Top green living myths
guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk
If you want to learn how negligible the effect of turning off your lightbulbs or converting to a gas heated kettle is, read "without the Hot Air" by David McKay: http://www.withouthotair.com/ It's transport and domestic heating that are the major energy consumers in the west. It's barely worth focusing on anything else.
"wood is a green fuel because the CO2 released when it gets burned will be sucked from the air by the trees planted to replace the felled ones"
What? No. Wood is a green fuel because all the CO2 released when burned was previously captured by the plant itself! What you replace it with is irrelevant.
The "Buy local" section is very good though. Local purchases will in general be a lot more wasteful than purchase of mass produced food which takes advantage of economies of scale.
So burning oil into the atmosphere is green because the CO2 and other dangerous substances were previously captured by the oil itself? (though it takes a bit more for an oil deposit to form than for a tree to grow)
Same for buying local. Buying mass produced grain from Brazil might be more efficient, but worse for the environment because of the deforestation that's driven by high food export prices.
We won't really know for sure until we have a comprehensive way of accounting for all the different factors on a case-by-case basis.
If you want to reduce your energy footprint, buy insulation for your house and stop driving. Really, everything else is insignificant in comparison.
The problem with these sorts of statements is that nearly everything is insignificant compared to something else. The UK shouldn't bother about efficient energy use or renewable sources as China is a far greater consumer and anything we do will be insignificant. I shouldn't bother insulating my house because my neighbour owns a mansion and heats it to 25 degrees C all year and keeps the windows open. There's no point in fitting loft insulation as my car wastes more energy that that would save. There's no point turning the tap off when I brush my teeth because the tap at work drips all day and wastes just as much water ... you get the idea anyway.
Millions of people doing small things in lots of instances creates a large(r) difference. It's a sort of bystander effect that prevents such things; no-one acts because someone else could do more - like #6, if everyone signs up for the renewable then they're not going to be able to meet the demand and will have to bring online more sources of renewable energy.
The reusable nappies issue, #9, is that they assume the nappies are not reused. We bought most of ours 3rd hand on ebay (some 2nd hand) and also used moltex nappies that can be degraded completely by vermiculture within 1 year (though we simply composted them) - our second child is now using the reusables (4th hand) so that makes manufacturing cost just over a quarter (due to disposable paper liners) what they were considered to be in the study mentioned. If you use nappy liners then cleaning is easier. There are other benefits including end-of-life reuse (floor cloths) too.
Yes. Yes it is. Welcome to reality, and engineering. The problem with your statement is that if you're burning a lot of time and mental energy on the insignificant things, then you are wasting your time.
If you, personally, have already taken the time to secure your housing's heating situation, already have an energy-efficient car and minimize driving anyhow, then maybe for you worrying about your kid's diapers is the lowest hanging fruit. I mean that completely straight, not sarcastic at all. However, if you're sitting here encouraging others to worry about their diapers while their homes sit there blowing 75% of their heat out a leaky door, then you're just wasting time.
It's the 80/20 principle, only when it comes to things like energy budgets it's more like the 95/5 principle; one or two things make up 95% of your energy budget and the rest is fiddling around the edges. Optimize the 95% first. Worry about the 5% later, if at all.
(Fiddling around making optimizations smaller than the noise threshold is also a waste of time. "Noise threshold" may sound like a weird concept to apply here, but it does; making a small food optimization that, even if applied by a million people, is still less than the daily variation in the amount of food thrown out by restaurants daily would be a complete waste of time. This is an example, I have no specific optimization in mind. The temptation is to say "Well, these things add up", but in fact when you're dealing with these sorts of distributions, sometimes they don't! Even ten .001% optimizations don't add up to much, and for the effort of getting those you probably missed out on a 1% somewhere else. These distributions can be very counter-intuitive, we don't do well with such large order-of-magnitude ranges.)
Well done.
Share away!
