Industrial consumption dwarfs the rest of us. We can fool around with 'energy theatre' turning off lights and walking to the market. But unless we can do 'big industry' more efficiently then it's all for show.
Industrial and commercial energy usage accounted for about 50,000 trillion BTU of energy consumption in the US in 2019. Residential used about 21,000 trillion BTU in the same time. [0] Definitely not insignificant in any way.
However! Transportation used about 28,670 trillion BTU that year. Somewhere around 50-55% [1] of that is from people driving around. I include that in residential/individual choice even if a lot of it is for commuting, because a massive amount of that number is driven by vehicle choice (people have switched to gas guzzling SUVs and trucks in droves as fuel efficiency has crept up, negating efficiency increases), housing type/density and location, etc.
This puts residential/individual energy usage at ~35,000 trillion BTU and commercial/industrial at 71,000. So individual usage is a full _third_ of total energy consumption.
That's massive, and a huge amount of that could easily be cut out if we stop subsidizing people driving trucks, SUVs, etc 45+ minutes each way to work so they can live in some mediocre suburb.
We could also not listen to a minority of NIMBYs and throw out the awful zoning laws that have swept the US over the last 50+ years to make it legal to build more traditional styles of homes and apartments to reduce sprawl and reduce infrastructure costs massively.
Industry still needs to be made far more efficient, but individuals are still a huge factor in energy usage. Other parts of the world have different energy numbers, but a lot of first world countries look fairly similar to what I just laid out.
0: https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T... 1: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/transporta...
It's pretty hard to care about saving energy when there's a hundred meter column of flame on the horizon. Mossmorran is an intermittent offender, but worldwide you would be appalled at how much gas is flared. It's probably enough to make up for the loss of Russian gas.
Ignorance.
> my understanding is that in most cases not-flaring would be more wasteful.
Case in point. Why would not releasing something that could be captured and sold be more wasteful?
Can you explain this further?
It often costs more to not flare, which isn't quite the same kind of "wasteful", and sometimes it is necessary for safety reasons. But mostly it happens because gas is a "cheap" byproduct of production of other fuels.
I think that most people generally underappreciate the challenges associated with alternatives. Many alternatives require substantial infrastructure that will be under utilized to avoid flaring. If you have an oil drill in a remote location, there are huge material costs involved in either transporting the gas to a processing center, or converting it to liquid natural gas on site, and then transporting that (assuming there is a nearby market that will take it).
In your example of Mossmorran, I would really be interested in an analysis of the alternatives. I looked but couldn't find any. Would the plant need to be completely redesigned and rebuilt to avoid flaring? Maybe it is low hanging fruit and it could be avoided with some extra storage tanks. Maybe the nature of the flared gases are specialized would require the construction of a second plant to process.
Like I said above, I am sure there are some areas where alternatives are cost effective, or even mildly cost negative, but still should be implemented. On the other end of the spectrum, I am sure that there are cases where it would be more wasteful to capture the gas than shut down the wells entirely.
The collection of flares could easily be seen from space. It resembled a large city in brightness.
Consumers are the ultimate source of funding for the industry through their purchases or purchases of their governments. That is what drives industrial consumption. They aren't rogue mining von Neumann machines who make more miners for the sake of it!
Exactly right. Residential usage tends to spike greatly during hot or cold events since a much larger portion of it is for heating and cooling. For industrial users, there is some heating and cooling component, but the industrial process is generally what's going to dominate.
So, if you look at extreme events, residential usage will dominate during those times. The residential usage total may spike up to 2x or 3x "baseline" usage, which industrial never will. However, if you look at sum totals across a year, industrial will typically be a much larger user than the residential sector.
More ambitiously, the government could tax embodied carbon at the current price of atmospheric carbon capture.
Steps taken to reduce GHG emissions (reducing fossil fuel use) also reduce other pollutants like local particulate pollution.
I agree we should be self critical and vigilant about calling out climate posturing but if we shame people / ourselves for anything short of al gore wetdream ecoterrorism aren't we in danger of creating a convenient nihilism narrative that justifies not doing anything at all?