you alive in a crash. Americans drive on highways a lot and the need to be able to accelerate through an on-ramp quickly enough to feel safe has lead to cars with less net fuel efficiency than we might have.
I don't have the original one on hand. The research I encountered was done at the University of Victoria back in the 1980s, and I learned about it while I was a student there.
However I just looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_cup#Environmental_impact which has the comment, Paper cups may consume more non-renewable resources than cups made of polystyrene foam (whose only significant effluent is pentane). which includes two citations for the fact.
My father works in recycling. You can recycle styrofoam, but all you can make out of it is packing peanuts. Styrofoam cups aren't exactly a sustainable solution.
As the argument progressed it turned out that his 2 mile commute
The counter-counter argument at that point should have been that if it's only 2 miles you should walk or ride a bike, and leave the pickup at home.
edit: Just to be clear, I agree with your argument and find it strange that so many "eco" people insist on living in houses far off in the country side where they have to drive everywhere.
This discussion took place in Michigan. For a substantial fraction of the year you really don't want to ride a bike there. And 2 miles is long enough that walking is inconvenient.
In any case the guy in the conversation wasn't the wannabe environmentalist. He just didn't like being harassed about the impact of his lifestyle choices by a hypocrite who was demonstrably far less environmentally friendly. (But who thought she was doing her bit.)
In other word it was a standard beam/mote discussion.
Does Michigan have worse weather than Bergen? The wettest city in Norway, situated 6° south of the Arctic circle? I'm willing to bet not.
Bergen has seen a boom in percentage of trips made by bike since they instituted a program to make the city more friendly to that mode of transportation.
Cities being designed around the automobile are by far the biggest thing standing in the way of the uptake of everyday cycling, not the weather.
Does Bergen have ice on bike paths for much of the year? My dad traveled to Bergen when he was in his 60s, but I have never been there. Here in Minnesota (which has a climate similar to Michigan), a big barrier to biking or walking outdoors for shopping or commuting (which I do a lot) is the presence of ice on the streets. In places with a freeze-thaw cycle repeatedly during the winter (and Minnesota is one of those places) streets can be covered with ice on random occasions during six months of the year.
Some Minnesotans fly to Arizona every winter to avoid the icy streets here. They are called "snowbirds" locally. I used to think that was an extravagant lifestyle, but when my dad was not quite seventy-two years old, in April in Minnesota, he slipped on ice while on a trip to the local grocery store and then was paralyzed (quadriplegic) for the last six years of life, unable to care for himself at all. Since then, I have taken icy streets much more seriously. I still bike a lot, and I still stay in Minnesota during the winter, but I realize now that walking or biking on ice can have catastrophic consequences.
I agree with the idea that designing a city to be more bike-friendly increases bike trips. I enjoy where I live now because my city has an extensive set of city bike trails (which in the winter are sometimes used by Nordic skiers) that connect to regional trails (former railroad lines) that extend all over our metropolitan area. But I watch out for ice for half of each year.
I clearly shouldn't have underestimated Michigan's climate. I haven't been to Bergen, but I've been in Minneapolis in winter (it was -20 °C). I wouldn't have cycled there due to the bad infrastructure, not due to the weather.
Anyway, aside from those two cities the main reason people don't cycle has been shown time and time again to be lack of infrastructure, not the weather. Just look at other places with the same climate as The Netherlands, or Bergen. Clearly the common factor isn't the weather.
It's also a much bigger factor than people imagine. I've lived in Iceland which often has these sort of glassy ice conditions an -5 °C, and I'd much prefer it to otherwise equivalent weather at 20 °C somewhere else.
The cold allows you to push harder without being sweaty, and I've found that in mixed terrain cycling on ice with studded tires is a lot safer than on no ice. It's a lot easier to slip on loose gravel than it is to slip on ice when your tires have a dozen nails sticking into the ice.
That was 12 years ago, maybe it changed a lot. I just remember a city that fit the typical sprawling metropolis model with everything far apart and cars everywhere that the US is known for. None of it looked very bike friendly compared to similar cities in Europe.
Edit: The parent pointed out that Minneapolis was one of the top cycling cities in the US with around 4-5% of trips made by bike (compared to Europe's 2% average, 10% for Austria & Germany, and >20% for the Netherlands and Denmark). Then deleted the comment for some reason.
Yes, the Twin Cities have improved for bikers in the last twelve years. The metropolitan area here is one of the most sprawling in the United States, so many people rely on personal automobiles for all of their transportation, but there has been a major effort since you were last here to improve bicycle trails.
I don't really understand why Europeans think they have harsh weather. Despite their relatively northern position, water currents and conditions actually produce a calming effect for the majority of Europe (excluding Russia and some of the westerly former soviet satellites). Recently someone asked the same question for a city in Sweden, but I noted that even Chicago has a slightly lower average winter temperature and a much higher average summer temperature. Whatever you do, don't underestimate Minnesota! (I say from experience :().
P.S. Yeah, I know you Canadians have it rough, I feel for you.
P.S. Yeah, I know you Canadians have it rough, I feel for you.
Actually I grew up in Victoria, BC. The climate there is very mild for similar reasons to why much of Europe is. I didn't experience nasty weather until I moved to New Hampshire.
Indeed, the most eco-strident person I know a) lives in a huge house full of consumer crap b) flies all the time on business to c) Dubai, where she is part of the indoor-skislope-in-the-desert economy.
She was vegan for a bit which I suppose might count for a little, then her therapist told her it was OK to eat meat so she started again...
