Scott Adams: How I (Almost) Saved the Earth | Hacker News Reader

Scott Adams: How I (Almost) Saved the Earth

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122 pointsflybrand48 comments

Interesting article. However, there's one aspect that I find a bit puzzling. I currently live in Germany and Adams' summary of tips how to build a greener house is pretty much a description of how houses have been built here for ages. I mean - the regular houses, not the ones considered particularly green. The general topic seems to be very big in this country, and apparently caters to a huge market. Almost everybody building a new house these days, not only the Earth savers, is trying to implement as many energy efficient measures as possible - that's because Germany, unlike California, is not a very warm place and to save on heating costs means to save big time. I don't actually know what it means, but the term "zero energy house" is a marketing term you see a lot here. Solar energy in private homes is heavily subsidized, too. And Germans don't move as much as Americans, they tend to build their houses to settle and grow old in them, so sustainability is a logical value.

It seems that the art of building efficient houses is contained only in Europe.

The houses in the US all seem to be made of wood, without much insulation. "Problems" that that causes are all dealt with using "efficient" heating or air conditioning systems. From what I've seen the same is true of Australia and New Zealand though. There you see a whole lot of portable electric heaters being used for the winter, which are probably the most inefficient way to generate heat.

The way typical Americans treat "energy conservation" is also an affront to people from Europe. Nobody in the US seems to think about conserving water in any way. Just look at the toilets, they flush a massive amount of water compared to the ones in Europe. Or the amount of ice that is used in drinks, the amount of water that is served and thrown away in restaurants.

It's all the little things that make a huge difference, and there seems to be a huge gap in the way these things are treated in Europe and in the US.

I really would like to write a more articulate reply, but it's late and I'm tired, so I'll leave you with:

I don't believe you.

Portable electric heaters can be incredibly efficient, since they only heat the room in question. I don't know much about building materials, but the article suggested that most heat loss is through windows, so worrying about wood building seems unnecessary.

Water conservation discussion need to be very localized. Lots of places in the US have very low population densities and plenty of water. Conservation is silly in this case. Whether your toilet uses a lot of water or a little, the same amount of poop and same amount of water are going to end up back in the river. Besides all this, toilet flushing and ice in drinks is peanuts compared to agricultural usage. They are little things and do not make a huge difference.

Please site your sources. Here are some of mine:

http://greenliving.lovetoknow.com/Energy_Efficient_Space_Hea...

http://www.toiletabcs.com/toilet-water-conservation.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_resources

I had a look through your sources and they convinced me that you were wrong about water conservation. Even if lots of places have low density and plenty of water, there are negative effects.

Surely using as little as necessary, most of the time, is a good policy.

"Per capita residential water use in the United States is more than four times as high as in England and five times as high as in Germany."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_...

There are many conclusions you can take from that, but a common one would be: Many people in the US use more water than necessary.

In terms of buildings, my experience with houses in Australia (almost zero insulation, single glazing) and northern Europe (astonishing volume of insulation, triple glazing standard) also suggests that there is something to think about here.

I'm not sure that this is what jvdh had in mind, but any pure-heating device is by definition 100% inefficient. Any physical device which does work produces heat as well (well eventually. The energy may feed into other processes before it ends up as heat). A 100% efficient device is one that produces work equal to the amount of heat (I think - my thermodynamics is a little rusty). A pure heater produces heat without doing any work whatsoever with the energy. The most efficient heating would be done either by a heat pump (backwards air conditioner), or by doing some work with it.

Your point about heating only the rooms required is quite true, though. portable heaters may be more efficient than other extant kinds of heater. One other disadvantage is that many of them are air heaters, and the human body is more sensitive to radiant heat than air temperature. (It feels a lot better to be warmed by the sun, than to breath warm air).

There are portable radiant heaters, though far less of them around than there used to be. I think people see them as less safe, which I guess they are.

An electric heater is inefficient if the electricity was generated inefficiently.

Inefficient: burn methane at a central point running a steam engine generator, dumping tons of waste steam into the air, run the electricity to your house and turn it into heat there.

