If I turned you off back there

[j4]

"On televisions, for example, we would like to see labels saying 'if you watch it, it will cost x pence per hour, if you leave it on standby, it will cost y pence'. Then you can present the environmental cost in monetary terms"

But that's not actually presenting the environmental cost at all, really, is it? Unless you add "WHICH MEANS that when you sink into drooling oblivion in front of the flickering forms of minor celebrities bonking in a bath of baked beans you are not only wasting the product of several thousand years of human evolution but also SYSTEMATICALLY RAPING THE PLANET and leaving it an UNINHABITABLE WASTE LAND, you selfish cretin." Really. Is it. I mean.

That's before we get to the question of how in the name of -- well, frankly, anything you care to name -- an electric toothbrush can be regarded as "essential".

I think I'm just in a bad mood today.

Comments

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

I don't have a TeeVee. I do fall into the internet similarly a lot, though.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Dude, I'm not saying "people shouldn't use electricity". I use a computer for at least 10 hours a day. It would be spectacularly hypocritical of me, not to mention mindbogglingly and laughably stupid, to castigate the internet on the internet for using the internet.

That doesn't change the fact that "this will cost you x pence per hour" is not really giving people any information about the environmental cost unless they already have a handy pence-per-hour-to-kilograms-of-carbon-emissions converter installed in their brain, in which case they probably don't need a bit of lip-service in the small-print on the packaging for their laptop.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

*nod*

It might be valid if the cost of electricity actually reflected environmental costs, but currently it does not.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Hmmm.... Barclays have poster up telling the happy commuters of Canary Wharf that you can 'Offset' the carbon emissions of a flight to Shanghai with twenty-two quids' worth of tree planting.

I'm not convinced that you can monetise environmental damage but it seems reasonable to try costing a preventative effort.

So the warning would read:

If you watch this, it costs x pence per hour, and y pence on standby; if you had to pay to prevent the environmental damage it would be another x_c and y_c. But as nothing is being done to prevent the environmental damage it'll end up costing some poor bastard his home, his crops, and his access to safe drinking water; that poor bastard might not be you but the economic disasters of Global Warming will probably cost you your job and a fair bit of your pension.

Actually, I think the best thing is to keep watching: a population of clinically obese couch-potatoes is probably a valuable carbon sink (assuming they are buried rather than cremated).

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Well, it's a decent approximation. I don't know how the cost of manufacturing and disposing of a TV compares to that of using it. But environmental inneficiencies transmitted by electricity is surely a major one, and then money is a good measure of that, right?

[j4.livejournal.com]

The point I'm clearly failing to make is that "this costs x pence per hour" does not per se actually tell Joe Average anything at all about "the environment", unless he already knows (as I certainly don't) at least a rule-of-thumb formula for calculating how pence-per-hour translates into meansurable environmental inefficiency and/or damage.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

There's also the other point, that Joe Average then thinks "That's OK, I can afford y pence per hour, it's nothing really - and besides, nobody can criticise me for what I do with my own bought-and-paid-for electricity." I'm not suggesting that the labels would be actually counterproductive, though being a congenital cynic I wouldn't rule it out entirely.

[(Anonymous)]

Neither do I. But I have a vague memory that turning monitors off overnight is worth it as a country, which gives me a baseline for which gadgets are worth worrying about.

I'm probably overgeneralising from myself too much. I'm thinking "Well, I can afford £xx. But if I see what I'm wasting then if I don't actually need it I'll not use things completely gratuitously." You're probably right this isn't exactly the best use of their effort, but my first impression was that it's more useful than not.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

I got it. :D

I was diverted into a "but is it better for the environment to have unfit young couch potatoes or to have them out on the streets vandalizing trees, driving cars (legally or illegally), or doing other unpleasant and probably carbon-emitting things?" thought which got precisely nowhere because my brain is full of cotton wool. Which probably isn't environmentally sound either.

[arron-shutt.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's great to live in an unbridled consumer society that until now, we've not had to consider the fruits of our actions.