That may be true, but I believe the point is not that the Truck-driver couldn't do more (Sure, he could.. Switching to a car would be better), but to show that the car owner was not considering things logically and considering that the ramifications of her own choices.
A complaint I hear quite a lot is that people in the west are so decadent, they throw away a perfectly good mobile phone every two years and buy a new one. But, I mean, mobile phones are tiny. They don't use up that much material. Sometimes it seems the activities targeted by environmentalists has more to do with how much people like them rather than how much energy they consume. Killjoyism.
They might be tiny, but electronics are extremely expensive in terms of environmental impact.
In terms of energy consumption alone, semiconductor manufacturing uses about 10^6 as much energy as metal craft, or 10^7 the one needed for plastics injection (per weight of finished product). Other key measures such as water consumption and pollution are in the same ballpark.
OF course, electronic gadgets are mostly made out of plastic pieces, and ICs are only a tiny fraction of the total weight, which is way we don't pay thousands of dollars for a cell phone. But the size of an object is normally not a good predictor of its environment impact.
A more accurate measure would be the retail price, but then you have to take into account the price distortions such as brand premium. You can do that by using the price of the cheapest competitor instead. This has the advantage of taking into account the energy needed for shipping and storage as well.
> but then you have to take into account the price distortions such as brand premium.
You don't have to take this into account, as the distortion just becomes more pollution. Chances are the brand premium ends up in the pockets of marketing and execs, who spend it. Any* time money is spent it eventually "generates" an equivalent amount of pollution.
* Assuming all regulations are equally applied to all manufactures.
I think you are right, but still... would prefer to keep the model simple.
The purpose of using the price as an indicator is to roughly estimate the inputs required to manufacture a product. Under that assumption, profit margins are noise.
Of course, profits are eventually expended, but so are the cost paid to suppliers, the taxes and so on. You would have to think about velocity of money and the overall macroeconomic effect. This is way overkill.
Or just take the limit as time->infinity and simplify it to price=pollution.
If you want this taken to the logical extreme, see http://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf where it is argued that "using dollars = spending gasoline". As oil is the cheapest available energy source, everything eventually becomes oil burnt.
I think it might be helpful to be specific about who is making this claim. Is it a major environmental organization like the Sierra Club? A highly regarded university research group that studies sustainability? An environmental think tank? Or some random crank on the street?
There are lots of crazy or ignorant people in the world who say crazy or ignorant stuff. It doesn't necessarily make sense to ascribe every self-described environmentalist's claims to all environmentalists. This seems like the real world version of nut-picking.
This article buries an important story beneath bombast. A much better read is David MacKay's (free) book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air": http://www.withouthotair.com/ As the book itself says, it's an analysis of sustainable energy based on "numbers not adjectives".
That's an excellent book. I have a paper copy of it. While the article
is right about cellphone chargers things like this lack some context:
Glass requires so much energy to make - or recycle - that it is
always more eco-friendly to use aluminium cans
Firstly, that depends on how you recycle things. Perhaps in the UK
they melt down their glass and make it anew, but in some other
countries such as Denmark they'll actually use the same bottle again
after cleaning it out.
If you buy a soft drink in a class bottle in Denmark you'll get a
container that looks like it's seen war.
Secondly, it's presuming that pounds sterling is the best way to
measure sustainability, and that just because something costs more now
it's less sustainable in the long run.
Which is just patently silly. We basically have infinite energy on
this planet as long as the sun keeps shining, but we don't have
infinite easily accessible aluminum.
In the future access to basic material resources is going to be a
lot more important than whether someone expended a few extra joules
back in 2010.
I didn’t know that there are places on the world where glass bottles are not used several times. Even some PET bottles are used several times in Germany. I’m drinking Coke out of one of those right now. You can even crudely gauge how often one has been used by how clear it is. (Mine looks pretty new.)
Wikipedia tells me that those PET bottles are used about twenty times (and then they are recycled). They were introduced in Germany in 1990 by Coca Cola.
Where I live in the US, there is no bottle reuse, as far as I know. In fact, while we have recycling pickup, the city will not pickup glass at all because it is considered too dangerous for the workers. If you want to recycle glass, you have to take it yourself to a recycling center.
In the past (30+ years ago?) glass bottles were routinely reused before plastic and aluminum containers were widespread.
In general all of the schemes for recycling and bottle reuse vary by state and city in the US.
Now that I think of it, there are glass bottles in Germany which are not reused, wine and liquor. Actually those are the only two next to beer which still commonly use glass bottles. Everything else is pretty much PET, nowadays probably already mostly not reusable (despite a mandatory deposit for all bottles, no matter if reusable or not). It will be very hard for you to find anyone selling aluminum cans, though.
I have also only seen reusable PET bottles in Germany, but haven’t looked very closely elsewhere in Europe.
You are right about the cans as I just learned. I always just assumed that every can is a aluminum can but Wikipedia tells me that tin cans are also common. I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. (Wikipedia illustrates its article about cans with two tin cans [1]. If you had asked me what material they were made of without showing me the caption I would have told you aluminum. Clearly visible FE in a circle be damned.)
Another interesting tidbit from that Wikipedia article: cans might be on the rise again in Germany. 700 million were sold in 2009 (a bit less than 9 per person), 1 billion is the projection for 2010 (a bit more than 12 per person). The US number for 2009 seems to be 96 billion [2], that’s about 320 per person.
Most of the plastic bottles sold in Finland were reusable up until 2008 or so, but now that the tax levied on non-reusable containers has been removed, most of the bottles appear to be of single-use variety.
