I find your comment to be at the absolute peak of sanctimony. Who are you to decide if it is necessary or not? Furthermore, why are you justified in negatively stereotyping Americans – a diverse group of individuals?
A diverse group of individuals who consume 12 MWh of power per capita, while it's around 6 or 7 MWh for modern European countries. It's not even a stereotype, just statistics. (got my data in two minutes from Wikipedia, so maybe not up-to-date)
"who consume 12 MWh of power per capita, while it's around 6 or 7 MWh for modern European countries."
Lol, you write that as if the Europeans were consuming half as much because they are morally enlightened.
Europeans use 6Mwh/person because thats as much as their emasculated societies can steal from Africa. May I remind you they didn't leave Africa very willingly in the 50s-70s. But they kept on stealing anyway!
Thats right. Steal. Libya, Algeria, Niger. The French convertible Franc. The French senate bemoaning just this week that Macron "lost" Africa. Lost Africa? Africa is not France's to lose!
Unlike, say, Japan or Korea that have more than just a token few LNG terminals and pay for their gas with monitors and great cars.
I don't either but certainly it's a big part of it since I rarely have seen a US household without some sort of cooling and of course heating. Add to that we have larger houses than Europe, like larger.
A part time job of mine is helping a buddy's solar company and right now I'm working on a project, for an older couple who are building a 4200sqft house with 4 mini-splits, 2 electric boilers that switch to gas when it's cold, 3 refrigerators, 2 deep freezes and a potential future electric vehicle. There's a pool too but that changes the dynamics of the system greatly but I don't design and quote that unless they really want to spend $$$.
I'm glad they're deciding to go solar but I see this so often it hurts. An older couple without kids in a giant house in the desert that requires immense heating and cooling wants some solar to help offset their gross over consumption. Rather than scale down to a, still large, 2000sqft high efficiency house they go with cheap construction so they have more than enough space for the one time a year all the family shows up. Oh yah then they fill it with crap that's rarely if ever used.
There's no judgement thrown to the customer as this is the reality of the world we live in, but I see this as seriously problematic. Especially going forward as these older individuals die. Can a family of 4 or 6 afford that place? Do they even want a place so large which requires such an inordinate amount of maintenance? Three 1400sqft high efficiency homes could be built on approximately that same space bringing down the price of the home, reducing maintenance and providing more than one couple space to live.
Sorry, that was more of a rant than anything. Europe is not the promised land but the US really has some screwy priorities when it comes to housing.
I agree with pretty much everything you said. I'm trying to convince my own aging parents to downsize. They're already running into physical issues getting around their house, let alone trying to keep it clean, organized, and maintained.
Please don't make assumptions on something you don't know anything about.
Even many northern US states (around the same Latitude as Madrid, north), on average, are 30-35+ every day during the summer and 0C to -10C in the winter. Many Canadians have air con.
So yes, heating and air con is a requirement in many areas. I live in a northern state, and we regularly have full weeks that are 38-40C.
Hehe, you also described Madrid and basically the center of Spain. From -5 to 45 extremes. More normal is around 0 in colder winter days and 35+ in hotter summer days. 36 today.
>Why? IMO we should all avoid waste, whether that's plastic or energy.
Allow me to respond with a slight tangent:
Suppose you care about reducing plastic in the ocean. So you try to reduce your usage of plastic straws. You spend a whole lot of time convincing everyone you know to buy bamboo straws or such.
Plastic straws make up less than 0.1% of the plastic in the ocean. Meanwhile, fishing nets make up ~40%. Plastic straws are a hard problem to solve, and solving them accomplishes less than 1/400th of the fishing net problem.
And yet, we hear a lot about plastic straws but nothing about fishing nets. Why?
Because it's the more consumer-facing solution. It's vital that people focus on the solution that solves the problem, rather than wthe one that is most easily pointed to.
Should we do both? In theory, sure. But in practice people have finite time, and you have 30 seconds max before they start tuning you out, so you're better off giving your elevator pitch on fishing nets.
Using energy doesn't cause climate change. Producing energy from fossil fuels causes climate change. Humans don't need to minimise energy usage to fight climate change, instead they need to produce energy from non fossil sources. I wish we produced 10x energy that we do now but from renewable sources.
You're right, in the most meaningless sense of the word. I too wish we had 10x the energy from renewable sources, but we don't and won't for the foreseeable future. What we actually can do is get maybe 1/10 of our energy from renewable sources and then, to be sustainable, we need to use 1/10 of the energy we currently use.
How do you know OP cares about the environment? Because they criticize others?
I have no doubt we could examine OP’s life and find plenty of “wasteful” use of energy but no doubt OP would say “that’s different”. It’s always “the other guy” in these cases.
Add on top it’s a lazy comment that adds nothing to the conversation.
Good question, not sure how I would know the answer though. You probably should ask the guy. Given how he seems to track everything, I wouldn't be surprised if he came up with a way of measuring that as well.
Would any answer to your question mean mine is not one worth asking, or that it's not worth estimating those quantities to include in calculations of CO2e-opportunity cost?
Yes. This is a prime example of what people refer to when they say that someone is being an "asshole". The reason being that the OP is being incredibly condescending while simultaneously lacking any trace of empathy and knowledge.
I've seen stuff that or more vile etc. of course, but as far as sanctimoniousness goes, this is the worst I've seen in my several decades on the internet.
