Smelting aluminum requires between 12,500 kWh and 15,000 kWh of electricity per ton of yield.
My lights use 8.5 Wh apiece.
The notion that consumer savings will make a dent in our problem has a few problems with decimal places. This is, by-and-large, a capital-driven problem. It's probably true that a reduction of individual consumption of stuff would be more beneficial than our energy use, too...but then that creates a new problem for that capital, too. So not only is avoiding the collective-action problem probably easier, but it's more effective, too.
1. Working on the different problems you described is not mutually exclusive.
2. How many aluminum smelting plants are there? How many light bulbs? The decimal places seem to go the other way.
This Wikipedia page -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aluminium_smelters -- lists a bunch of aluminum smelters. While it says it's incomplete, its existence implies it has most of them. I doubt there is a page listing all the light bulbs. Once habitualized, turning them off takes negligible extra time or effort.
3. I don't mean to be flippant, but are you arguing against conservation?
I do think there is something of a point there in that combined industrial and commercial use account for a larger portion of overall consumption. But, residential use is still significant.
This chart is old, but has a nice quick visualization of where you might want to focus.
1. Agreed, but whataboutism--and you may not mean it that way but your post sure sounded like it--is basically never helpful.
2. OK. Aluminum smelters and oil refineries and frigging box factories and everything else. Start summing up. Those numbers don't show what you want them to show, I'd wager.
3. I'm arguing that it is a hell of a lot better to go after the people who actively benefit from disproportionate use because they are causing the deepest externalities.
I don't know if this adds or detracts from what your saying but here in NZ 13% of power usage is aluminium smelting.
44% is industry, 32% commercial and 24% residential. Transmission loses 6% (not sure why the above totals add up to 100%, so it must exclude the losses).
I did some back of the envelope calculations and if everyone on the planet runs 1.4 20W lightbulbs (100W equivalent CFL) half the time, that comes to the amount of energy expended on smelting Aluminium.
Aluminium per year: 720000GWh
20W (100W equivalent CFL) Lightbulb on half the year: 87.6KWh
Aluminium = 8.21917808 × 10e9 lightbulbs
Probably wrong in many ways, but I'll post it here anyway.
My lights use 8.5 Wh apiece.
The notion that consumer savings will make a dent in our problem has a few problems with decimal places. This is, by-and-large, a capital-driven problem. It's probably true that a reduction of individual consumption of stuff would be more beneficial than our energy use, too...but then that creates a new problem for that capital, too. So not only is avoiding the collective-action problem probably easier, but it's more effective, too.