According to PALPA, those single-use bottles do get returned (89%) nearly as well as the sturdier ones did. They just aren't reused as such but in production of plastics.
To reuse a aluminum soda can you need only 5% of the energy used to make the can.
97% of beverage bottles are recycled in Finland. Glass bottle gets reused on average 33 times.
Finland seems to be the world leader in this area.
Joining the Finnish beverage recycling scheme is very expensive. The industries own PALPA. If you want to join, you'll have to pay upfront your share of the investment expenses which the other have paid previously. The bottle stock is also very expensive. Materials plus 0,20€ per 0,33-0,5 litre bottle, 0,40€ for 1-2 litre bottle or 0,15€ per aluminum can. For example the German retail giant Lidl chose not to join this scheme. They do recycle their own bottles, but you can't return their bottles anywhere else.
cans make some kind of comeback. thez were always there for energy drinks (red bull etc) and beer (5,0 , holsten..) and i see them more and more (in small quantities) for coke/pepsi etc.
> If you buy a soft drink in a class bottle in Denmark you'll get a container that looks like it's seen war.
Here in Argentina, there are returnable glass bottles, non-returnable glass bottles, returnable PET bottles, and non-returnable PET bottles.
> Which is just patently silly. We basically have infinite energy on this planet as long as the sun keeps shining, but we don't have infinite easily accessible aluminum.
If the crust is 0.4% of the mass of the Earth, then aluminum comprises about 2 × 10¹⁸ tons. Current annual production, which is limited by energy availability, is about 30 million tons. At the current rate of production, we would run out of crustal aluminum in 70 billion years if we didn't recycle any of it.
You can make glass out of silica, although typical glass contains sodium oxide and some other common minerals to make it easy to work with. So we aren't going to run out of raw materials for glass soon.
There are basic material resources that are in short supply, and which in the future will have to come from mining landfills. Aluminum, however, is at the other end of the scale.
We have infinite energy, but not infinite accessible energy. It takes millions of years for those rays of sunshine to get neatly packaged into oil and coal, which are honestly still our best ways of extracting energy.
is the aluminum going somewhere? we're mooshing it around into different shapes, and drawing pictures on it, but it's still aluminum which has had inconvenient impurities removed. if you're telling me we've got infinite energy, then what's the problem with mining through landfills to extract the useful stuff?
if we've got infinite energy, then the problem will be when we want to have more aluminum in use at one time than we've got, total.
The "easy" solution is for society to imposes higher taxes on energy, particularly those forms of energy which we wish to discourage our reliance on.
This would particularly useful in the realm of consumer purchasing decisions.
Which apples required less energy, the ones shipped in from Chile, or the ones trucked over from California? There's no way as a consumer I can know that, but if taxes on certain energy forms (e.g. carbon-based) are high enough, then price becomes 1) a signal of how much energy was consumed in production and delivery, 2) a factor which discourages consumers from purchasing products which require more energy, 3) an incentive for firms to minimize their energy usage to keep costs down.
Will such taxes ever be effectively implemented? Almost certainly not. For such taxes to work they would need to be high enough that consumers and firms "felt the pinch." This desired effect, however, is exactly what makes these kinds of taxes politically unfeasible, at least in America.
Apples being apples, all that matters to a consumer is the retail price. If Chilean apples cost more because of an energy tax, demand will increase for California apples, raising the prices, until the two equalize.
This desired effect, however, is exactly what makes these kinds of taxes politically unfeasible, at least in America.
Sadly true. The other factor is that conservatives won't like them because they're taxes, and liberals won't like them because they're market-based. ("Rich people shouldn't be able to pay to pollute").
I don't know any liberals that don't like carbon taxes or cap and trade regimes because they're market based. I mean, the EPA already runs a cap and trade system for some pollutants. I'd say the bigger issue is that there are some states represented by both liberal and conservative politicians that will lose under a cap and trade regime, and those politicians are going to oppose any carbon price because of that.
I probably overstated it, but it does seem that the left prefers cap-and-trade to carbon taxes, and they definitely prefer higher fuel economy standards to gas taxes.
both liberal and conservative politicians that will lose under a cap and trade regime, and those politicians are going to oppose any carbon price because of that.
I probably overstated it, but it does seem that the left prefers cap-and-trade to carbon taxes
This confuses me. I thought you were arguing that liberals dislike cap and trade regimes because they're market based, but now you seem to suggest that they prefer cap and trade regimes to carbon taxes. What am I missing?
I think lefty think tanks and environmental groups do prefer
cap and trade to carbon taxes but only because of implementation issues. They seem to think that more tinkering around with the tax code will not be helpful and that a cap and trade regime will have an easier time getting through Congress without getting gutted and sullied by unsavory deals than a carbon tax would. Plus, politically, calling anything a tax is a killer. And that includes policies that are revenue neutral. So they've basically decided that a crummy cap and trade regime that passes Congress is better than a good carbon tax that has no chance of getting passed.
Economists generally view carbon taxes and cap and trade regimes as equivalent; there are differences but they boil down to implementation practicalities. Its like arguing over whether you should use CPython or Jython; they're mostly the same and the answer depends on a lot of gritty technical details about your deployment environment, etc.
and they definitely prefer higher fuel economy standards to gas taxes.
I think this reflects a belief that raising the gas tax is political suicide and completely impossible. At least, that's the sense I get from reading lefty environmental wonks.
A carbon tax is more free market, because it just puts a price on the externality and lets the market decide how to respond. Cap and trade involves setting a limit by fiat and allocating the initial permits. Some on the left see those attributes as features, because they get to pretend to control total emissions, and help "deserving" companies. In reality I expect cap and trade would be corrupted by rent seekers to a far greater extent than a carbon tax would be.
