People have no bloody idea about saving energy - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/18/energy_idiocy_survey/ <comment><USER2> This is not a new phenomena.

I remember 20 years ago learning that styrofoam is one of the most recyclable materials (very little energy to recycle, can be recycled many times), and the waxed paper we make paper cups out of is one of the least. Yet the world switched to paper cups because styrofoam caused unsightly litter.

I remember 10 years ago having a friend tell me about a conversation he overheard between two co-workers. The upshot was that a woman was criticizing a man for driving a gas guzzling pickup truck. As the argument progressed it turned out that his 2 mile commute to his apartment in his pickup truck used much less gas than her 15 mile commute to her colonial in an efficient car. And she was so fixed in her view of the world that she couldn't accept that her desire to have a large house was less environmentally friendly than his desire to have a vehicle that he could use to carry a dead deer.

I can't count how many times I've heard environmentally active people talk about how the forests are the lungs of the world. Yet they are wrong. True, cutting down forests inevitably releases a lot of carbon. But mature forests are at equilibrium. They both absorb and release large amounts of carbon with little net effect. (This is especially true of jungles, slightly less true of deciduous forests whose leaves tend to become part of the soil.) The _real_ "lungs of the world" that act as a carbon sink are the algae in the ocean.

I could multiply examples, but the trend is clear. When I hear someone start a lecture on what is good for the environment I first try to verify how much that person knows. Most of the time I'm able to ignore that person in good conscience.

<comment><USER3> _Yet the world switched to paper cups because styrofoam caused unsightly litter._

I thought the real issue here was biodegradability. Since most disposable cups are not recycled, the ease with which they could be recycled matters a lot less than the fact that styrofoam is forever. Then again, in the absence of oxygen and light, I'm not sure that paper cups will ever degrade much in a modern landfill....

 _The upshot was that a woman was criticizing a man for driving a gas guzzling pickup truck._

I'm a pretty environmental fellow. But I cannot understand the psychology of someone who would harass a stranger about their choices. I mean, what business of it is mine how some random person decides to carry out their life. Even if I'm right (which this woman clearly was not), it is not going to make a difference -- it will just make people miserable.

 _When I hear someone start a lecture on what is good for the environment I first try to verify how much that person knows._

My personal favorite is that we must prevent any new construction in the city because we should be building parks and green space there because green space is more green and trees are vital for dealing with climate change. That's why we should ensure that there is no high density housing near public transportation infrastructure.

<comment><USER4> _I'm a pretty environmental fellow. But I cannot understand the psychology of someone who would harass a stranger about their choices._

There are, broadly, two kinds of environmentalists.

There are the pragmatic environmentalists, who value the environment and seek to find the most effective ways to minimize damaging it through human activity.

Then there are the religious environmentalists. A new type of puritan, religious environmentalists seek to cast individual worth and goodliness in the frame of environmental impact. It's not about results so much as it is about intentions. It is an environmental sin to own a "gas guzzling" truck or SUV, regardless of whether that truck is used for extremely short commutes, or whether the SUV is used to carpool with 3 other people, or whether you walk to work everyday and only use the car on the weekends (and thus have lower per- person per day carbon emissions than the prius or smart car owner who drives alone and commutes from the suburbs).

As this very article shows, such religious fervor is built, as always, on a mountain of ignorance. And the faithful are zealous in spite of rather than because of any practical knowledge in the subject.

There are lots of pragmatic ways we can be reducing humanity's environmental impact, but the religious greenies aren't helping. They are building up resentment that may eventually lead to a backlash.

<comment><USER5> > There are, broadly, two kinds of environmentalists.

Not only that, I'd say there are two such kinds of advocates for _anything_.

<comment><USER6> _There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't_ \-- Robert Benchley

<comment><USER7> Well, there are at least two kinds of people in the world then. -- cema

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article buries an important story beneath bombast. A much better read is David MacKay's (free) book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air": <http://www.withouthotair.com/> As the book itself says, it's an analysis of sustainable energy based on "numbers not adjectives".

<comment><USER9> That's an excellent book. I have a paper copy of it. While the article is right about cellphone chargers things like this lack some context:

        Glass requires so much energy to make - or recycle - that it is
        always more eco-friendly to use aluminium cans

Firstly, that depends on _how_ you recycle things. Perhaps in the UK they melt down their glass and make it anew, but in some other countries such as Denmark they'll actually use the _same_ bottle again after cleaning it out.

If you buy a soft drink in a class bottle in Denmark you'll get a container that looks like it's seen war.

Secondly, it's presuming that pounds sterling is the best way to measure sustainability, and that just because something costs more now it's less sustainable in the long run.

Which is just patently silly. We basically have infinite energy on this planet as long as the sun keeps shining, but we don't have infinite easily accessible aluminum.

In the future access to basic material resources is going to be a _lot_ more important than whether someone expended a few extra joules back in 2010.

<comment><USER10> I didn't know that there are places on the world where glass bottles are not used several times. Even some PET bottles are used several times in Germany. I'm drinking Coke out of one of those right now. You can even crudely gauge how often one has been used by how clear it is. (Mine looks pretty new.)

Wikipedia tells me that those PET bottles are used about twenty times (and then they are recycled). They were introduced in Germany in 1990 by Coca Cola.

<comment><USER11> Where I live in the US, there is no bottle reuse, as far as I know. In fact, while we have recycling pickup, the city will not pickup glass at all because it is considered too dangerous for the workers. If you want to recycle glass, you have to take it yourself to a recycling center.

