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Top green living myths

• ars 17y ago
  Very good info! 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=346912 Be aware that less energy is not always equal to better for the environment.
  • revorad 17y ago
    ars, you make a good point but pollution is a very big hole in your metric. If you can't account for it, then your rule of thumb is misleading.
  • ubernostrum 17y ago
    Of course, something may have been cheap because it was produced in a place with lax environmental regulations (so lower compliance costs) and shipped via bulk freight options which dump a lot of nastiness into the atmosphere...
    • ars 17y ago
      Yes, certainly. But if you compare two products made in the same country/area they nearly always have about the same pollution load, so price is an excellent way to compare them. "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.
• jrmg 17y ago
  One thing that's always puzzled me: surely in the winter, when you have heating on, it doesn't really matter how efficient your appliances are - 'waste' heat from inefficient appliances will just replace heat that the heating system would generate otherwise?
  • henrikschroder 17y ago
    Only if you have electric radiators. If you heat your home in any other way, you're wasting some energy, since electric energy is the least efficient to use for simple heating.
    • jrockway 17y ago
      Indeed. It is amazing how much heat-per-watt of electricity you can get from a heat pump. Much better to use your electricity to power that than it is to use a bunch of old servers as your primary heat source. (Yes, I know someone who did this...)
    • akamaka 17y ago
      Well, not entirely true, depending on what you're optimizing for. 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!)
      • fhars 17y ago
        But in France the problem is that they built their houses according to the maxim "we have abundant cheap nuclear energy" to use marginal insulation and electric heaters, so these days they have to buy electricity produced in Germany's dirtiest coal power plants during winter... Here is a (German, sorry) text from last winter: http://www.sol.de/titelseite/topnews/Strom-EDF-Frankreich-Koelte-Winter-Heizung-freiren-ueberlastet-Stromnetze-in-Frankreich-wegen-Kaelte-ueberlastet;art26205,2840399 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/frances_notsonuclear_winter.html http://weblog.greenpeace.org/nuclear-reaction/2009/11/france... http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssUtilitiesElectric/idUSLU26856720091030 http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssUtilitiesElectric/idUSLU2...
  • tomjen2 17y ago
• tome 17y ago
  Some of it is useful, some of it is useless nonsense, perpetuating other myths. 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/ 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.
  • mapleoin 17y ago
    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. 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)
    • tome 17y ago
      You're right: the duration over which the CO2 was captured is important. The argument doesn't apply to burning the whole of the amazon at once! But burning growth which has happened since we started caring about CO2 has no net effect.
  • akamaka 17y ago
    It's a bit more complicated than that. Wood can be both green and non-green. Burning a full grown tree could release hundreds of years worth of carbon in an instant. Replanting that tree won't offset the effect of that CO2 within the 50-100 years in which global warming is expected. 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.
• whatajoke 17y ago
  To quote from the article: 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.
  • jules 17y ago
    From the Volkskrant (newspaper): cheese takes more kg of food for the cows to produce per protein than chicken. For vegerarians cheese is an important source of protein.
    • furyg3 17y ago
      link?
    • whatajoke 17y ago
      For vegerarians cheese is an important source of protein. 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/Chicken_(food) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_bean#Red_or_kidney_beans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_bean#Red_or_kidney_beans
      • tome 17y ago
        Interesting. Sainsbury's has chicken at 30g and kidney beans at 7g. You can search for nutritional information very easily here: http://www.sainsburys.co.uk/groceries/index.jsp 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 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.
        • jamesbritt 17y ago
• cake 17y ago
  2. What they tell you: Buy a greener car 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.
  • jws 17y ago
    You have been misinformed about batteries and shelf life, the mileage is variable, it depends on the driver. 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.)
    • mmt 17y ago
      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. 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.
• Daishiman 17y ago
  However well-intentioned these articles are, I think it's intellectually dishonest to focus on such ridiculously irrelevant things as heating the water for your coffee when the fact is that it won't make any difference. If you want to reduce your energy footprint, buy insulation for your house and stop driving. Really, everything else is insignificant in comparison.
  • dazzawazza 17y ago
    You're correct but since people do 'boast' about these tiny changes to their lives turning them green it's useful for 'authoritative' sources to slap them back down.
  • pbhjpbhj 17y ago
    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.
    • 17y ago
• LucaDuval 17y ago
  As usual the single most important advice is missing: * 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.
  • ars 17y ago
    No you couldn't. Instead you would doom billions to death and starvation, because during the transition time you need young people to support the old. 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.
    • LucaDuval 17y ago
      Overpopulation is a menace and family planning is the only viable solution. Two or three billions of healthy, nourished, educated human beings are more than enough to substain our economical, social and scientific structure.
      • randallsquared 17y ago
        Why two or three and not twenty or thirty, if we're specifying that they're healthy and educated? :) Overpopulation (in the sense of too many meat humans) is no longer particularly relevant to our future; simple copying seems likely to be more important.
    • nomoresecrets 17y ago
      "Instead you would doom billions to death and starvation, because during the transition time you need young people to support the old." Not if we kill them when they reach the age of 30.
• dtf 17y ago
  Maybe one thing that could help cut domestic energy consumption in the UK is the introduction of decent real-time meters. Getting a massive bill through the post once every three months doesn't really help you understand where your money's going, especially as they usually have confusing terms (kW/H, BTU etc) and strange pricing structures. Look at these new ones from British Gas: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8375711.stm 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?
  • gridspy 17y ago
    Or even better, see how much you are using each second [My company] http://www.gridspy.co.nz/ http://www.gridspy.co.nz/
• narag 17y ago
  Spain has just passed a law to regulate temperature in public places like government offices, bars and shops. It shouldn't be higher than 21ºC in the winter, it shouldn't be less than 25ºC in the summer. Of course, what it's being regulated is the heating or AC devices! :-) 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.
• pmorici 17y ago
  "especially in colder months when any heat from the flames that escapes around the side of the kettle will warm the room, reducing the burden on the central heating system" 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.
• bh23ha 17y ago
  The buy local meme is everywhere and sadly like so much of environmentalism it is short on smarts, case in point: 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.