Economists generally view carbon taxes and cap and trade regimes as equivalent
I think this reflects a belief that raising the gas tax is political suicide and completely impossible.
Could be. From the conservative wonks I read there's a surprising amount of support for a higher gas tax, but you're right that it would be a hard sell to the public, compared to regulations where the costs are much easier to hide.
A carbon tax is more free market, because it just puts a price on the externality and lets the market decide how to respond.
Ryan Avent, an economist who focuses on these issues and writes for the, um, Economist, claims that there are no significant differences between the two policies: http://www.ryanavent.com/blog/?p=2011 I haven't heard your explanation before though, so do you have any experts who support this claim?
I agree with Greg Mankiw that cap and trade equals carbon tax plus corporate welfare:
Um, do you really think that the US tax code is generally free from corporate welfare giveaways? If you don't, then why exactly do you think that we could pass a carbon tax that would not have corporate welfare exemptions included? Do you think that corporate lobbyists are particularly powerless when it comes to changing the tax code?
It seems that giving away permits initially is superior to including an exemption in tax law. The giveaway is a one time cost; but exemptions live forever.
Beyond that, I agree with conservative economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok that Mankiew's analysis is naive and incomplete: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/05... ; that might be true for the ideal carbon tax with no exemptions for anyone that everyone agrees could never pass Congress. But there seems to be no point comparing a realistic cap and trade bill against an impossible to pass carbon tax.
From the conservative wonks I read there's a surprising amount of support for a higher gas tax
Interesting. I'd be curious which conservative wonks support a gas tax increase.
Fair enough, but I'd wager that carbon-based energy is cheap enough that it accounts for only a fraction of the price of many (probably most) products.
Also, producers have no incentive to utilize alternative sources of energy while carbon-based energy is so relatively inexpensive.
Actually no. Energy accounts for almost 100% of the cost of everything.
If you track down why does something cost money, and go all the way down, you will see that it's entirely the cost of energy, and pretty much nothing else.
I completely understand the principle you are trying to communicate. But your assertion that "it doesn't matter" is false.
Please consider the following:
If it is true that energy accounts for 100% of the price of everything, then raising the price of energy via a tax absolutely would alter the price signal by increasing the price difference between products with low and high energy requirements.
In overly simplified terms, imagine apples from Chile require 5kj to produce and apples from California cost 3. Imagine 1kj costs $.10. So apples from Chile costs $.50 and apples from California cost $.30. What happens if we add a $.05 tax on each kj? Apples from Chile now cost $.75, and apples from california cost $.45.
Makes sense?
It should also be noted that most proposals for energy taxes are on certain forms of energy, i.e. you'd levy a tax on carbon-based energy but not on solar energy. This would absolutely impact the signals sent by pricing.
No, your numbers don't make sense. The percent difference between the items is identical and did not change.
Please do not make the error of comparing absolute difference in prices, because that is not how money is compared.
The biggest problem with energy taxes is that when you increase the cost of energy, you also increase the cost of building a solar power station. So you can never catch up.
If solar power was cheaper than hydrocarbons, then no tax is needed, people would use it on their own.
If on the other hand you add tax, then solar power stations become more expensive to build, so they have to charge more for the energy - so much more that tax does not help them.
This doesn't add up. If the average person spends US$8600 per year (which they do), total world marketed energy consumption is about 500 quadrillion Btu per year (which it is), then they are paying 39¢ per kilowatt-hour.
But energy doesn't cost anywhere close to that much. http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/commodities/energy-prices/ says current electricity spot prices are around US$40 per megawatt-hour, which is 4¢ per kilowatt-hour. Crude oil is currently around US$80 per barrel, so assuming 0.8 g/cc and 45 MJ/kg, that's 5¢ per kilowatt-hour. (http://www.eppo.go.th/ref/UNIT-OIL.html says I'm low by about 10% where it defines "Barrel Oil Equivalent".) Coal is even cheaper.
Your logic has two problems that lead to this discrepancy.
First, when it bottoms out in a barrel of oil or a lump of coal being bought for some price, it pretends that the money disappears at that point. Actually, however, the money paid for the lump of coal is paid in dividends to coal shareholders, in salaries to coal miners, in interest to Chase Bank, in expenses to Caterpillar for tractors, and so on. These recipients of the money then turn around and spend, by your logic, almost 100% of it on energy. So actually energy accounts for almost 200% of the cost of everything. But it doesn't stop there. 300%, 400%, ∞% of the cost of everything is, eventually, energy.
Second, it doesn't apply uniquely to energy. It applies equally well to, for example, cheese. Maybe only 2% of my own earnings are spent directly on mozzarella and Swiss, but when I pay someone to do a service for me, 2% of what I pay them also gets diverted off to the immense dairy octopus, and so on at each step of the chain, until after only 228 steps of exchange, 99% of the world GDP has bottomed out in one nice wheel of Gouda or another. Thus we can deduce that ultimately the price of everything is some multiple of the price of cheese, because cheese accounts for almost 100% of the cost of everything. (Ignoring, as you did, externalities, the most glaring of which is government subsidies for dairy farming.)
A much more sensible approach, at least when looking at the economy as a whole, is to divide the amount of energy consumed into the total value of goods and services produced in the economy. Using the numbers above, this comes out to about 13%. That is to say, with this method of accounting, energy accounts for about 13% of the cost of everything.