In the past (30+ years ago?) glass bottles were routinely reused before plastic and aluminum containers were widespread.

In general all of the schemes for recycling and bottle reuse vary by state and city in the US.

<comment><USER10> Now that I think of it, there are glass bottles in Germany which are not reused, wine and liquor. Actually those are the only two next to beer which still commonly use glass bottles. Everything else is pretty much PET, nowadays probably already mostly not reusable (despite a mandatory deposit for all bottles, no matter if reusable or not). It will be very hard for you to find anyone selling aluminum cans, though.

<comment><USER11> The only place I've seen reusable plastic bottles has been in Germany. Are they used elsewhere in Europe?

Also, it seems that most of the drink cans I've seen in Germany are steel rather than aluminum.

<comment><USER12> Most of the plastic bottles sold in Finland were reusable up until 2008 or so, but now that the tax levied on non-reusable containers has been removed, most of the bottles appear to be of single-use variety.

<comment><USER13> According to PALPA, those single-use bottles do get returned (89%) nearly as well as the sturdier ones did. They just aren't reused as such but in production of plastics.

Finnish numbers:

Aluminum cans: 92% recycled (Germany 96%, Belgium 93%)

Glass bottles: nearly 100%

Plastic bottles: 89%

To reuse a aluminum soda can you need only 5% of the energy used to make the can.

97% of beverage bottles are recycled in Finland. Glass bottle gets reused on average 33 times.

Finland seems to be the world leader in this area.

Joining the Finnish beverage recycling scheme is very expensive. The industries own PALPA. If you want to join, you'll have to pay upfront your share of the investment expenses which the other have paid previously. The bottle stock is also very expensive. Materials plus 0,20€ per 0,33-0,5 litre bottle, 0,40€ for 1-2 litre bottle or 0,15€ per aluminum can. For example the German retail giant Lidl chose not to join this scheme. They do recycle their own bottles, but you can't return their bottles anywhere else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The "easy" solution is for society to imposes higher taxes on energy, particularly those forms of energy which we wish to discourage our reliance on.

This would particularly useful in the realm of consumer purchasing decisions.

Which apples required less energy, the ones shipped in from Chile, or the ones trucked over from California? There's no way as a consumer I can know that, but if taxes on certain energy forms (e.g. carbon-based) are high enough, then price becomes 1) a signal of how much energy was consumed in production and delivery, 2) a factor which discourages consumers from purchasing products which require more energy, 3) an incentive for firms to minimize their energy usage to keep costs down.

Will such taxes ever be effectively implemented? Almost certainly not. For such taxes to work they would need to be high enough that consumers and firms "felt the pinch." This desired effect, however, is exactly what makes these kinds of taxes politically unfeasible, at least in America.

<comment><USER15> _This desired effect, however, is exactly what makes these kinds of taxes politically unfeasible, at least in America._

Sadly true. The other factor is that conservatives won't like them because they're taxes, and liberals won't like them because they're market-based. ("Rich people shouldn't be able to pay to pollute").

<comment><USER3> I don't know any liberals that don't like carbon taxes or cap and trade regimes because they're market based. I mean, the EPA already runs a cap and trade system for some pollutants. I'd say the bigger issue is that there are some states represented by both liberal and conservative politicians that will lose under a cap and trade regime, and those politicians are going to oppose any carbon price because of that.

<comment><USER15> I probably overstated it, but it does seem that the left prefers cap-and-trade to carbon taxes, and they definitely prefer higher fuel economy standards to gas taxes.

 _both liberal and conservative politicians that will lose under a cap and trade regime, and those politicians are going to oppose any carbon price because of that._

Very true.

<comment><USER3> _I probably overstated it, but it does seem that the left prefers cap-and- trade to carbon taxes_

This confuses me. I thought you were arguing that liberals dislike cap and trade regimes because they're market based, but now you seem to suggest that they prefer cap and trade regimes to carbon taxes. What am I missing?

I think lefty think tanks and environmental groups do prefer cap and trade to carbon taxes but only because of implementation issues. They seem to think that more tinkering around with the tax code will not be helpful and that a cap and trade regime will have an easier time getting through Congress without getting gutted and sullied by unsavory deals than a carbon tax would. Plus, politically, calling anything a tax is a killer. And that includes policies that are revenue neutral. So they've basically decided that a crummy cap and trade regime that passes Congress is better than a good carbon tax that has no chance of getting passed.

Economists generally view carbon taxes and cap and trade regimes as equivalent; there are differences but they boil down to implementation practicalities. Its like arguing over whether you should use CPython or Jython; they're mostly the same and the answer depends on a lot of gritty technical details about your deployment environment, etc.

 _and they definitely prefer higher fuel economy standards to gas taxes._

I think this reflects a belief that raising the gas tax is political suicide and completely impossible. At least, that's the sense I get from reading lefty environmental wonks.

<comment><USER15> A carbon tax is more free market, because it just puts a price on the externality and lets the market decide how to respond. Cap and trade involves setting a limit by fiat and allocating the initial permits. Some on the left see those attributes as features, because they get to pretend to control total emissions, and help "deserving" companies. In reality I expect cap and trade would be corrupted by rent seekers to a far greater extent than a carbon tax would be.

 _Economists generally view carbon taxes and cap and trade regimes as equivalent_

I agree with Greg Mankiw that cap and trade equals carbon tax plus corporate welfare: [http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/05/reading-for-pigou- clu...](http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/05/reading-for-pigou-club_18.html)

 _I think this reflects a belief that raising the gas tax is political suicide and completely impossible._

Could be. From the conservative wonks I read there's a surprising amount of support for a higher gas tax, but you're right that it would be a hard sell to the public, compared to regulations where the costs are much easier to hide.