One has to buy nappies*, as a minimal impact example, and one has to choose the brand and type. I don't really think there is any greater thought-cost, if you will, in choosing the more ecologically sound option provided proper scientific research has been performed - amazingly it doesn't appear to have been (note major problem with UK gov study which is now widespread used as a reason not to have reusable despite them being lower impact; I'm assuming big pharma corps are invested against proper research).
Things like turning off the tap as you brush your teeth are just habitual it doesn't need thought once it has been done for a few days, ditto turning out lights. These are not major lifestyle changes and so, I'd argue, don't impact at all the possibility of promoting better resource use in the large scale situations.
Finally, ten 0.001% optimisations that compound over a zero change threshold can be extremely important - ask anyone who is in debt and bumping the bottom of their agreed overdraft, a few pence is all it takes to cycle you down instead of up.
Food optimisation: in the States, I read today, 40% of purchased food is wasted. That's got to be at least half of all food production when you allow for spoiling and other waste (I'd reckon more). A small change in lifestyle, simply choosing to care, can lead to a huge drop in this figure - there are 300 million people in the USA.
Ultimately I see that the 95% I don't have direct control over, eg building of renewable energy capture in favour of fossil fuel based systems, the 5% I do.
If I've got a cup and my boats sinking I'm still going to bail-out until someone else comes along and helps.
Products are driven by people's concerns, and so concern about the environment is a good thing - it impacts products, it drives policy.
But drafts, single-glazing and inadequate wall/ceiling insulation continue to waste enormous energies every winter. And car engines, like light bulbs, continue to be about 15-20% efficient.
(Indeed, if you have a furnace for your central heating, and the ductwork passes outside the heated volume of your house, it's more efficient for you to leave the TV on than it is for the furnace to heat your house, because none of the TV's waste heat escapes the heated volume.)
Most of what people consider to be "green" is irrational during the winter. They'll turn the lights out but run a space heater.
1) reducing electricity consumption will reduce use of fossil fuels in power stations (in most parts of the world). Burning fuel in your own home bypasses the inefficient conversion to electricity.
2) if you are going to heat your home with electricity you can be more than “100% efficient” by using a heat pump, so you still wouldn’t want to do it with light bulbs and TVs.
The only way to reduce electricity consumption is improved insulation.
I agree with you if you have a wood-burning stove.
Heat pumps can out-perform heaters (they seem to have >100% “efficiency”) by working in a different way. Rather than spending 1kWh to heat a room, you spend 1kWh to move 4kWh of heat from outside into the room.
You were being sarcastic, but that is a very good point. I am tired of feel-good "stop taking hot showers" + "ask for paper bags at the store" kind of articles aimed at individual consumers. Sure it makes the writer feel good, it makes the consumer feel good -- they are all working together to save the planet. But if they really wanted to have an impact they should aim the article at the government and the big industrial giants. Instead of "stop taking hot showers" the article should say "write your representative".
Because even a million people taking cold showers might not make as much difference for the environment as installing a single scrubber on a coal plant, or forcing P&G to stop dumping tons of crap into the air. Those are the things that really make a difference. But somehow those things don't get talked about in the mainstream media.
Then we have China and it is a real big problem. How does one make China cut down on its coal plants? Can they claim that they are still industrializing, so they shouldn't adhere to the same rules as the rest of the 'already developed' world? Can we tell them what to do when we are also major offenders? Want to do something, talk to your congressman. Get involved, get the media involved...
And I am not advocating to start buying Hummers and letting our hot water run all night, but we shouldn't delude ourselves that it actually makes a real difference. We do it because it is a good thing to do, it make us feel warm and fuzzy but that is about it.
Actually don't. Paper bags are MUCH worse for the environment than plastic. Paper bags are not just an example of a waste of effort, but actually have negative value! (Reusable is good of course, and on that note plastic is much easier to reuse as a trash bag than paper, but even if you don't, plastic is better.)
Paper uses more than 4 times as much energy as plastic. And releases much more pollution, and more water, and takes 85 times as much energy to recycle.
It looses in every way except litter.