If you want to do this kind of accounting on a per-product basis, I think you have to start by deciding when you're going to stop tracing back the value chain. If you only stop when you reach a particular commodity, whether it be energy, cheese, or human labor, then you will discover that, tautologically, that commodity accounts for 100% of the cost of everything. If you add some more commodities, or restrict yourself in how many steps you go back, or add temporal discounting (it may take 50 years for 99% of the peso I spend this week to bottom out in a tasty block of Monterey Jack, after all) then you may get a more interesting answer. But it will depend on which choices you made.
As usual, unmentioned is an individual's biggest single energy impact: dietary choices. Just a single semester's worth of thermodynamics study (the 2nd Law in particular) would make that clear. Some background includes:
No one who claims to be worried about energy consumption and climate change should be taken seriously, unless they cut down on their meat consumption first. Al Gore and "An Inconvenient Truth" was a case in point, but Gore finally started changing his tune on his diet, to his partial credit:
It is not that long ago that if you wouldn't use animal products or labour in most of Europe you would starve and/or freeze. Veganism as a lifestyle is utterly dependent on huge energy subsidies.
They love to play tricks with statistics too, comparing the calories in an acre of simple carbs in crops to the calories in the complex proteins in a cow. That's where the energy has "gone"...
> Veganism as a lifestyle is utterly dependent on huge energy subsidies.
What? You are confusing technological development with energy. People used to rely on burning wood for heat also but do you think this is energy efficient? Do you really think that a horse is more efficient for labour than machinery?
In the past people used these inefficient methods because that was the best technology they had available. There is no way we could sustain our current world population if we all attempted to return to their lifestyles.
Yes but you can't discount that. Another example: cycling is only a viable means of transport because of the extensive road network built for (and by!) oil-powered vehicles.
Dried soybeans are 36% protein by weight. Muscle beef is 32% protein by weight, although other parts of the cow are lower in protein. A steer is 4% of the soybeans it's fed, by weight. So feeding soybeans to cattle is even less defensible as a way of providing protein to people than as a way of providing calories to people: you waste 96.5% of the protein that way.
The picture is a little less egregiously bad if you look at some other foods (sweet corn is only 3.2% protein, so if you could get your cattle to grow on corn without supplementing their diet with soy or other protein, you'd only be wasting 60% of the protein). But it still isn't good.
The fundamental constraint here is that animals can't produce protein from carbohydrates or fat. Animals can only produce protein from protein. In fact, most plants can't produce protein from carbohydrates or fat or carbon dioxide or water, either. They need to take up nitrogen compounds from the soil to make protein. As far as we know, animals can't aminate carbohydrates using other sources of nitrogen, the way plants can. So the protein that comes from your crops is the most protein you can possibly get. Processing it through animals can only reduce the protein yield per acre of crops.
The complexity of the proteins in the cow isn't an advantage, either. You have to break those proteins down to individual amino acids before your ribosomes can use them to build proteins of your own. If foreign peptides (protein fragments) get into your bloodstream, your immune system will destroy them. From the standpoint of nutrition, the less complex the proteins are, the better.
On the other hand, animal processing can make the protein and calories considerably easier to eat. Ruminants' symbiotic bacteria can extract useful calories (and massive amounts of methane) from cellulose, even if they only pass 5% of them on to their predators; your body doesn't support these bacteria at all. And cows have these massive jaws and teeth for grinding up cellulosic material to extract the nutrients from it.
So, veganism as a diet (I'm not sure what you mean by "as a lifestyle"} isn't dependent on "huge energy subsidies". It's just dependent on crops you can stand to eat and that provide you adequate nutrition. Eating animals is a huge cost to your primary productivity; the compensating advantage is that it renders you more adaptable in your crops. Eating animal products is somewhat less of a huge cost.
As for freezing, it's fairly unusual for people to heat their homes by burning animals, and in Europe, it was unusual for people to insulate their homes with animals or animal products. Not freezing is really more a matter of thermodynamic engineering than it is a matter of acquiring adequate energy. A good thick thatch roof, a couple of meters of straw bales in the walls, and some whitewash on the inside will allow you to heat even a largish habitation with a small fire. No huge energy subsidies required. (Please don't start complaining about the embodied energy of the whitewash.)
The soy that vegans use to replace animal fats and proteins is horrendously grown here in the US. Most of our soybean crop is of a monocropped, GMO variety using heavy amounts of pesticides and fertilizers. See the recent articles on dead zones in the oceans due to excess nitrogen.
To insinuate that a vegan diet is better for the planet than meat is insincere. In the end it's probably a wash, for various reasons.
98% of the US soybean crop is used to feed livestock, according to Britannica http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/557184/soybean . Eating the soybeans directly, instead of converting most of them to animal manure, uses dramatically less pesticide and fertilizer.
I request that you withdraw your accusation of insincerity and substantiate your extraordinary claim that "it's probably a wash, for various reasons".
But as a human being, it's inevitable you'll need to eat. It follows we should weigh the consequences more heavily for inevitable choices. Having children - at least in richer countries - is a choice, and not inevitable.
On a larger scale, it's arguably inevitable that humanity seeks to perpetuate itself. In that sense, having children is not a choice at the species-level. But we have the unique power, individually and collectively, to reflect on whether and how to perpetuate ourselves sustainably.
Finally, the difference between a vegetarian/vegan diet versus say, the Standard American Diet, has orders of magnitude differences in water, fuel, land, and waste products (that 2nd Law thing again). That means the same resource base and ecosystem could support tens to thousands more vegetarians than meat-eaters. A very large vegetarian family would still have less impact than a single meat-eater.