<comment><USER3> _A carbon tax is more free market, because it just puts a price on the externality and lets the market decide how to respond._

Ryan Avent, an economist who focuses on these issues and writes for the, um, Economist, claims that there are no significant differences between the two policies: <http://www.ryanavent.com/blog/?p=2011> I haven't heard your explanation before though, so do you have any experts who support this claim?

 _I agree with Greg Mankiw that cap and trade equals carbon tax plus corporate welfare:_

Um, do you really think that the US tax code is generally free from corporate welfare giveaways? If you don't, then why exactly do you think that we could pass a carbon tax that would not have corporate welfare exemptions included? Do you think that corporate lobbyists are particularly powerless when it comes to changing the tax code?

It seems that giving away permits initially is superior to including an exemption in tax law. The giveaway is a one time cost; but exemptions live forever.

Beyond that, I agree with conservative economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok that Mankiew's analysis is naive and incomplete: [http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/05...](http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/05/the- politics-of-cap-and-trade.html) ; that might be true for the ideal carbon tax with no exemptions for anyone that everyone agrees could never pass Congress. But there seems to be no point comparing a realistic cap and trade bill against an impossible to pass carbon tax.

 _From the conservative wonks I read there's a surprising amount of support for a higher gas tax_

Interesting. I'd be curious which conservative wonks support a gas tax increase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As usual, unmentioned is an individual's biggest single energy impact: dietary choices. Just a single semester's worth of thermodynamics study (the 2nd Law in particular) would make that clear. Some background includes:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/02/un- report-...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/02/un-report-meat- free-diet)

<http://www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0612sp1.htm>

No one who claims to be worried about energy consumption and climate change should be taken seriously, unless they cut down on their meat consumption first. Al Gore and "An Inconvenient Truth" was a case in point, but Gore finally started changing his tune on his diet, to his partial credit:

[http://www.ecorazzi.com/2009/11/04/al-gore-agrees-that- going...](http://www.ecorazzi.com/2009/11/04/al-gore-agrees-that-going- vegetarian-helps-the-environment/)

<comment><USER17> It is not that long ago that if you wouldn't use animal products or labour in most of Europe you would starve and/or freeze. Veganism as a lifestyle is utterly dependent on huge energy subsidies.

They love to play tricks with statistics too, comparing the calories in an acre of simple carbs in crops to the calories in the complex proteins in a cow. That's where the energy has "gone"...

<comment><USER18> Dried soybeans are 36% protein by weight. Muscle beef is 32% protein by weight, although other parts of the cow are lower in protein. A steer is 4% of the soybeans it's fed, by weight. So feeding soybeans to cattle is even less defensible as a way of providing protein to people than as a way of providing calories to people: you waste 96.5% of the protein that way.

The picture is a little less egregiously bad if you look at some other foods (sweet corn is only 3.2% protein, so if you could get your cattle to grow on corn without supplementing their diet with soy or other protein, you'd only be wasting 60% of the protein). But it still isn't _good_.

The fundamental constraint here is that _animals can't produce protein from carbohydrates or fat_. Animals can only produce protein from protein. In fact, most plants can't produce protein from carbohydrates or fat or carbon dioxide or water, either. They need to take up nitrogen compounds from the soil to make protein. As far as we know, animals can't aminate carbohydrates using other sources of nitrogen, the way plants can. So the protein that comes from your crops is the most protein you can possibly get. Processing it through animals can only _reduce_ the protein yield per acre of crops.

The complexity of the proteins in the cow isn't an advantage, either. You have to break those proteins down to individual amino acids before your ribosomes can use them to build proteins of your own. If foreign peptides (protein fragments) get into your bloodstream, your immune system will destroy them. From the standpoint of nutrition, the less complex the proteins are, the better.

On the other hand, animal processing can make the protein and calories considerably easier to eat. Ruminants' symbiotic bacteria can extract useful calories (and massive amounts of methane) from cellulose, even if they only pass 5% of them on to their predators; your body doesn't support these bacteria at all. And cows have these massive jaws and teeth for grinding up cellulosic material to extract the nutrients from it.

So, veganism _as a diet_ (I'm not sure what you mean by "as a lifestyle"} isn't dependent on "huge energy subsidies". It's just dependent on crops you can stand to eat and that provide you adequate nutrition. Eating animals is a huge cost to your primary productivity; the compensating advantage is that it renders you more adaptable in your crops. Eating animal products is somewhat less of a huge cost.

As for freezing, it's fairly unusual for people to heat their homes by burning animals, and in Europe, it was unusual for people to insulate their homes with animals or animal products. Not freezing is really more a matter of thermodynamic engineering than it is a matter of acquiring adequate energy. A good thick thatch roof, a couple of meters of straw bales in the walls, and some whitewash on the inside will allow you to heat even a largish habitation with a small fire. No huge energy subsidies required. (Please don't start complaining about the embodied energy of the whitewash.)

<comment><USER19> The soy that vegans use to replace animal fats and proteins is horrendously grown here in the US. Most of our soybean crop is of a monocropped, GMO variety using heavy amounts of pesticides and fertilizers. See the recent articles on dead zones in the oceans due to excess nitrogen.

To insinuate that a vegan diet is better for the planet than meat is insincere. In the end it's probably a wash, for various reasons.