There's also the "carbon cost" of moving components around the world to make essential electric toothbrushes, making components for essential electric toothbrushes and digging resources out of the ground to make and fuel all these processes. I remember seeing a "resource assessment" in the late seventies on Tomorrow's World for the environmental impact of making a single Coca Cola can. The report was nearly half a metre of paper stacked on top of each other. Just for making a single cola can.

The problem with people today, is that they do not see cause and effect as being linked. And even now that disaster seems to be staring us in the face without some kind of radical rethink to how we live..people still ignore it, as it seems easier just to ignore reality than actually do something about it..

Just wait until the oil runs out. No food on supermarket shelves, no plastics, no transport, no medicine, no agrochemicals, no computers, no electrical power..then we'll be royally screwed as a advanced species..

no electrical power

[ewx.livejournal.com]

You don't need oil to generate electricity.

Re: no electrical power

[arron-shutt.livejournal.com]

You need it to lubricate vehicles, move coal from place to place by diesel train (given that most of the UK train network is unelectrified) as well as make the plastics that act as insulators around wires and for electronic components.

Sure you can avoid fossil oil for generation, but it's in everything else..and converting one form of oil to another is not economic, and in some cases not fit for the purpose you intend. You can make aviation fuel from biodiesel, but you can't power jet engines from it AFAIK.

Not saying it's impossible, but I guess we'll wait until it's too late before we start to deal with the problem.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

Well, we've got 100 years of coal and Fisher-Troph, so we're not going to run out of oil soon. Even then it's never going to get to a "no ..." situation, just a "more expensive" one, as we can cook all that stuff up from oilseed or oilpalm feedstocks.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

*nod* the Alberta Shales are going to go over the line into "worth extracting oil from" any day now. I wish that part of this country were not wingnut-conservative heartland, but it still won't hurt our economy.

[(Anonymous)]

Though basically I'm very much with you, there is a valid point being made by the label, which you've missed. That's to point out that if you leave your TV on standby you really genuinely are wasting electricity and also your own money. Which is generally not known or cared about. It'll be a lot easier to stop people pointlessly pouring energy down the drain by leaving things on standby, than to stop them actually using stuff. But then I'd rather they had the label `if British people turned their TVs off rather than putting them on standby we'd need one fewer power station[1]'. (While they're at it, rather than putting that label on new TVs, they could just not give them a standby mode.)

(Am entertained as the article starts by questioning the validity of cordless phones and electric toothbrushes, both of which I've just got for the first time for Christmas. However I do not like the electric toothbrush. Horrid vibraty thing like nails on blackboard. Can I stop using it on environmental grounds?)

[1] Does `having heard this statistic several times' count as `having independantly and intelligently verified whether it contains an ounce of truth'? Is leaving things on standby a significant waste of energy? Is the point I'm trying to make worth making at all? Shall I go and do some work? Tarra.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Sorry, that were me. btw I'm back in Ox now. Want tea some time?

[j4.livejournal.com]

Ah, I wondered who it was. I'm still wrestling with the environmental consequences of drinking tea, so can I get back to you on that? (Tea in teabags comes in a cardboard box, which I can recycle, or could if Vale of the White Horse had cardboard recycling, but at least biodegrades eventually; loose-leaf tea comes in plastic bags, which I can't recycle, and biodegrades much slower if at all. Now if only I could buy loose-leaf tea by the scoop and take it home in a reusable bag of my own, though then there's the shoe-leather to think of, or the bicycle tyre rubber, and of course if I cycle I risk making a car overtake me which means it will do a slightly longer journey and use more petrol, and, oh dear.)

[j4.livejournal.com]

I didn't miss that point, and I do think it's worth reminding people that if you leave electrical stuff switched on then it's using up electricity (though you'd think that'd be quite obvious), I just didn't think it was relevant to the environmental question! I certainly wasn't trying to cover every aspect of the debate. But I do think that what the chap said -- or at least what the Beeb reported -- is rubbish, and that appealing to people's desire to save cash is a significantly different issue from appealing to their environmental conscience (whether or not it has a knock-on benefit for the environment and/or is a useful thing in and of itself).

if British people turned their TVs off rather than putting them on standby we'd need one fewer power station

You may like some of these energy efficiency posters (http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/estates/environment/energyandw.shtml). I'm still trying to pluck up the courage to ask my SUV-driving, jet-setting, yacht-sailing boss if I can put some up at work.