I personally think we should have consumption guages on our major energy users. Getting a hybrid woke me up to this and I have since added one to the house electrical system and built one for our heat. The cool thing is that it gave an intuitive sense of different energy draws.
In general it is true. Our intuition is wrong in many cases. For example, I found unhooking our doorbells was more significant than not using the clothes drier. Today our house uses 20% of the energy it did before having the gauge. We don't even try to conserve because the effort to reduce the baseline made such a difference.
Why don't they require this sort of device in all new cars? One study indicated that it would add $12.50 per car. Adding the ones to the house was about $200.
We had three old transformers that drew 20 watts each. The drier draws around 6000 watts for 40 minutes. Though I usually use a mode that uses less heat.
Anyway, I have a gauge by the sink showing the current usage and monthly total. It's cool because I could flip on a light and see the change. Right away I found $50/month (out of $250) but then over the years I kept looking to find the extra draws. I'd shut everything off and flip breakers to narrow it down. Since then it's guided purchases so I avoid things that waste energy.
At the peak of my "research" I had no fridge and then something I built that drew 300 watt hours per day. Back then my electric bill was only $7 (plus $15 delivery charge.). Though now I just live like an ordinary person. We use about $25-$45 plus delivery charge (a big chunk is a dehumidifier for our damp basement).
Heard an episode of CBC Radio's Ideas show on Hydrogen that had this fascinating aside (I'm paraphrasing):
During the 1970's oil shock buildings in Toronto turned out their lights to save energy, however many buildings had electricity from Hydro-electric resources and were heated via oil-fired generators. The net result was that turning off the lights made the buildings colder and it took more oil energy to heat them up again than if the lights were left on.
> Glass requires so much energy to make - or recycle - that it is always more eco-friendly to use aluminium cans, even if one is talking about virgin cans compared to recycled bottles.
Since when?!? Growing up, in a part of the country that was once known for glass making (but had stopped by the time I was a kid), we were taught in school that glass was cheaper to make resource and energy wise than aluminum, due to the lower technology overhead and ready access to the sand used to make it. Since then, based on my own reading, I understood that aluminum was really expensive to make due to the high electrical requirements for the process of cracking ores to get the pure aluminum out (a substance that is hard to find in nature in pure form, since it’s readily makes compounds and ores due to its reactivity.) It was this basis that politicians and activists gave to push the first recycling programs here in the States. (Which always, without exception AFAIK, started with aluminum.)
My understanding is that glass was phased out in favor of aluminum not due to container creation costs, but storage reasons, since cans take up less room and shelf space than glass and were easier for stock boys and shoppers to carry. (The only eco-reason I came across was increased fuel use to ship glass bottles for the old returnable bottle programs. But this reasoning didn’t make sense to me since I thought shipping a pre-existing container was much cheaper than destroying and making new ones.)
Did some technology in recent years dramatically reduce the energy cost of making aluminum? Or has the modern requirements of glass making added too much overhead to what was once a cheap process?
No, aluminum production still costs the same as it has for more than a century. The cost of the Hall-Héroult electrolytic process dwarfs the cost of mining bauxite, so the easy access to the sand is irrelevant.
Perhaps the distinction between what you were taught and what the article says amounts to a distinction of denominators. Glass is much cheaper per kilogram (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Embodied_ener... says glass is 18–35MJ/kg, while aluminum is 227–342) but aluminum is cheaper per container, because the weight of the container is smaller by more than a factor of 10.
Also, recycling aluminum costs less than a tenth as much energy as smelting it afresh. This reduces the "embodied energy" of a kilogram of aluminum destined for recycling to the same ballpark as the "embodied energy" of a kilogram of glass.
However, washing out bottles and reusing them is cheaper still.
That is probably what it all boils down to: destructive verses non-destructive recycling. In short, aluminum is better if you always break down the container before remaking it, but glass is better if you try and preserve the form of the container. That is a shame, and makes the recent effort by beverage companies to make aluminum bottles make more sense.
What’s disgusting given this realization is the recent popularity of Mexican sodas as a pushback against HFCS. Guess what containers are still in use south of the border? Guess we shouldn’t have dismantled out returnable bottle infrastructre so soon… /-:
A source for the cost of washing out bottles? No. I guess you might use about 100mℓ of water that you've heated from, say, 28°C up to 40°C, which is 1200 calories, or about 5 kilojoules. But the cost of the detergent and the new bottlecap might be more.
The cost of recycling an aluminum can, however: an aluminum can is about 14 grams of aluminum, which is about 300 kilojoules according to the above; supposedly (sorry, no source handy) recycling it takes about 10% of that amount, or 30 kJ; that's about US$0.0004 of energy.
I recommend never putting a bear in a virgin bottle.
You can probably reuse some of the heat for the washing up. And perhaps even some of the water.
I've heard that glass bottles are more convenient to wash, because you can use hotter water. (That's from a reliable source --- a visit to a beverage bottler on their open day.)
About unplugging adapters: It is worth noting that the EU mandated more efficient wall warts and as a result all new stuff uses negligible power when idle. But a few years ago when DC conversion was done at 50/60Hz with great masses of copper and iron, it wasn't unusual to have a wart burning 8 watts day in and day out. 70kWhr/year.
As a good rule of thumb for warts: If it is warm to the touch, it is drawing 4 watts or more. If it isn't warm, don't unplug it.
I have a Ryobi drill charger, that if I left it plugged in when idle would use as much power as my high efficiency refrigerator. (A normal refrigerator is about 1800whr/day, so that is quite a bit more than my 200whr/day, but I'm living remotely with an astronomical energy cost.)