<comment><USER18> 98% of the US soybean crop is used to feed livestock, according to Britannica <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/557184/soybean> . Eating the soybeans directly, instead of converting most of them to animal manure, uses dramatically less pesticide and fertilizer.

I request that you withdraw your accusation of insincerity and substantiate your extraordinary claim that "it's probably a wash, for various reasons".

(Disclaimer: I am not a vegan.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I personally think we should have consumption guages on our major energy users. Getting a hybrid woke me up to this and I have since added one to the house electrical system and built one for our heat. The cool thing is that it gave an intuitive sense of different energy draws.

In general it is true. Our intuition is wrong in many cases. For example, I found unhooking our doorbells was more significant than not using the clothes drier. Today our house uses 20% of the energy it did before having the gauge. We don't even try to conserve because the effort to reduce the baseline made such a difference.

Why don't they require this sort of device in all new cars? One study indicated that it would add $12.50 per car. Adding the ones to the house was about $200.

<comment><USER21> > For example, I found unhooking our doorbells was more significant than not > using the clothes drier.

Wait, what? What sort of doorbell do you have?

Also, did you figure that out just by trial-and-error of disconnecting things, or did something lead you more directly to them?

<comment><USER20> We had three old transformers that drew 20 watts each. The drier draws around 6000 watts for 40 minutes. Though I usually use a mode that uses less heat.

Anyway, I have a gauge by the sink showing the current usage and monthly total. It's cool because I could flip on a light and see the change. Right away I found $50/month (out of $250) but then over the years I kept looking to find the extra draws. I'd shut everything off and flip breakers to narrow it down. Since then it's guided purchases so I avoid things that waste energy.

At the peak of my "research" I had no fridge and then something I built that drew 300 watt hours per day. Back then my electric bill was only $7 (plus $15 delivery charge.). Though now I just live like an ordinary person. We use about $25-$45 plus delivery charge (a big chunk is a dehumidifier for our damp basement).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Heard an episode of CBC Radio's Ideas show on Hydrogen that had this fascinating aside (I'm paraphrasing):

During the 1970's oil shock buildings in Toronto turned out their lights to save energy, however many buildings had electricity from Hydro-electric resources and were heated via oil-fired generators. The net result was that turning off the lights made the buildings colder and it took more oil energy to heat them up again than if the lights were left on.

</comment><comment><USER23> From the article…

> Glass requires so much energy to make - or recycle - that it is always more > eco-friendly to use aluminium cans, even if one is talking about virgin cans > compared to recycled bottles.

 _Since when?!?_ Growing up, in a part of the country that was once known for glass making (but had stopped by the time I was a kid), we were taught in school that glass was cheaper to make resource and energy wise than aluminum, due to the lower technology overhead and ready access to the sand used to make it. Since then, based on my own reading, I understood that aluminum was really expensive to make due to the high electrical requirements for the process of cracking ores to get the pure aluminum out (a substance that is hard to find in nature in pure form, since it's readily makes compounds and ores due to its reactivity.) It was this basis that politicians and activists gave to push the first recycling programs here in the States. (Which always, without exception AFAIK, started with aluminum.)

My understanding is that glass was phased out in favor of aluminum not due to container creation costs, but storage reasons, since cans take up less room and shelf space than glass and were easier for stock boys and shoppers to carry. (The only eco-reason I came across was increased fuel use to ship glass bottles for the old returnable bottle programs. But this reasoning didn't make sense to me since I thought shipping a pre-existing container was much cheaper than destroying and making new ones.)

Did some technology in recent years dramatically reduce the energy cost of making aluminum? Or has the modern requirements of glass making added too much overhead to what was once a cheap process?

<comment><USER18> No, aluminum production still costs the same as it has for more than a century. The cost of the Hall-Héroult electrolytic process dwarfs the cost of mining bauxite, so the easy access to the sand is irrelevant.

Perhaps the distinction between what you were taught and what the article says amounts to a distinction of denominators. Glass is much cheaper per kilogram ([https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Embodied_ener...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Embodied_energy#Embodied_energy_in_common_materials) says glass is 18–35MJ/kg, while aluminum is 227–342) but aluminum is cheaper per container, because the weight of the container is smaller by more than a factor of 10.

Also, recycling aluminum costs less than a tenth as much energy as smelting it afresh. This reduces the "embodied energy" of a kilogram of aluminum destined for recycling to the same ballpark as the "embodied energy" of a kilogram of glass.

However, washing out bottles and reusing them is cheaper still.

<comment><USER24> > However, washing out bottles and reusing them is cheaper still.

Do you have a source for this? I am quite amazed that the British drink their bear out of virgin bottles. In Germany re-using bottles is common place.

<comment><USER18> A source for the cost of washing out bottles? No. I guess you might use about 100mℓ of water that you've heated from, say, 28°C up to 40°C, which is 1200 calories, or about 5 kilojoules. But the cost of the detergent and the new bottlecap might be more.

The cost of recycling an aluminum can, however: an aluminum can is about 14 grams of aluminum, which is about 300 kilojoules according to the above; supposedly (sorry, no source handy) recycling it takes about 10% of that amount, or 30 kJ; that's about US$0.0004 of energy.

I recommend _never_ putting a bear in a virgin bottle.

<comment><USER24> You can probably reuse some of the heat for the washing up. And perhaps even some of the water.

I've heard that glass bottles are more convenient to wash, because you can use hotter water. (That's from a reliable source --- a visit to a beverage bottler on their open day.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> About unplugging adapters: It is worth noting that the EU mandated more efficient wall warts and as a result all new stuff uses negligible power when idle. But a few years ago when DC conversion was done at 50/60Hz with great masses of copper and iron, it wasn't unusual to have a wart burning 8 watts day in and day out. 70kWhr/year.

