People have no bloody idea about saving energy
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is a fair amount of cyclists here, but not that many ride in the winter.
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...
If these people actually cared about the environment they'd buy a used car, or bike to work.
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.
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.
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!
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.
So no, it is not all CO2, but the rest is a rounding error.
If you're cared about pollution aside from that then yes, there are huge differences depending on make, model, maintenance, etc.
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Role_of_water_va...)
It was also mostly made out of aluminium, much to the chagrin of my parents / loved ones.
It'll take a very very long time to recoup that.
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."
So 11%. Pretty far off.
Two completely different things!
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.
Other people's decisions become your business the instant they affect you.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Not only that, I'd say there are two such kinds of advocates for anything.
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.
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.
On this subject, I highly recommend Chapter A, "Cars II", of Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/ps/2...
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.
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.
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.
And you follow this assertion with more speculation without evidence. Interesting...
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....
Not to mention how much worse it would be to end up in an accident with one of them.
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.
"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."
From http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science...
Citation? I don't think I've ever lived somewhere that accepted styrofoam in curbside recycling, so I'm a bit skeptical.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Glass requires so much energy to make - or recycle - that it is
always more eco-friendly to use aluminium cans
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, it seems that most of the drink cans I've seen in Germany are steel rather than aluminum.
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.
[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Getraenkedos...
[2] http://www.cancentral.com/members/pdf/CMI2009AnnualReport.pd... (PDF)
Finnish numbers:
Aluminum cans: 92% recycled (Germany 96%, Belgium 93%)
Glass bottles: nearly 100%
Plastic bottles: 89%
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.
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.
Aluminum makes up 8% by weight of the Earth's crust, according to https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Abundance_of_...
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.
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.
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").
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.
Very true.
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.
Economists generally view carbon taxes and cap and trade regimes as equivalent
I agree with Greg Mankiw that cap and trade equals carbon tax plus corporate welfare: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/05/reading-for-pigou-clu...
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.
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.
Since pretty much all our energy comes from hydrocarbons it doesn't much matter. All you need is to check the price.
Energy costs money, use more energy, pay more money. Your market signaling method is already there.
Also, producers have no incentive to utilize alternative sources of energy while carbon-based energy is so relatively inexpensive.
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.
Instead of rewriting it here, I'll link you to a comment which I wrote that explains it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=346912
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.
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.
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.
There is some discussion of different approaches to this problem at https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Embodied_ener...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/02/un-report-...
http://www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0612sp1.htm
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:
http://www.ecorazzi.com/2009/11/04/al-gore-agrees-that-going...
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"...
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.)
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.
I request that you withdraw your accusation of insincerity and substantiate your extraordinary claim that "it's probably a wash, for various reasons".
(Disclaimer: I am not a vegan.)
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.
In terms of guiding what we should do now it can and should be discounted to zero.
> Another example: cycling is only a viable means of transport because of the extensive road network built for (and by!) oil-powered vehicles.
Another example of what? Of one technology being dependant on the history and environment that preceded it? Isn't that true for everything?
As to the specifics of your example : you know that bicycles were popular before cars don't you?
'Bicycles and horse buggies were the two mainstays of private transportation just prior to the automobile'
Oh, and wait, if everyone died that would have tremendous ecological impact too.
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.
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.
Wait, what? What sort of doorbell do you have?
Also, did you figure that out just by trial-and-error of disconnecting things, or did something lead you more directly to them?
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).
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?
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.
Do you have a source for this? I am quite amazed that the British drink their bear out of virgin bottles. In Germany re-using bottles is common place.
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.
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.)
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… /-:
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.)
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).
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.
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.
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 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).
"For example, participants estimated that line-drying clothes saves more energy than changing the washer’s settings (the reverse is true)"
Makes no sense to me. "Changing" doesn't mean anything. I'm sure the article is on to something, but that quote here is just too unclear.
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.
I should measure the water consumption of my washing machine.
"We recruited 505 participants through Craigslist in seven US metropolitan areas: New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Houston, Dallas, Denver, and Los Angeles."
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.
You would need to unplug it or switch it off for a year
to save as much energy as it takes to have one-and-a-half
baths.
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".
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.
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?
"Thus, lighting was approximately 8.3% of national primary energy consumption, or about 22% of the total electricity generated in the U.S."
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.
Huh? Line drying saves plenty of energy, what settings are you proposing we change?
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.
Also, does using hot water negate the fact that line drying saves energy?
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.
sorry for the diversion, just needed to let that out.
Reminds me of this comic book.
That we'd be better off burning it for energy. And some other arguments about the life span of a tree and the amount of oxygen it produces.
Can't seem to find it now as my quoted URL is no longer valid.