Transport and heating/air-conditioning presumably are by far the biggest energy hogs of the private individual.
So if you want to use less energy: don't drive and fly gratuitously, and live in a property which already by its construction and location keeps the heat in (if you live in a cold climate), or keeps the heat out (if you live in hot climate).
Re heating/air-conditioning: get a passive house [+], but those work probably best in relatively moderate climate and you will have to sacrifice some comfort.
I would love to get some DigitalStrom[1] in my house in order to get some hard data on my personal energy consumption. But you simply can't buy these systems yet. And I doubt I can get the same amount of data and control (over the data and my appliances) from the smart meters my power company is trying to sell me.
"Worse, participants who reported taking the most steps toward energy conservation had the least accurate perceptions of which ones saved the most energy."
That's a killer quote right there. I think bad newspaper science is to blame, there's too many articles printed on "do X to save energy NOW", without putting them in perspective, and only reinforcing some sort of feel-good effect in the readers.
The only thing that will work is cold hard measurements, and lots and lots of education.
I'd love to get appliance by appliance data of where my house's energy is going. I've got a Killawatt, but that only helps for 120v appliances with plugs, and that doesn't include the in wall electric squirrel cage heaters (x6, on 240v) or the Hot Water heater, or the Oven/Stove, or the dryer. PSE, the local energy co, is supposed to have 5 minute lag time electric meters, but they've never been able to show me any data from them.
I have found out that my free, spare, energy guzzling fridge that's stored in the garage costs $5 a month to run in the summer. I was expecting way worse than that.
Google was supposed to have some sort of thingy that went on the electric meter, but searching for it is failing me now. If I had real time use data, even for the house as a whole, I could probably back out what's taking the monster share of the load. (especially if I went around killing things at the breaker).
Agreed, the only problem with these devices as I see it is that they themselves consume energy. Also I suspect the output is not so fun / worthwhile. Perhaps it can help people to tweak their refrigerators a couple of degrees but then again, the only real weapon against electricity overuse is pricing.
What we "need" is a carbon tax, I do not like people telling me I cannot use electricity in whatever quantities I feel like. I will however respect the fact that said electricity cant be had for free.
I assume they mean washing the clothes in cold water instead of hot. changing the washer’s settings does cunningly mask that the wash will also be less effective.
Numbers: A top loading machine[3] uses about 150 liters (40 gallons) of water to fill. If you fill that with hot water that is water that has had 30°C (50°F)[1] added to it. That is about 20 megajoules (5kWhr). Heating a liter of water from room temperature to vaporization[2] takes 2.5 megajoules (700 watt hours). So… in very rough numbers you can vaporize 8 liters of room temperature water for the same energy it takes to fill a top loading washer once with hot water. I'd say my load of wash doesn't lose 16kg being dried, so I presume less than 8 liters are being vaporized.
[1] I'm pulling numbers out of google here, you didn't expect more than one significant digit, did you?
[2] Vaporization is more than 5 times the energy from 1°C to 99°C.
[3] Terribly inefficient way to wash clothes, but if an article is going to make dramatic statements, you have to figure they will pick the most extreme numbers.
Changing from washing in hot to washing in cold? That's all I can figure. If that is indeed the case one should wash in cold AND line dry their clothes.
"We recruited 505 participants through Craigslist in seven US metropolitan areas: New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Houston, Dallas, Denver, and Los Angeles."
Is it about saving "energy" or reducing carbon emissions?
If it's about reducing carbon emissions, simply follow France's lead and move 80% of the world's electricity generation to nuclear and get a 95-97% emission reduction over coal fired plants.
Presumably, yes. Although there are formulae to convert water use to an amount of energy consumption (which takes into account processing, pumps, etc), they are probably referring to the energy to heat water. 1 watt for 1 year is (1W * 24h * (365d/year)) * (1Wh/1000kWh) = 8.76 kWh, or ( * 3412 BTU/kWh) about 30k BTU. The average bath is about 50 gallons, or ( * 8.35 lb/gallon) 417.5 lb. 30k BTU is enough energy to raise that much water by about 70°F (30k BTU / 417.5 lb). By that measurement, the Guardian takes baths 46.6°F hotter than their tap water. If that is too cool for you, you can take a smaller bath.
It's worth noting that the conversions here assume you can transfer the kWh with perfect efficiency to heating water, while in actuality, all heating systems will be somewhat inefficient. It will actually take more energy to heat the water, regardless of the energy source used by the water heater.
Edit: whoops, I originally misread and used 1.5 years and 1.5 baths. Calculations changed.
- It's a lot easier to heat your bath with solar energy than it is to run your phone charger. So if you have a solar hot water heater, a different comparison would be in order.
- The inefficiency of the water heater is probably relatively small (under 50%, maybe under 10%) and so can be neglected for the purpose of round-number figures like "one and a half baths".
what if you have cold water baths? The comparisons are really unclear - really poor use of language. And they assume too many things. What if you don't take any warm/hot baths AND turn off lights? Would that save energy?
"In fact lighting accounts for a relatively small proportion of the average person's energy use"
That I do not share this view. The residential household typically uses 11% of energy on light and commercial up to 20%. It might not be much as a single individual if you consistently flip the switch when not needed, but overall as a society it does safe MW of energy.
An even better way is to safe energy is the use of CFL (4 times energy savings compared to incandescent light) or the new LED lighting solutions (4-6 times energy savings compared to incandescent light).
Australia and some places in Europe by law banned already some incandescent bulbs, because the savings is enormous.
