Weird that sometimes the same news is revealed simultaneously in several countries. The latest I have noticed deals with those little, insignificant appliances that we leave on stand-by instead of unplugging them (or switching them off). It might be nothing, one could think. After all, what does a diode consume? Almost nothing… Right. This reminds me the donation principle. Give a small amount, and by the end of the day your association, if successful, has enough funds for a year , simply because adding small amounts alltogether leads to huge amounts.
That is the same with these electronic devices we carelessly leave on the plugs. These timers that we never check (cause we have wrist clocks), these phone chargers forgotten so many times. But this goes further than simply forgetting something; sometimes the industry makes us consuming more. Who remembers those old phones without any display that we used in the late 80’s, early 90’s? They didn’t need more than a couple of watts to function during the conversations. Nowadays, a phone has to have a wide display, memory, sometimes even a real screen, and so on. Impossible to find normal and simple phones anymore… And multiply this power consumption by millions of users, so that you can get an idea of the energy waste we are responsible for. A quick search on the web shows that it is pretty easy to get an idea of how this scale effect can lead to huge environmental benefits, or should I say avoided emissions. On a swiss website, the author computed that by saving 88W in each of the 3,5 millions swiss households, a nuclear power plant could be shut down (300 MW in reality).
Take the 26,4 millions French households (2005 figure) for example. Let them save 20 W by simply unplugging the TV, radio, CD player and all this stuff that can be so easily unplugged without loss of any performance or uncomfort (when not in use): that yields more than 500 MW savings. EDF (the French electricity provider) recently announced the construction of some new gas-fired power plants. 500 MW is large enough to avoid the construction of one of them; let us suppose that the households can save 40 W each (is that so hard? I wouldn’t say so) so that our total savings reach roughly 1 GW. Translated into CO2 emissions, based on gas-fired power plants, and supposing that we switch off our appliances 80% of the time, the 20% left being for use, we save 7 TWh energy per year. Producing 1 kWh of electricity from gas leads to direct emissions of 600g of CO2; meaning that by switching off their appliances instead of leaving them in standby, the French households could avoid the emission of 4,2 million tones of CO2 per year -and more importantly, avoid the construction of these 2 power plants. Considering a country that produces its electricity from coal instead, this would lead to 7 million tones less per year… Impressive, isn’t it? Greenpeace has a nice webpage dealing with the consumption of your appliances and how you can save energy by small changes.
This week, two articles in the press reveal that the UK and US households could avoid this order of magnitude of CO2 emissions by switching off their electrical devices. So next time you wonder how you could participate somehow in a reduction of CO2 emissions… Flick off!
What are we going to say to our children when they ask us the two following questions?
Question One:
When did you know your generation was foolhardy and selfish, inadvertently precipitating the massive extinction of life as we know it and ravaging the Earth?
Question Two:
Why did you and your leaders not stop what you were doing and at least try to do something different, that might have given life as we know it a chance for a good enough future rather than keep charging ahead down the “primrose path” of endless human over-growth activities, the ones you could see would lead humankind to confront some kind of colossal wreckage, the likes of which only Ozymandias has seen?
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
Selfish, paternalistic managerialism, unbridled wealth accumuation and the twilight zone of endless growth.
The ruling politicians and economic brokers who maintain control over a lion’s share of the world’s wealth and military power in our time are in denial of reality. They want what they want and, as they tell us in demonstrable ways, they will have whatsoever they desire, come what may for our children, biodiversity, coming generations, global ecosystems and the integrity of Earth.
The leaders in my not-so-great generation apparently wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, increasing per capita consumption of scarce resources and skyrocketing human population numbers worldwide; their desires are evidently insatiable; they choose to believe anything that meet the `standards’ for political convenience and economic expediency; and they act accordingly. But, despite all their widely shared and consensually validated specious ideas and soon to be unsustainable production, consumption and propagation activities, Earth exists in space-time, is relatively small and bounded, and has limited resources upon which the survival of life as we know it depends. Whatsoever is is, is it not?
What worries me is this: the elder guarantors of a good enough future for the children appear to be leading our kids down a “primrose path” along which the children could unexpectedly be confronted with sudden, potentially colossal threats to human and environmental health, threats that are directly derived from converging human-induced global challenges such as pernicious impacts of global warming and climate change, massive pollution of the air, water and land from microscopic particulates and solid waste, and the reckless dissipation of scarce natural resources. All the while, the leading elders remain willfully and foolishly in denial of the fulminating ecological degradation by declining to acknowledge, much less beginning to address, humanity’s emerging, human-driven predicament. One day, perhaps sooner rather than later, our children could have extraordinary difficulties responding ably to that with which they could soon come face to face; that is to say, because their elders have so adamantly refused to so much as openly recognize God’s great gift of good science of global warming and climate change, our kids will not even know what “hit” them, much less why it is happening.