From: j4	Date: January 10th, 2007 12:13 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Dude, I'm not saying "people shouldn't use electricity". I use a computer for at least 10 hours a day. It would be spectacularly hypocritical of me, not to mention mindbogglingly and laughably stupid, to castigate the internet on the internet for using the internet.

That doesn't change the fact that "this will cost you x pence per hour" is not really giving people any information about the environmental cost unless they already have a handy pence-per-hour-to-kilograms-of-carbon-emissions converter installed in their brain, in which case they probably don't need a bit of lip-service in the small-print on the packaging for their laptop.

	From: j4	Date: January 10th, 2007 12:21 pm (UTC)		(Link)

The point I'm clearly failing to make is that "this costs x pence per hour" does not per se actually tell Joe Average anything at all about "the environment", unless he already knows (as I certainly don't) at least a rule-of-thumb formula for calculating how pence-per-hour translates into meansurable environmental inefficiency and/or damage.

	From: ewx	Date: January 10th, 2007 01:53 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	no electrical power

You don't need oil to generate electricity.

	From: half_of_monty	Date: January 10th, 2007 01:49 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Sorry, that were me. btw I'm back in Ox now. Want tea some time?

	From: j4	Date: January 10th, 2007 02:19 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I didn't miss that point, and I do think it's worth reminding people that if you leave electrical stuff switched on then it's using up electricity (though you'd think that'd be quite obvious), I just didn't think it was relevant to the environmental question! I certainly wasn't trying to cover every aspect of the debate. But I do think that what the chap said -- or at least what the Beeb reported -- is rubbish, and that appealing to people's desire to save cash is a significantly different issue from appealing to their environmental conscience (whether or not it has a knock-on benefit for the environment and/or is a useful thing in and of itself).

if British people turned their TVs off rather than putting them on standby we'd need one fewer power station

You may like some of these energy efficiency posters. I'm still trying to pluck up the courage to ask my SUV-driving, jet-setting, yacht-sailing boss if I can put some up at work.

However I do not like the electric toothbrush. Horrid vibraty thing like nails on blackboard. Can I stop using it on environmental grounds?

Err, if you don't like it, you can surely stop using it on the grounds that you're (presumably -- don't actually know who you are) an adult, and as such you're basically in charge of what you put in your mouth.

Personally I cannot imagine finding the task of brushing one's teeth so wearisome that one feels the need to get a machine to do it, but then I suppose I have fairly good arm muscles, and fewer than the full adult complement of teeth (four permanent teeth removed, no wisdom teeth yet), so maybe it does get tiring, who knows.

	From: j4	Date: January 10th, 2007 02:28 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Hahahahaha...nnnnggghhhh.

in five years

Not wanting to be Area Man here, or anything, but I do not expect to watch any television after 2012, if I'm even still bothering with it by then.

	From: jiggery_pokery	Date: January 13th, 2007 10:34 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: Random figures pulled from the ether

Or by about one-seventh to put me out of a job.

I think you could probably sell this to the Countryside Alliance and the like by expressing the savings in terms of wind turbines, especially if you used pictures of the really old, ugly, wimpy ones. Then you truthfully could say "The whole village changing to low-energy bulbs would obviate one of these", for a suitably sized village.

of which we use 46GW on average

That doesn't look right to me; I'd be prepared to go along with "On an average day, demand will peak at 46 GW", though. There are many occasions overnight in summer when the country happily chugs by on under 20 GW. The figures are in the public record; you can see them here and dig through the database, but from memory, I don't think we've got above 58-59 GW yet at all in this abnormally (probably record?) mild winter. Yet.

I can happily go into more non-confidential power station geekery on demand!