However I do not like the electric toothbrush. Horrid vibraty thing like nails on blackboard. Can I stop using it on environmental grounds?

Err, if you don't like it, you can surely stop using it on the grounds that you're (presumably -- don't actually know who you are) an adult, and as such you're basically in charge of what you put in your mouth.

Personally I cannot imagine finding the task of brushing one's teeth so wearisome that one feels the need to get a machine to do it, but then I suppose I have fairly good arm muscles, and fewer than the full adult complement of teeth (four permanent teeth removed, no wisdom teeth yet), so maybe it does get tiring, who knows.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Err, if you don't like it, you can surely stop using it on the grounds that you're (presumably -- don't actually know who you are) an adult, and as such you're basically in charge of what you put in your mouth.

Ah but you see, this is a present from Duncan's mother, who likes to take charge of what we ought to be doing. The point is that it cleans your teeth much much better (apparently). But the task is in fact more wearisome, for it is so horridly vibratiouis that you have to nerve yourself up to it. But do you not feel obliged to give such Christmas presents a go, at least for a week or so? Actually I haven't tried the reflective jackety thing for night cycling yet. But then I haven't cycled very far at night yet.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

It depends very much on the device. Sensible switchmode devices should use ~1 watt when not in use, which is trivial compared to electric central heating and lighting.

I should stick my wattmeter on the TV and see what the answer is...

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

As the good Mr. W. points out below, power stations come in many different shapes and sizes, so I would tend to believe the contention on the basis that it is not at all specific about just which power station can be turned offline through intelligent use of standby; in truth, it might well be a tiddler.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Ha, switching TVs off? Not doubling the electricity cost of standby by having digital receivers? Integrated recording of course, which will probably be mainstream in five years, means you can't switch it off at all if you want to record something.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Hahahahaha...nnnnggghhhh.

in five years

Not wanting to be Area Man here, or anything, but I do not expect to watch any television after 2012, if I'm even still bothering with it by then.

Random figures pulled from the ether

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

It's a deeply ineffective label, I agree; pointing out that leaving a telly on standby uses electricity to the cost, on a bad tariff, of roughly one Yorkie bar a month just isn't very striking.

... didn't Cadbury's have to dispose of a huge amount of defective chocolate a few months back? I sense a missed opportunity for an advert, a million pounds worth of real chocolate bars in a heap would be a striking image of what a million wasted pounds really means.

Households use a surprisingly small amount of electricity - a bit of Googling suggests the average household electricity use in Britain is 4500kWh per year, which is about 500 watts, totalling 13GW. Losing five watts of consumption per household would be a 1% cut, 130MW, and let you close this (http://www.eon-uk.com/602.aspx) power station, though the inhabitants of the Isle of Grain would consider themselves victimised if the posters got that specific.

http://www.aepuk.com/need_info.php#20 takes me to http://www.aepuk.com/faq_pdf/dukes_2005_5.11.xls (an abomination - who puts repeating headers in a spreadsheet?) suggests there are 243 power stations in the UK, with a capacity of 77GW at peak (the 52 big ones add up to 65GW), of which we use 46GW on average.

Per-household power consumption would have to go down by 25% to allow Drax to be shut.

Re: Random figures pulled from the ether

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Or by about one-seventh to put me out of a job.

I think you could probably sell this to the Countryside Alliance and the like by expressing the savings in terms of wind turbines, especially if you used pictures of the really old, ugly, wimpy ones. Then you truthfully could say "The whole village changing to low-energy bulbs would obviate one of these", for a suitably sized village.

of which we use 46GW on average

That doesn't look right to me; I'd be prepared to go along with "On an average day, demand will peak at 46 GW", though. There are many occasions overnight in summer when the country happily chugs by on under 20 GW. The figures are in the public record; you can see them here (http://www.bmreports.com/servlet/com.logica.neta.bwp_StaticIndoServlet?param1=NRT) and dig through the database, but from memory, I don't think we've got above 58-59 GW yet at all in this abnormally (probably record?) mild winter. Yet.

I can happily go into more non-confidential power station geekery on demand!