Where’s the love for energy efficiency?
Whenever you see climate change mentioned in the media, or discussed over a few drinks, all the attention goes to renewables, or the nuclear debate, or whether or not clean coal can get going before it’s too late. No-one mentions energy efficiency unless they’re telling you about their CFL bulbs.
Energy efficiency is boring, and dull, and the kind of thing that accountants and people wearing ties would be into. But it’s still one of the most important ways Australians could be fighting climate change. It’s often easy to improve: it’s the low-hanging fruit of the environmental world, picked with little effort. And as long as energy costs money, reducing the energy it takes to do something will always be a money-saver.
So why does it get ignored?
- We assume we’ve already done the common-sense things. Why would anyone do anything inefficiently if they didn’t have to? That’s just silly, surely we’d have already taken action if it was so easy? Often we don’t even ask if a process could be changed a little to make it faster or less wasteful. For example, at my work we used to get our payslip data sent to a company for printing, the payslips were sent back, and then they got handed out to us every fortnight. That’s a lot of paper and driving around, every fortnight! Now the pay data is available on our company intranet – you can still get a printout if you need one, but hardly anyone wants another bit of paper to throw out. We could have done this years ago, since the data and the website was there all along; it just didn’t occur to anyone until now.
- We don’t want to look like we’re penny-pinching. Energy efficiency has a reputation as things you do when you can’t afford to do them the ‘normal’ way. Some people think a 5-star appliance or a smart-meter is what you get if you struggle to pay your electricity bills, instead of it just being a sensible option for everyone. We need to stop worrying about keeping up with the Joneses, and doing what’s right for us instead.
- We think it’s harder to become efficient than it really is. But energy efficiency is almost always one of those things that you can set up at the start and let it run without worrying about it later. If you build an energy efficient house, then you’ll be saving energy for decades without having to lift a finger. The same goes for well-designed suburbs with shops, doctors and parks all within walking distance – a bit of planning early on means much less driving for years to come.
If we can get the hang of energy efficiency on a personal level, the next step is to try it on a national level: compulsory building and manufacturing efficiency codes, the same as we do for safety requirements; better urban planning to make our cities less reliant on cars; take-back programs for everyday products to recover and re-use the materials that went into them. Have you got any ideas about how we could be more efficient overall?
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No different to learning to walk really is it !! One step Two steps ..
The concept of achieving a goal in small measurable steps really is amazing. If every one took a small step or two, then The Giant Leap for mankind will be much easier.
We’ve been sold the concept of ‘cheap’ as consumers for so long that we’re really disbelieving in the long tail of better products and procedures and this spreads over to our ideas about things like energy efficiency. Its probably a commonly held belief that it would be more expensive to be efficient. It probably would be to begin with but the whole idea of efficiency is that it saves (money, resources etc) in the long run.
Its like one of the Terry Pratchett bits about boots. Only the very rich can afford to live so cheaply. A cheap pair of boots will wear out very quickly but a slightly more expensive version will last you 10 pairs of the cheap ones.
To quote Flight of the Conchords “The sneakers don’t seem that much cheaper. What are your overheads?”
I think one of the problems is all the well-meaning but really bad advice out there.
For example – there is a campaign called unpluggit which espouses people to do their bit by unplugging phone chargers when not in use.
I measured the power draw of my Nokia charger and it was 0.12 Watts. That will cost me about 15c per year to run!
The problem with that kind of information is that it flies in the face of the first rule of making a difference with your actions: Pareto’s Law.
We should be ingorning the distractions of the tiny things we can do and leave time and mental bandwidth to concentrate on the big hits. e.g. if everyone in Australia serviced their fridge properly, I reckon we could close down a dirty 100MW power station… I reckon that’s pretty sexy!
See, that’s what’s missing from a lot of the talk about efficiency: what changes can you make that’ll get bang for your buck? I’m all about tackling the big issues head-on instead of lots of little issues that eventually add up. I suppose in the end, it’s the same result, but my way looks more impressive
I really think that people have to become more environmentally driven. Nowadays people think: oh well, what does it matter what I do? nobody else does so why should I? It really starts with yourself and how you look at the world. Turn of the light when you don’t need it and stop using too much water because Australia is short on water. Keep it up guys!