There is all the energy AKA oil used to make them. From driving the machinery used to cut the tree, then transport the tree, mill it, process it, bleach, then color it, then you have to dry it (heat), and finally transport it. And paper is big and bulky and uses a lot more energy than plastic does to do all that.
Then you have the real problem: water. It takes a lot of water to make paper, and there is a MUCH bigger shortage of water compared to oil.
But even if you want to look at oil alone, paper bags use more oil than plastic ones do.
Some numbers I posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=965694
It conflicts with our view of family values and wholesomeness, but in general a wasteful consumeristic childless individual is going to be more ecological in the long run than pretty much anyone with several kids.
In every country where people might listen to this idea, population shrinkage is a bigger problem than population growth.
The net value of a human to society is positive not negative.
The problems of overpopulation is a myth.
Did I interpret your comment correctly?
Population shrinkage is certainly not a problem for the environment and it was not implied that it was not a problem in other respects.
The value of a human to society is a positive? Can you unequivocally state that a world with 3 billion people is worse off than one with 6 billion? It is an idealistic claim and only true in a personal sense, and even then may well be founded on an inconsistent set of values.
An over-supply of labor is pretty good for the economy as a whole, bad as it is for the unemployed. We're not even close to the point where the over-supply is so big it causes real problems. There are still areas where there is a labor shortage, especially in skilled professions.
In particular hard cheese, which takes a lot of milk to produce, can have a bigger footprint per kilo than chicken.
This is super stupid. Hard cheese contains more than double the calories of chicken. And nobody in their right minds will consume hard cheese as the main food item.
Sorry, but the vegetarian you talk of is doing it wrong.
My primary source of proteins is pulses. Especially the red kidney beans contain the same amount of protein as chicken, 24 gm out of 100 gm.
Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(food)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_bean#Red_or_kidney_beans
http://www.sainsburys.co.uk/groceries/index.jsp
Wolfram Alpha agrees, for what it's worth:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=kidney+bean+100g
I wouldn't trust Wikipedia to give correct nutritional information. I've noticed they've been incorrect about this before.
Articles like the one under discussion would be a helluva lot more persuasive if they linked to some resources for their stats. The claims about vegetarianism struck me as clutching at straws just to be contrarian.
http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/
You can put "chicken" in the search field wade through the many choices, or you can put input the NDB numbers from my own searches, listed below.
The two wiki pages don't say exactly which variation of bean or chicken from the database they're using, so I went with these:
chicken breast raw, NDB # 05057, 20.85g protein/100g chicken
chicken breast stewed, NDB # 05061, 27.39g p/100g
kidney beans raw, NDB # 16027, 23.58g p/100g
kidney beans boiled, NDB # 16028, 8.67g p/100g
So, whatajoke's source for beans looks like it's for raw beans, and tome's looks like it's for cooked.
Does anyone eat raw kidney beans?
Choosing veganism over corn-fed carnivory is the lesser of two evils, only because veganism requires less monocropping. However, at best it can only slow--never reverse--environmental destruction (without animals, the NPK source is petroleum).
From an environmental standpoint, the disease is "growing crops without animal input," and corn-fed beef is merely a symptom.
Ironically, the only way to turn veganism into a closed system is to avoid the large-scale monocropping of grains and re-introduce animals for a nitrogen source.
If it's cost, you need to see if gas bill savings + price difference of appliance < electric bill savings.
If you're optimizing for CO2 emissions, and live in France, with many nuclear plants, maybe using less electricity doesn't do much.
(I have ground source heating in my home, btw, and it's great for both!)
Here is a (German, sorry) text from last winter: http://www.sol.de/titelseite/topnews/Strom-EDF-Frankreich-Ko...
This winter may become even more problematic, since about a quarter of their nuclear power plants are down for maintenance. http://weblog.greenpeace.org/nuclear-reaction/2009/11/france... http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssUtilitiesElectric/idUSLU2...
