9 ms·

Interesting, but it seems like a lot of the lifestyle choices are just pushing the carbon/climate impact to someone else where the author doesn't have to think

Interesting, but it seems like a lot of the lifestyle choices are just pushing the carbon/climate impact to someone else where the author doesn't have to think about it. Getting custom clothes made in china and shipped frequently is certainly far less environmentally friendly than simply re-using the clothes you already have. Taking an uber still burns gasoline. A bike would be better.

fezz 11y ago
Agreed on the shifting the consumption down the line. However, the primary energy advantage of Uber-like car services is that it reduces the high cost of energy to produce a car by reducing the pool of cars through optimizing their use (meaning, instead of a majority of cars sitting around doing nothing, using a pool of cars working most of the time would mean fewer cars needed overall). If all cars end up being full time service vehicles (through self driving?), one car would hopefully be able to service 20 people and replace all those cars. If the carbon foot print of gas/electric consumption is 12% of a car's total (the rest going to manufacture), then moving to a full shared service model would be a huge gain (and loss of the auto industry)
- Jeema101 11y ago
  I don't know that it's even clear that using Uber-like services reduces carbon footprint. I mean wouldn't a car wear out a lot faster if 20 people were using it as opposed to 1? Sure, some components in a car are mileage independent, but generally not the most critical ones like the engine and transmission...
  - greggyb 11y ago
    We are not at this point now, but I'll share my understanding of what the grandparent post meant. The average car sits unused (parked) for well over half of its life (I'd say 90%, but I don't feel like research right now, and the concept holds at 50%). If we assume 100 1-hour rides are needed in a day, and each person uses their own vehicle, we need 100 cars, despite the fact that we need 100 car-hours. If we can optimize with a service like Uber, we would only need 5 cars to provide 100 car-hours in a day. Obviously, trips are not completely fungible, but I think the central concept is clear above. The second piece is that those 5 cars will be replaced much sooner than the 100 individual cars. That's where the utilization comes in. If everyone drives themselves, then the stock of cars must equal peak demand. If services like Uber combine riders (via UberPool - the typical car has more than 1 passenger seat that is unutilized in the typical commute) and provide utilization for cars at 50% of the day, then the total stock of vehicles would be lower than required for self-driving. These two effects combine leading to fewer cars.
  - mxxx 11y ago
    Yeah the idea that taking a taxi is a way to reduce your energy consumption footprint is absurd. Get on a bike or catch public transport you nimrod.
    - pbreit 11y ago
      One less car is manufactured. He said he does take public transportation. Down vote.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    For one thing, there's one less car being manufactured. How fast (in time) it wears out is irrelevant.
david-given 11y ago
Hmm. A washing machine consumes about 100Wh == 360kJ for a load (ref: http://www.rpc.com.au/information/faq/power-consumption/washing-machines.html http://www.rpc.com.au/information/faq/power-consumption/wash...). The Emma Mearsk, one of the largest container ships around, uses 13 tonnes of fuel an hour to transport 18000 containers, over a distance of (say) 20000 kilometres, which is 1kg of fuel to transport one container 45km (according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transportation#Ships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...), or 450kg for the whole distance. A 7.5kg washing machine load occupies about 0.00025 of a container, so the fuel requirement to transport that washing machine load is 0.1kg. The ship's engines use 0.163kg of fuel to generate one kWh, so the energy consumption for just the transport of our washing machine load is 0.6kWh, or 2200kJ. 360kJ of USA residential electricity will cost about $0.015. (Pulled randomly from: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_5_6_a http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm...) 0.16kg of heavy fuel oil in Singapore will cost $0.05. (From: http://shipandbunker.com/prices/apac/sea/sg-sin-singapore#IFO380 http://shipandbunker.com/prices/apac/sea/sg-sin-singapore#IF...) This is, of course, horribly simplified --- e.g. I'm not calculating the cost of washing water, or transport from the container port to the owner's house --- it does at least show that big ship shipping is really, really cheap. While I still think the original author is wrong, they are at least plausibly wrong.
- dragontamer 11y ago
  Shipping is always surprisingly cheap. But manufacturing new clothes every time you need new clothes? In China, land of the "who cares about the EPA" coal-laden environmental almost-slave-labor disaster? Built from synthetics (which are Petroleum-derived) ? To add insult to injury, he talks about injuries / deaths from HEPPA-regulated American Power Plants without giving a damn about the suicide nets placed outside of Chinese Sweatshops that builds his clothes because he's too lazy to wash them.
  - david-given 11y ago
    I don't know, how much energy does making clothes in China consume? You're more than welcome to go find out and let us know...
enkiv2 11y ago
I don't see why he doesn't just stop bathing and stop changing his clothes altogether, if this is his goal. (After all, this is the same guy who drank a potent antibiotic to keep himself from defecating in order to save water; that wouldn't be the craziest thing he's done, and it would make more sense than buying new clothes every day.)