The EIA Annual Energy Review 2008 http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/ estimates that 1340 trillion Btu was used in the US in commercial buildings for lighting during 2003 (p.65), out of a total of 99.30 quadrillion Btu total US consumption in 2008 (p.3), of 18.54 quadrillion Btu total commercial use (of which 1.34 quadrillion Btu is 7.2%, which is, as you say, less than 20%). US residential usage amounted to 21.64 quadrillion Btu in 2008 (p.3).
Suppose you're right and 11% of typical residential usage is lighting (what's your source for that, please? The AER doesn't seem to hazard a guess there), and that the US isn't too atypical (admittedly, a very dubious assumption). Then that would amount to 2.4 quadrillion BTU spent on residential lighting in the US.
The total, then, would be 1.3 + 2.4 = 3.7 quadrillion Btu per year used on residential and commercial lighting, or 3.7% of the total.
Industrial facility lighting adds another 0.2 quadrillion Btu (p.48), which would bring it up to 3.9%.
It would immediately follow that 3.7% of the average person's energy use is residential and commercial lighting, and 3.9% is residential, commercial, and industrial lighting, which is indeed a relatively small proportion. If every person in the US went entirely without artificial lighting but otherwise somehow continued their lives as before (except in cars, which are not included in the above statistics), total US marketed energy consumption would drop by 3.9%.
I am in favor of compact fluorescent lights, ordinary fluorescent lights, halogen lights, and new high-efficiency LEDs. But the savings are not enormous when considered overall as a society, particularly considering that most industrial commercial lighting is already using more efficient machinery than incandescent bulbs. They are, rather, relatively small.
3.9% of US marketed energy consumption is 130 gigawatts. 3.9% of world marketed energy consumption (about 500 quadrillion Btu/year, according to IEO2010 Highlights, p.1) would be about 700 gigawatts.
Laws are not admissible as evidence about energy usage. Laws provide evidence about political reality, not objective reality.
Do you not "share the view" that 3.9% is a relatively small proportion of 100%? I think that would merely mark you as a Humpty-Dumpty. (There's glory for you!) Or do you think that the US is deeply atypical, and that the average numbers are much higher than the US numbers?
Thanks for the link. I can't find the words you quote on that page. Are they in one of the eleven PDF files linked from that page?
What's "primary" energy consumption?
Suppose it's 8.3% instead of 3.9%. Do you not share the view that 8.3% is a relatively small proportion?
Is there a way I can make the calculations any clearer? I wasn't being deliberately obscure. I didn't even do any unit conversions until close to the end, and that was only to compare energy usage for lighting with your figure of an unspecified number of "MW".
Do you have any information on average lighting usage? The reports on that page all seem to be about lighting usage in the US, which is almost guaranteed to be far from the average.
"Zeal to promote the common good, whether it be by devising anything ourselves, or revising that which hath been laboured by others, deserveth certainly much respect and esteem, but yet findeth but cold entertainment in the world. It is welcomed with suspicion instead of love, and with emulation instead of thanks: and if there be any hole left for cavil to enter, (and cavil, if it do not find a hole, will make one) it is sure to be misconstrued, and in danger to be condemned."
If interested check http://www.energytransitionmodel.com/ there you can build future energy scenarios. For instance see that you're far better off when you invest money in a better (house) insulation then in efficient light bulbs. Or how much total CO2 emissions are reduced if everybody switched to electric cars.
My laundry washing machine has a dial on the front for the water temperature, which goes up to 90° (C, obviously). It heats the water electrically as it comes in. All but the cheapest washers sold here in Argentina have such a facility, because hot water is not normally provided to the laundry room. In the US, washers usually have an option to choose hot or cold water. Using cold water instead of hot will use less energy.
Also, "plenty of energy" is not a quantity of energy that can be usefully compared with other quantities of energy. See jws's comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614745 for more calculations.
Certainly for any given water temperature you can line-dry to save even more energy. However, it's important to know that lowering the water temperature by a few degrees does more to reduce your energy usage than line-drying.
Yes, recycling glass needs more energy that aluminum. That's why reusing glass is better. That's how many bottles (including beer) are handled in Germany.
would this be a good place for me to complain that San Francisco, home to Gavin Newsom's green initiative, just charged me over $150 for a permit to replace my old windows with energy efficient windows?
sorry for the diversion, just needed to let that out.
I remember 20 years ago learning that styrofoam is one of the most recyclable materials (very little energy to recycle, can be recycled many times), and the waxed paper we make paper cups out of is one of the least. Yet the world switched to paper cups because styrofoam caused unsightly litter.
I remember 10 years ago having a friend tell me about a conversation he overheard between two co-workers. The upshot was that a woman was criticizing a man for driving a gas guzzling pickup truck. As the argument progressed it turned out that his 2 mile commute to his apartment in his pickup truck used much less gas than her 15 mile commute to her colonial in an efficient car. And she was so fixed in her view of the world that she couldn't accept that her desire to have a large house was less environmentally friendly than his desire to have a vehicle that he could use to carry a dead deer.
I can't count how many times I've heard environmentally active people talk about how the forests are the lungs of the world. Yet they are wrong. True, cutting down forests inevitably releases a lot of carbon. But mature forests are at equilibrium. They both absorb and release large amounts of carbon with little net effect. (This is especially true of jungles, slightly less true of deciduous forests whose leaves tend to become part of the soil.) The real "lungs of the world" that act as a carbon sink are the algae in the ocean.
I could multiply examples, but the trend is clear. When I hear someone start a lecture on what is good for the environment I first try to verify how much that person knows. Most of the time I'm able to ignore that person in good conscience.