Efficient: pump methane to your house and burn it there.

More efficient: burn the methane at a central location running a steam engine generator, carry both the steam and the electricity to your house, heating it and running appliances.

The moral: live densely enough that steam pipes are practical.

My thermodynamics is rusty as well, but from experience I can say that using a central heating system where hot water is pumped through feels a lot better and seems a lot more efficient than an electric heater.

"Water conservation discussion need to be very localized."

I live in Michigan. Tomorrow my car is going into the dealership to be examined to see if the flood it was in last week damaged it in any subtle ways, then it needs to be cleaned up since I wasn't quite able to get it dry enough to avoid it smelling.

This snapshot gives you a reasonably accurate idea of our relationship to water around here. (I'm smart enough to live where it won't flood, unfortunately my work office is built in a flood plain, albeit on stilts so the main office won't flood, I was out to lunch, bit o' rain pops up, bam.)

I live in the Netherlands, we have an abundance of water here.

The point is not the availability of water, it is the availability of fresh water. Most of the time it takes a lot of work to treat water in such a way that it suitable for consumption. And then there's the waste water processing. You can't just dump your waste water in nature, it has to be processed first, which takes some effort as well.

US toilets may flush more water per flush than EU toilets, but a single flush gets the job done.

I will grant, however, that Europeans do seem to save a lot of water on showers.

Have you used the newer low-flow toilets? They work great. One flush, every time.

In Northern Europe it's similar to Germany.

Actually in my home town (Kuopio, Finland) the first passive/zero energy student housing (a 3 floor block of flats) is nearing its completion.

The US Ambassador to Finland Bruce Oreck visited the site a few weeks ago. He himself is quite active in this field.

Few pics here: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house

Our ("socialist") method of operation is setting super strict national building requirements. Very soon you won't be allowed to build other than low energy housing. The people are quite happy to oblige, similar to them liking paying taxes. There will also be governmental subsidies for converting some of the remaining oil heating to geothermal (some 20% of the equipment acquisition cost + you can also deduct 3000€/year of the paid work done on the house from your personal taxes).

Alternatively you can move to a location with a decent year round climate (Redwood City, CA) and move into an apartment.

My PG&E Bill for 29 Days ending 4/21/2010: $5.00 - 40 Kwh @$0.11877. Easily the most massive energy consumer was the refrigerator - I would have cut that energy use by 2/3 if I could have figured out how (conveniently) to do without a fridge. My Hot water came from the building, but, at 97 degrees, and northern california water pressure, I know I was probably in the lower 5% of consumers in that space as well.

Just hitting the breaker to all your wall warts / WiFi when you leave to work has a very significant impact on energy consumption.

Scott Adams touches on one very, very good point - Having Northern exposure (in an apartment not on the top floor) means (in Redwood City) that from about April through late September you will never be uncomfortable. Apartments have awesome insulation - though I guess it's possible I was leaching heat during the winter from five of my neighbors and the hallway. I never bothered turning on (or even figured out how to) the central heat.

It's amazing how much a difference your apartment orientation can make to your quality of life.

I lived in an apartment in Northern England one winter.

In about January I found out that I hadn't understood the thermostat and the central heating had never turned on. I went through the whole of December oblivious (and warm) thanks to the surrounding apartments providing heat through the walls, floor and ceiling.

I once made it a month into the cold season here in Michigan before realizing that my house's only heating was coming from my computers...

Lived above a restaurant for two years, which kept me comfortable in a sweater in the winters.

Just a caution: Circuit breakers (I'm assuming you mean the sort that are permanently mounted on a panel in the wall) are not intended for frequent use as a switch. They will wear out.

I'm about 5 minutes north in San Carlos and I'm spending $50/month. My apartment is poorly built (gets up to 80 F when it's only 60 F outside, no idea what's up with that), however I try to avoid running the A/C and it's still that high. My Mac Mini and a couple of external hard drives are always running but otherwise I'm surprised at the energy usage.