fezz 11y ago

Agreed on the shifting the consumption down the line. However, the primary energy advantage of Uber-like car services is that it reduces the high cost of energy to produce a car by reducing the pool of cars through optimizing their use (meaning, instead of a majority of cars sitting around doing nothing, using a pool of cars working most of the time would mean fewer cars needed overall). If all cars end up being full time service vehicles (through self driving?), one car would hopefully be able to service 20 people and replace all those cars. If the carbon foot print of gas/electric consumption is 12% of a car's total (the rest going to manufacture), then moving to a full shared service model would be a huge gain (and loss of the auto industry)

Jeema101 11y ago
I don't know that it's even clear that using Uber-like services reduces carbon footprint. I mean wouldn't a car wear out a lot faster if 20 people were using it as opposed to 1? Sure, some components in a car are mileage independent, but generally not the most critical ones like the engine and transmission...
- greggyb 11y ago
  We are not at this point now, but I'll share my understanding of what the grandparent post meant. The average car sits unused (parked) for well over half of its life (I'd say 90%, but I don't feel like research right now, and the concept holds at 50%). If we assume 100 1-hour rides are needed in a day, and each person uses their own vehicle, we need 100 cars, despite the fact that we need 100 car-hours. If we can optimize with a service like Uber, we would only need 5 cars to provide 100 car-hours in a day. Obviously, trips are not completely fungible, but I think the central concept is clear above. The second piece is that those 5 cars will be replaced much sooner than the 100 individual cars. That's where the utilization comes in. If everyone drives themselves, then the stock of cars must equal peak demand. If services like Uber combine riders (via UberPool - the typical car has more than 1 passenger seat that is unutilized in the typical commute) and provide utilization for cars at 50% of the day, then the total stock of vehicles would be lower than required for self-driving. These two effects combine leading to fewer cars.
- mxxx 11y ago
  Yeah the idea that taking a taxi is a way to reduce your energy consumption footprint is absurd. Get on a bike or catch public transport you nimrod.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    One less car is manufactured. He said he does take public transportation. Down vote.
- pbreit 11y ago
  For one thing, there's one less car being manufactured. How fast (in time) it wears out is irrelevant.

david-given 11y ago

Hmm. A washing machine consumes about 100Wh == 360kJ for a load (ref: http://www.rpc.com.au/information/faq/power-consumption/washing-machines.html http://www.rpc.com.au/information/faq/power-consumption/wash...). The Emma Mearsk, one of the largest container ships around, uses 13 tonnes of fuel an hour to transport 18000 containers, over a distance of (say) 20000 kilometres, which is 1kg of fuel to transport one container 45km (according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transportation#Ships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...), or 450kg for the whole distance. A 7.5kg washing machine load occupies about 0.00025 of a container, so the fuel requirement to transport that washing machine load is 0.1kg. The ship's engines use 0.163kg of fuel to generate one kWh, so the energy consumption for just the transport of our washing machine load is 0.6kWh, or 2200kJ. 360kJ of USA residential electricity will cost about $0.015. (Pulled randomly from: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_5_6_a http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm...) 0.16kg of heavy fuel oil in Singapore will cost $0.05. (From: http://shipandbunker.com/prices/apac/sea/sg-sin-singapore#IFO380 http://shipandbunker.com/prices/apac/sea/sg-sin-singapore#IF...) This is, of course, horribly simplified --- e.g. I'm not calculating the cost of washing water, or transport from the container port to the owner's house --- it does at least show that big ship shipping is really, really cheap. While I still think the original author is wrong, they are at least plausibly wrong.

dragontamer 11y ago
Shipping is always surprisingly cheap. But manufacturing new clothes every time you need new clothes? In China, land of the "who cares about the EPA" coal-laden environmental almost-slave-labor disaster? Built from synthetics (which are Petroleum-derived) ? To add insult to injury, he talks about injuries / deaths from HEPPA-regulated American Power Plants without giving a damn about the suicide nets placed outside of Chinese Sweatshops that builds his clothes because he's too lazy to wash them.
- david-given 11y ago
  I don't know, how much energy does making clothes in China consume? You're more than welcome to go find out and let us know...

enkiv2 11y ago

I don't see why he doesn't just stop bathing and stop changing his clothes altogether, if this is his goal. (After all, this is the same guy who drank a potent antibiotic to keep himself from defecating in order to save water; that wouldn't be the craziest thing he's done, and it would make more sense than buying new clothes every day.)