As a good rule of thumb for warts: If it is warm to the touch, it is drawing 4 watts or more. If it isn't warm, don't unplug it.

I have a Ryobi drill charger, that if I left it plugged in when idle would use as much power as my high efficiency refrigerator. (A normal refrigerator is about 1800whr/day, so that is quite a bit more than my 200whr/day, but I'm living remotely with an astronomical energy cost.)

</comment><comment><USER26> Transport and heating/air-conditioning presumably are by far the biggest energy hogs of the private individual.

So if you want to use less energy: don't drive and fly gratuitously, and live in a property which already by its construction and location keeps the heat in (if you live in a cold climate), or keeps the heat out (if you live in hot climate).

<comment><USER10> Re heating/air-conditioning: get a passive house [+], but those work probably best in relatively moderate climate and you will have to sacrifice some comfort.

[+] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house>

</comment></comment><comment> Asa-Nisse Sometimes I wonder if The Register just is internet trolls from 1995.

<comment><USER27> Ars Technica posted an article on the same study with less trolling: [http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/08/most-people- in-t...](http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/08/most-people-in-the-dark- about-best-way-to-save-energy.ars)

I would love to get some DigitalStrom[1] in my house in order to get some hard data on my personal energy consumption. But you simply can't buy these systems yet. And I doubt I can get the same amount of data and control (over the data and my appliances) from the smart meters my power company is trying to sell me.

[1] = [http://www.digitalstrom.org/index.php?id=115&L=2](http://www.digitalstrom.org/index.php?id=115&L=2)

<comment><USER28> "Worse, participants who reported taking the most steps toward energy conservation had the least accurate perceptions of which ones saved the most energy."

That's a killer quote right there. I think bad newspaper science is to blame, there's too many articles printed on "do X to save energy NOW", without putting them in perspective, and only reinforcing some sort of feel-good effect in the readers.

The only thing that will work is cold hard measurements, and lots and lots of education.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can someone explain this to me?

"For example, participants estimated that line-drying clothes saves more energy than changing the washer's settings (the reverse is true)"

Makes no sense to me. "Changing" doesn't mean anything. I'm sure the article is on to something, but that quote here is just too unclear.

<comment><USER25> I assume they mean washing the clothes in cold water instead of hot. _changing the washer's settings_ does cunningly mask that the wash will also be less effective.

Numbers: A top loading machine[3] uses about 150 liters (40 gallons) of water to fill. If you fill that with hot water that is water that has had 30°C (50°F)[1] added to it. That is about 20 megajoules (5kWhr). Heating a liter of water from room temperature to vaporization[2] takes 2.5 megajoules (700 watt hours). So… in very rough numbers you can vaporize 8 liters of room temperature water for the same energy it takes to fill a top loading washer once with hot water. I'd say my load of wash doesn't lose 16kg being dried, so I presume less than 8 liters are being vaporized.

[1] I'm pulling numbers out of google here, you didn't expect more than one significant digit, did you?

[2] Vaporization is more than 5 times the energy from 1°C to 99°C.

[3] Terribly inefficient way to wash clothes, but if an article is going to make dramatic statements, you have to figure they will pick the most extreme numbers.

<comment><USER18> You mean "lose 8kg being dried".

I should measure the water consumption of my washing machine.

<comment><USER25> Right you are. I try to be modern and use standard units, but there is a little "multiply by two" always working in my brain when I think about mass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> From the source at [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/06/1001509107.full...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/06/1001509107.full.pdf+html)

"We recruited 505 participants through Craigslist in seven US metropolitan areas: New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Houston, Dallas, Denver, and Los Angeles."

</comment><comment><USER31> Is it about saving "energy" or reducing carbon emissions?

If it's about reducing carbon emissions, simply follow France's lead and move 80% of the world's electricity generation to nuclear and get a 95-97% emission reduction over coal fired plants.

</comment><comment><USER32>
        You would need to unplug it or switch it off for a year
        to save as much energy as it takes to have one-and-a-half
        baths.

Maybe something is lost in translation but what on earth are they comparing? The energy cost to heat the water in a bath?

<comment><USER33> Presumably, yes. Although there are formulae to convert water use to an amount of energy consumption (which takes into account processing, pumps, etc), they are probably referring to the energy to heat water. 1 watt for 1 year is (1W * 24h * (365d/year)) * (1Wh/1000kWh) = 8.76 kWh, or ( * 3412 BTU/kWh) about 30k BTU. The average bath is about 50 gallons, or ( * 8.35 lb/gallon) 417.5 lb. 30k BTU is enough energy to raise that much water by about 70°F (30k BTU / 417.5 lb). By that measurement, the Guardian takes baths 46.6°F hotter than their tap water. If that is too cool for you, you can take a smaller bath.

It's worth noting that the conversions here assume you can transfer the kWh with perfect efficiency to heating water, while in actuality, all heating systems will be somewhat inefficient. It will actually take more energy to heat the water, regardless of the energy source used by the water heater.

Edit: whoops, I originally misread and used 1.5 years and 1.5 baths. Calculations changed.

<comment><USER18> A couple of points:

\- It's a lot easier to heat your bath with solar energy than it is to run your phone charger. So if you have a solar hot water heater, a different comparison would be in order.