“Don't brag to me about riding your bicycle to work; a lot of energy went into building that bicycle. Stop being a hypocrite like me.”

That doesn’t make any sense, does it? Making something will always require energy, what matters is whether something needs more or less energy than the alternative. (Making a bike needs less energy than making a car, riding a bike needs less energy than driving a car.)

Scott Adams’ writings always seem very shallow to me. He says something that sounds sorta good if you don’t pay too much attention.

"what matters is whether something needs more or less energy than the alternative"

Does it? Does Mother Earth care whether your pollution came from a car or bicycle? You're just another polluter, you big bad polluter you.

More seriously, I think the reference here is to the idea that you can somehow objectively measure your negative impact and that anything above zero is bad. Since I pretty comprehensively disagree with that statement (impact to something as dynamic as the ecosystem can not be measure concretely, most people's metric of "impact" are incoherent when you really examine them, zero impact isn't a useful metric in light of these things, and I have at least as much "right" to exist and impact an environment as a beaver), I tend to agree with you. My point here is that it depends on your point of view and there are common points of view that disagree with you, and the piece was very clearly invoking this "radical" green point of view very often.

The previous sentence was:

>Better yet, live in the forest and eat whatever the squirrels don't want.

I think he was building on his joke.

Yeah, you are right. I retract my comment. Shame on me and my nine upvoters :)

– edit: no irony

I still upvoted you for the last part of the post. I enjoy reading Adams's work, but he does do a fair amount of trolling.

I wouldn't really call it trolling. There's no intention of malice, he doesn't feign seriousness when making a controversial point, he is very self-deprecating, and everything is said interspersed with jokes (that of course are sometimes hit-or-miss).

In many ways, I think he uses one of the best techniques for coming up with new ideas and provoking discussions: asking questions (even ones that seem stupid at first -- and sometimes later as well), suggesting thought experiments, using humor, and above all, never taking yourself seriously.

I say he trolls sometimes because, if I recall correctly, he's said that he (at least once) has made a post he doesn't agree with, so he could see how people responded. I'll see if I can find the post where discussed this.

I guess that's either trolling or performing a psychological study.

Edit: the closest I could come is "...I enjoy yanking the chain of people who think they believe things for actual reasons as opposed to taking a side." Which isn't very close. It's in an interview with him at http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/scott-adams... (Look for the second-to-last question)

Second edit: Found it! "As regular readers know, I sometimes like to make arguments for positions I don’t hold, just to test my viewpoint." (http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/12/next...) That's...actually not as damning as I remembered, given that his motivation is "let's see how logical I really am".

I think Scott's recommendation would be to buy a used bike. The analogy is to not build a new house, but to move into an old one. (This of course has its limits.)

Just as a counter-point, I recently visited a friend in Prague who is both earth-loving like Mr. Adams and an architect. She and her husband recently rebuilt their home, and it looks fairly nice for the area despite being quirky for the energy savings. They have a grass roof which I was told was actually low maintenance once they had it in. That said, they weren't 'idiots' and didn't buy into photovoltaics.

Your mileage may vary depending on if your wife is an architect.

Grass roof... they have a slightly bigger one at Ford Rouge River:

"The roof of the 1.1 million square foot (100,000 m²) Dearborn truck assembly plant was covered with more than 10 acres (40,000 m²) of sedum, a low-growing groundcover. The sedum retains and cleanses rainwater and moderates the internal temperature of the building, saving energy. The roof is part of an $18 million rainwater treatment system designed to clean 20 billion gallons (76,000,000 m³) of rainwater annually, sparing Ford from a $50 million mechanical treatment facility."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW0G6zNStTE

Solar hot water heating is probably a much better deal than photovoltaics.

One house item which shows no progress on the green side is the refrigerator. Obviously it should be a split system: fridge is inside and heat exchange outside the house. If it's hot outside, I don't want fridge to heat up air inside the house so then my AC has to cool it (an you know, my house has quite limited AC capacity). If it's cold outside, I don't want fridge to consume energy - just dump excessive heat outside. It puzzles me for years why with all this green movement I haven't seen a single split fridge yet.