For example, Ontario is banning incandesent lightbulbs. However, studies have calculated that because of the colder climate, there will be no net cost savings for the average consumer. Although the government is touting this as an environmentally justified decision, it's more due to Ontario's lack of electrical generating capacity. (which, granted, could be seen as an environmental issue, if you don't want a new nuclear plant in your back yard)
All energy ends up as heat eventually. Since indoor lighting only leaks a very small amount of light (unless you've got an excessive number of windows), a 60W lightbulb will contribute to very close to 60W of heating.
You seem to be suggesting that leaving my lights on all night has a positive environmental impact since it would significantly affect my furnace use.
I find that rather unintuitive, although possible; hence, citation required.
Look at it this way: To raise the temperature by 1 K, you need to add X Joules of heat to the room, for some value X. Those X Joules can be added by burning approximately X * 9E-7 standard cubic feet of natural gas; by running a 1200 W electric heater for X * 2.3E-7 hours; or by leaving a 60 W light bulb turned on for X * 4.6E-6 hours.
And as other people mentioned, house heating is often produced with more efficient methods.
The perfect examples of this myth are the Toyota Prius and alike, it amazes me how wrong they are.
I've read that the production of these cars is more wasteful than the usual (because of the batteries that have to be shipped), that the global shelf life of the car is poor, that it is difficult to recycle them and finally that the fuel consumption is not extraordinary low (equivalent to a small car).
Yet they receive an enourmous media coverage because they seem to be the response to a greener car.
If you drive a prius with a thought toward efficiency it is quite good. If you are a pedal masher it won't be so good.
There are other, cheaper, paths to efficiency. A tiny diesel in a tiny car will get about the same mileage as the prius, but you will have to put up with slower acceleration. Most Americans do not tolerate slow acceleration. (The 1980s diesel rabbits were 50+mpg cars. 0-60 in 22 seconds with the air conditioner on, and they would fail modern emissions tests miserably, but cheap and efficient they nailed.)
I have found this to be true for any car. The question for hybrids is if it's any more or less so. That is, is the effect of a "lead foot" more or less pronounced on average fuel consumption when compared to a non-hybrid economy car?
My anecdotal experience with economy cars versus a similarly small, "sportier" car (Honda Prelude) is that efficient driving has more effect on the the latter (17 to 30 mpg, factor of 1.76) than on economy cars (25 to 36 mpg, factor of 1.44)
they would fail modern emissions tests miserably, but cheap and efficient they nailed
IIRC, the high-efficiency "HF" version of the 80s Honda Civic CRX typically got 45-50mpg, with the same caveat that it couldn't be produced today due to more stringent emissions standards and the added one that it only had two seats.
Hopefully this law will prevent us to freeze in theatres in the summer. And of course, it will reduce energy comsumption. There are more measures like forcing locals to have automatic-closing doors.
What they don't tell you: The transport of goods accounts for a small but significant proportion of the human impact on the climate. It generally makes environmental sense, therefore, to favour local food and other products. However, it's not always true that local is best. One study suggested that lamb from New Zealand, with its clean energy and rich pastures, has a lower footprint when consumed in the UK than locally produced lamb, despite the long-distance shipping. Another study showed that cut flowers sold in Britain that had been grown in distant but sunny Kenya had a smaller carbon footprint than those grown in heated greenhouses in Holland. So while transport is important, it's not the only factor to consider.
this article is nonsense. Excess heat from an electric heater is going to warm the ambient air just the same as a gas burner will.
Look at these new ones from British Gas:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8375711.stm
If you could see how much you were spending each minute, do you think that would encourage you to optimize your usage?
A rule of thumb: the cheaper it is, the less energy it took to make it. Some more details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=346912
Be aware that less energy is not always equal to better for the environment.
"bulk freight" being a problem is not correct. Bulk freight is probably the best way to ship something, and any energy cost is contained in the final products price.
* Don't have (more than one) child. *
We could build an everlasting eden for humankind if we could persuade everybody to limit themselves to one child for couple for the next two or three generations and then switch to two children for couple.
Lacking that we are doomed to damnation.
And who exactly would operate this "everlasting eden"?
Just about every single technology we have only exists because there are so many people in the world, which makes the cost of the item bearable.
Not if we kill them when they reach the age of 30.