\- The inefficiency of the water heater is probably relatively small (under 50%, maybe under 10%) and so can be neglected for the purpose of round-number figures like "one and a half baths".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "In fact lighting accounts for a relatively small proportion of the average person's energy use"

That I do not share this view. The residential household typically uses 11% of energy on light and commercial up to 20%. It might not be much as a single individual if you consistently flip the switch when not needed, but overall as a society it does safe MW of energy. An even better way is to safe energy is the use of CFL (4 times energy savings compared to incandescent light) or the new LED lighting solutions (4-6 times energy savings compared to incandescent light). Australia and some places in Europe by law banned already some incandescent bulbs, because the savings is enormous.

<comment><USER18> The EIA Annual Energy Review 2008 <http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/> estimates that 1340 trillion Btu was used in the US in commercial buildings for lighting during 2003 (p.65), out of a total of 99.30 quadrillion Btu total US consumption in 2008 (p.3), of 18.54 quadrillion Btu total commercial use (of which 1.34 quadrillion Btu is 7.2%, which is, as you say, less than 20%). US residential usage amounted to 21.64 quadrillion Btu in 2008 (p.3).

Suppose you're right and 11% of typical residential usage is lighting (what's your source for that, please? The AER doesn't seem to hazard a guess there), and that the US isn't too atypical (admittedly, a very dubious assumption). Then that would amount to 2.4 quadrillion BTU spent on residential lighting in the US.

The total, then, would be 1.3 + 2.4 = 3.7 quadrillion Btu per year used on residential and commercial lighting, or 3.7% of the total.

Industrial facility lighting adds another 0.2 quadrillion Btu (p.48), which would bring it up to 3.9%.

It would immediately follow that 3.7% of the average person's energy use is residential and commercial lighting, and 3.9% is residential, commercial, and industrial lighting, which is indeed a relatively small proportion. If every person in the US went entirely without artificial lighting but otherwise somehow continued their lives as before (except in cars, which are not included in the above statistics), total US marketed energy consumption would drop by 3.9%.

I am in favor of compact fluorescent lights, ordinary fluorescent lights, halogen lights, and new high-efficiency LEDs. But the savings are not _enormous_ when considered overall as a society, particularly considering that most industrial commercial lighting is already using more efficient machinery than incandescent bulbs. They are, rather, _relatively small_.

3.9% of US marketed energy consumption is 130 gigawatts. 3.9% of world marketed energy consumption (about 500 quadrillion Btu/year, according to IEO2010 Highlights, p.1) would be about 700 gigawatts.

Laws are not admissible as evidence about energy usage. Laws provide evidence about political reality, not objective reality.

Do you not "share the view" that 3.9% is a relatively small proportion of 100%? I think that would merely mark you as a Humpty-Dumpty. (There's glory for you!) Or do you think that the US is deeply atypical, and that the average numbers are much higher than the US numbers?

<comment><USER34> Sorry, I can't follow your calculations on the BTU and the information I took is from DoE (Department of Energy)

"Thus, lighting was approximately 8.3% of national primary energy consumption, or about 22% of the total electricity generated in the U.S."

<http://www1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/ssl/tech_reports.html>

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the link. I can't find the words you quote on that page. Are they in one of the eleven PDF files linked from that page?

What's "primary" energy consumption?

Suppose it's 8.3% instead of 3.9%. Do you not share the view that 8.3% is a relatively small proportion?

Is there a way I can make the calculations any clearer? I wasn't being deliberately obscure. I didn't even do any unit conversions until close to the end, and that was only to compare energy usage for lighting with your figure of an unspecified number of "MW".

Do you have any information on average lighting usage? The reports on that page all seem to be about lighting usage in the US, which is almost guaranteed to be far from the average.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "Zeal to promote the common good, whether it be by devising anything ourselves, or revising that which hath been laboured by others, deserveth certainly much respect and esteem, but yet findeth but cold entertainment in the world. It is welcomed with suspicion instead of love, and with emulation instead of thanks: and if there be any hole left for cavil to enter, (and cavil, if it do not find a hole, will make one) it is sure to be misconstrued, and in danger to be condemned."

</comment><comment><USER36> If interested check <http://www.energytransitionmodel.com/> there you can build future energy scenarios. For instance see that you're far better off when you invest money in a better (house) insulation then in efficient light bulbs. Or how much total CO2 emissions are reduced if everybody switched to electric cars.

</comment><comment><USER37> > For example, participants estimated that line-drying clothes saves more > energy than changing the washer's settings (the reverse is true)

Huh? Line drying saves plenty of energy, what settings are you proposing we change?

<comment><USER18> My laundry washing machine has a dial on the front for the water temperature, which goes up to 90° (C, obviously). It heats the water electrically as it comes in. All but the cheapest washers sold here in Argentina have such a facility, because hot water is not normally provided to the laundry room. In the US, washers usually have an option to choose hot or cold water. Using cold water instead of hot will use less energy.

Also, "plenty of energy" is not a quantity of energy that can be usefully compared with other quantities of energy. See jws's comment <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614745> for more calculations.

<comment><USER37> Does cold water clean effectively enough?

Also, does using hot water negate the fact that line drying saves energy?

<comment><USER18> Cold water sometimes cleans effectively enough.

Certainly for any given water temperature you can line-dry to save even more energy. However, it's important to know that lowering the water temperature by a few degrees does more to reduce your energy usage than line-drying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Yes, recycling glass needs more energy that aluminum. That's why _reusing_ glass is better. That's how many bottles (including beer) are handled in Germany.

