

Top green living myths - envitar
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2009/nov/26/top-10-green-living-myths

======
tome
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/> 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
_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
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.

------
Daishiman
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
_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.

~~~
jerf
"The problem with these sorts of statements is that nearly everything is
insignificant compared to something else."

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.)

~~~
run4yourlives
This is a brilliant comment. You should rework it into a blog post so that it
can be shared with a broader audience. (That is, of course, if you don't
consider it a waste of time!)

Well done.

~~~
sp332
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=964020>

Share away!

------
whatajoke
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
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.

~~~
whatajoke
_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/Common_bean#Red_or_kidney_beans>

~~~
tome
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>

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.

~~~
jamesbritt
More generally, "I wouldn't trust Wikipedia to give correct $TOPIC
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.

~~~
tome
To clarify what I meant, for what it's worth, _I_ have personally experienced
Wikipedia to be inaccurate with nutritional data, and that's something I've
spent a deal of time looking at.

------
jrmg
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
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.

~~~
akamaka
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
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-
Ko...](http://www.sol.de/titelseite/topnews/Strom-EDF-Frankreich-Koelte-
Winter-Heizung-freiren-ueberlastet-Stromnetze-in-Frankreich-wegen-Kaelte-
ueberlastet;art26205,2840399)

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://weblog.greenpeace.org/nuclear-
reaction/2009/11/frances_notsonuclear_winter.html)
[http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssUtilitiesElectric/idUSLU2...](http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssUtilitiesElectric/idUSLU26856720091030)

------
cake
_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
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
_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.

------
narag
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.

------
bh23ha
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._

------
pmorici
"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.

------
dtf
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>

If you could see how much you were spending each minute, do you think that
would encourage you to optimize your usage?

~~~
gridspy
Or even better, see how much you are using each second [My company]
<http://www.gridspy.co.nz/>

------
ars
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>

Be aware that less energy is not always equal to better for the environment.

~~~
ubernostrum
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
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.

------
LucaDuval
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
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
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
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.

