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Top green living myths

guardian.co.uk

31–40 of 78 posts

Re: Top green living myths

#31
post #3

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?

It depends: A lamp in the ceiling produces heat into the wrong place -- most of the warm air is stuck up there and not where people are.

And as other people mentioned, house heating is often produced with more efficient methods.

Re: Top green living myths

#32
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.

Re: Top green living myths

#33

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.

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…

"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.)

Re: Top green living myths

#34
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: Top green living myths

#35

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.

Exactly, and as I noted below, this book spells it out very clearly: http://www.withouthotair.com/

Re: Top green living myths

#36
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

Re: Top green living myths

#37
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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…

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.

Re: Top green living myths

#38
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Top green living myths

#39
post #18

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 (equi…

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.)

Re: Top green living myths

#40
post #3

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?

In Canada, it turns out that switching from incandescent light bulbs to more "environmentally friendly" bulbs actually causes a net increase in CO2 emissions, since most of our electricity is hydroelectric, but most homes are heated using natural gas.

I'd like to see some stats on that. Not that I think you're wrong, just that for me it isn't completely obvious that incandescent bulbs are giving off that much heat.
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