</comment><comment><USER39> would this be a good place for me to complain that San Francisco, home to Gavin Newsom's green initiative, just charged me over $150 for a permit to replace my old windows with energy efficient windows?

sorry for the diversion, just needed to let that out.

</comment><comment><USER40> [http://www.amazon.com/As-World-Burns-Simple- Things/dp/158322...](http://www.amazon.com/As-World-Burns-Simple- Things/dp/1583227776)

Reminds me of this comic book.

</comment><comment><USER41> In college I used a paper by former green peace founder where he talk about the fallacy of recycling paper.

That we'd be better off burning it for energy. And some other arguments about the life span of a tree and the amount of oxygen it produces.

Can't seem to find it now as my quoted URL is no longer valid.</comment>


Reasons to use Guava - <AUTHOR> http://insightfullogic.com/blog/2011/oct/21/5-reasons-use-guava/ <comment><USER3> I am a fan of Guava, not just as a very useful library, but as a way to read really good Java code. Check the source out, it is imo a must if you are a java dev.

One thing I'm not a fan of is the functional stuff. The idea is good, but java is just too verbose. Without real lambdas, like C# has now, it ends up being not so useful.

<comment><USER4> The whole Java is too verbose argument is starting to sound like a broken record. With an IDE and tools like ProjectLombok around, you don't need to type much more than most other languages. I code a lot in CoffeeScript and Java and I type less in Java because at least it has static types and code completion. Try renaming a method or variable in CoffeeScript. ;-) ctrl-space (code completion) and annotations are your friends. Obviously Java8 makes the whole argument go away and now that the multi-year stalemate on Java7 is over, we know that Sunacle is focused on getting Java8 out as well.

<comment><USER5> It isn't about how much you type, but how much noise your brain has to parse when you read it later.

<comment><USER6> My brain has to either parse or guess every time I read JS or Ruby code due to lack of information located near the subject code.

Obviously this is a neverending debate.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. I spend way more time in the debugger in CoffeeScript than I do with Java, simply because I have no idea what type of object I'm dealing with at that particular instant. I also tend to write pages of Java code and it runs the first time because I can read it and see exactly what it is doing before it runs. The compiler also tells me what typos I have in my code before I even have to run it.

<comment><USER5> I don't buy this for a second for many reasons. First, in Java I have to deal with a lot of other headaches. Heaven forbid I have to customize maven! Or, I'm using some annotation based framework, let's say jax-rs, and I'm trying to figure out why the annotations I'm putting on something aren't having the effect I think they should be having. Then there is the fact that my java project will likely have more lines of xml than lines of code in the equivalent ruby project.

But, at the end of the day I'll bet money that I can write a non trivial website faster with rails using notepad than the vast majority of java people can with their favorite IDE and java framework.

<comment><USER7> All of your complaints are about frameworks and tools, not the language itself.

Have you ever tried Play?

<comment><USER5> I have tried play, and my comment with a link is about the languages.

<comment><USER7> Sorry, I'm not groking what you mean. You mentioned problems with Maven, Jax- RS, and XML, then countered that with Rails in notepad.

None of these is a language, they are all frameworks and tools.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, I wrote more than one comment in this thread and was referring to one of the others. Java is much more verbose and I believe that has a negative impact. Here's the example I used earlier: [http://jaydonnell.com/blog/2011/08/07/is-your-idea- clearly-e...](http://jaydonnell.com/blog/2011/08/07/is-your-idea-clearly- expressed-in-your-code/)

That same code in C# would be nearly as concise as the ruby code. But there is more to it than just this. I've seen large Java projects that can't decide if they want to use interfaces or abstract classes. I don't think this is something one should spend much time on, but you're forced to in Java.

I've also see large java projects where they have some public interface that a bunch of other people are building off of, and after a couple years they realize they need to add a method to it. Ruh roh, what now? Again, why is this so painful?

Obviously these aren't problems in ruby because you can change classes at will. This scares some people, but I've done a LOT Of ruby and haven't had any serious problems with it. If you really like static typing then scala solves these problems as well and keeps the static typing.

Oh, another problem I've had in java are two frameworks butting heads over which is in the drivers seat as far as annotation based dispatch. Look back at the early days of combining guice with jax-rs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Java 7 also adds java.util.Objects, which contains hashcode() and other useful methods:

[http://download.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Objec...](http://download.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Objects.html)

<comment><USER9> It's going to be a mess with imports for those who need to use both com.google.common.base.Objects and java.util.Objects...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't follow Java development, but I have worked in it occasionally, and every time I do something in it, I'm inevitably surprised by having to use one of this commons libraries for something basic.

Is there a reason some of this stuff isn't added to the base framework?

<comment><USER11> \- Java has historically included things in its standard library that (presumably) everyone regrets nowadays, like CORBA support. The standard JRE is already overweight. Also keep in mind that size matters for Java - <USER2> theory, it's a client side environment that's downloaded and installed by consumers (of course, in practice nobody does that anymore).

\- The standard library has to be implemented by all JVM vendors, so adding lots of stuff to it that can also easily be shipped as a library creates a lot of unnecessary effort.

\- Changes to the Java standard library have to go through a committee process (JCP); again, it's probably just not worth the effort.

<comment><USER12> Bear in mind the in-progress modularity JSR (<http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=294>) that might help this problem. Also, some people won't want everything that Guava provides.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Adding to #1 :

Using static imports to import the newHashMap() method can make the statement even shorter :

      final Map<String, Map<String, Integer>> lookup = newHashMap();

This serves to make the code far more readable.