I thought about this too. It would be really nice if there was a central compressor that will pump that cold gas into ACs and refrigerators of multiple homes. I think that will be a lot greener than the other stuff suggested by Scott Adams.

Finland is now doing that for industry and warehouse refrigeration, and for some large retailers too. It might eventually find its way into homes too.

Finnish retailers are also converting en masse to refrigeration units which have a cover/door. It is a big investment to convert, but it also saves about 35% of the energy.

All new installs are of course with the doors.

Except you're just turning the problem around. While now, if it's hot outside, the fridge heats up the air in the house, just like you said.

With your system, if it's cold outside, the fridge cools down the air in the house (since the heat extracted from inside the fridge comes from the air inside the house, which is heated by your central heating system).

You're losing energy either way.

Yep, it's not ideal in the cold weather, but presumably split-system fridge itself is well insulated and thus not cooling the house interior significantly. And house heating system is capable of delivering heat to the right places more efficiently than in the case of traditional fridge "we heat the kitchen because that's where the back wall of the fridge is." But of course only real modeling and prototyping will tell for sure.

Agreed, heating is much more efficient than cooling anyway, so you'd still get a profit with your system, even though your heating exoenses might rise just a bit.

The problem with this is that it isn't as flexible as a normal frige, it basically has to be built into the house. Also, if you don't have it next to a exterior wall, you have to pipe the coolant through the walls or floors. It's a great idea, but it requires a major redesign of the refrigerator, and means you can't easily get a new one if it breaks or you want it bigger or smaller.

Yep, it's not easy, but this problem is already solved with split ACs. While they do require drilling the wall, some people still prefer them to the in-window units.

Houses in the developed world simply aren't designed to be "green". Painting your roof, reducing the number of windows, and adding insulation are all band-aid solutions to a much deeper issue. All the common "green" solutions might cut your energy consumption in half, but half of a large amount of energy is still a large amount of energy.

I've seen some extremely green homes, and they're far more bizarre looking than the example given in this article. Homes designed around sunlight, earth (for insulation and heat regulation), and airflow turn out looking VERY different from homes that have had energy-saving features tacked on.

Depending on the climate, they don't have to look too futuristic. Here are a bunch of "passive houses" in Sweden (houses without a dedicated source of heat, instead surplus heat from cooking, showering, people etc provide enough heat due to good insulation):

http://www.google.se/images?um=1&hl=sv&safe=off&...

Many of the more futuristic looking ones are not just designed to be "green" but also to demonstrate new construction techniques. My personally favorite is the FabLab House http://www.fablabhouse.com/en/ which is very "green" (passive cooling, good roof designed for efficient use of solar, etc) but also demonstrates building houses from wood shaped with CNC machines.

> Painting your roof,

Which color?

If you want heat, you should paint it black. If you want cool, you should paint it white.

Are you going to repaint it twice a year?

Arrgh. Scott sometimes mistakes his ignorance for wit. He could've outfitted his home with heat-pipe solar thermal collectors, like the Thermomax ones. These things work well, even in the winter, even in cloudy, chilly old England, where they were designed. I suspect they'd do a pretty bang-up job in California. Connecting those up to the hot water heating the floors would've taken a big chunk out of his carbon footprint, even if he couldn't heat his home completely with them. They're worth it just for the hot-water preheat.

http://www.thermomax.com/

There is a short and entertaining TED talk on this topic.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/catherine_mohr_builds_gree...

Smaller houses consume less resources and are more efficient. (In most cases.)

Solar cells are expensive now, but production of them has been going up at something likely 20-30% a year for a decade. You got to figure that a lot of the price of a cell is going to the rapid ramp-up in manufacturing capacity, and that at some point the supply will have increased enough that the price will drop.

Scott Adams, 2012! For a better America.

"As a rule, the greener the home, the uglier it will be. I went into the process thinking that green homes were ugly because hippies have bad taste. That turns out to be nothing but a coincidence."

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