<comment> guard-of-terra In bolts, it's

      Map<String, Map<String, Integer>> lookup = Cf.hashMap();

Which is as short and also doesn't require static imports.

Bolts are the state of art FP library for java.

[https://bitbucket.org/stepancheg/bolts/src/tip/src/main/java...](https://bitbucket.org/stepancheg/bolts/src/tip/src/main/java/ru/yandex/bolts/collection/example/ListFExample.java#cl-22) some examples in tests

<comment><USER14> Sadly not in maven repo yet so my company can't use it. I have played around some with functional java (functionaljava.org) and Op4j. Have you compared bolts to either of those?

<comment> guard-of-terra As far as I know, functional java was used as inspiration, but bolts were much more suitable for day to day tasks (a lot of pragmatic code already there).

No idea about the recent development in fj, they probably made some improvements in the meantime, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> And one reason not to: [http://code.google.com/p/guava- libraries/issues/detail?id=36...](http://code.google.com/p/guava- libraries/issues/detail?id=364)

Java 6 source was introduced without explicit intention and once detected was not addressed. Many companies would not use something whose vital dependencies change on a whim or oversight. A lot of shops are still using Java 5 compilers and have no immediate plan to upgrade. Some cannot upgrade conveniently.

<comment><USER9> Your comment might be misunderstood. While Guava now requires Java 6 to compile, it is not required to run it. Guava is still targeting Java 5. You can use it by declaring a Maven dependency or by adding the latest Guava jar to your project libraries... But yeah, it forces you to upgrade your compiler.

There is an issue to create a Java 5 backport branch when Guava moves to Java 6: <http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/issues/detail?id=32>

<comment><USER9> Kevin Bourrillion (Guava lead developer) just made an insightful reply on this subject in the issue tracker:

      > Saw this bug referenced as "a reason not to use Guava."
      > Does everyone understand that Guava is still perfectly
      > *usable* on JDK 5, it just can't be *built* using JDK 5,
      > and that part of the reason for that is *compiler bugs*
      > in JDK 5 whose fixes in 6 were never backported?

[http://code.google.com/p/guava- libraries/issues/detail?id=36...](http://code.google.com/p/guava- libraries/issues/detail?id=364#c7)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We've started using Guava recently and one of my favorite changes is that you no longer need try/catches around string conversions in case the OS doesn't support utf-8.

<comment><USER9> Yes. Passing Charset arguments as String not only forces you to deal with the checked UnsupportedEncodingException, but it's also brittle: it's easy to make a typo (is it "utf8", "utf-8", "UTF8", or "UTF-8"?) and get a runtime failure.

Guava solves this problem by defining standard Charset constants in com.google.common.base.Charsets ( [http://docs.guava- libraries.googlecode.com/git-history/v10.0...](http://docs.guava- libraries.googlecode.com/git- history/v10.0.1/javadoc/com/google/common/base/Charsets.html) ). Java 7 also brings java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets ( [http://download.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/nio/charse...](http://download.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/nio/charset/StandardCharsets.html) ), but Guava will do for now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Adding to the OP:

Immutable collections, e.g. ImmutableMap.of(key, value). These tend to be faster than their mutable counterparts.

MapMaker - really handy for building caches and computing maps. Possibly the most useful thing in guava for simplifying non-trivial Java programs.

Suppliers#memoize - lazy loading without the ugly DCL code that usually goes with it.

Good libraries make a language much more enjoyable to work in. Thanks Google!

</comment><comment><USER18> Once again, I'm faced with a choice of language before starting a project... I kinda hate having this choice.

</comment><comment><USER19> Guava is cool. But Java7 makes some of it's packages or classes redundant. Good stuff anyway.

</comment><comment><USER20> Well, I recommend to move to scala language instead :)

<comment><USER12> I don't really see what this has to do with the article itself. It's totally ridiculous to compare learning a new language, developer tools etc. with adding a single library to a project. Also, Scala is specifically designed to bring many benefits at the language and library level that Guava won't.

I really find this kind of Snark disappointing on HN, and one of the many examples of a decline in the quality of comments that PG has talked about.

<comment><USER21> I agree with him - what Guava brings (functional programming, better safety in types) is something that is better done at language level like in Scala.

Either you like Java and you don't need Guava, or you want functional programming and other goodness and for that Scala is a better language.

<comment><USER20> Exactly!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Taskbox - Mail Could Become A Worthy Sparrow Alternative - <AUTHOR> http://appadvice.com/appnn/2012/10/first-look-taskbox-mail-could-become-a-worthy-sparrow-alternative

<comment><USER2> I've been using for the past couple of weeks, I like it alot. The design sold me, but I care alot about UI, anyone have any fav features?

</comment><comment><USER3> I downloaded the beta app. I enjoyed the swiping gesture for organizing my email. I found it faster than using a mouse.</comment>


12 Years Later: Jira Still Can't Merge - <AUTHOR> https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-3592 <comment><USER2> That is a nice find. Have not yet ran into that issue but only switched to Jira about a month ago after using an in-house system for years. Love it so far though

</comment><comment><USER3> Jira has several bugs which were opened years ago. The software is at best average and documentation very poor. What are the alternatives in this space?

<comment><USER4> Redmine comes to mind:

[https://www.redmine.org/boards/1/topics/18986](https://www.redmine.org/boards/1/topics/18986)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why or why not should I use Elm instead of vanilla JS? - <AUTHOR> I am a programming noob. Recently after learning about paradigms, I found the functional approach easier to grasp than OOP. I have been using Haskell and JS for learning primarily. So is there any reason to learn Elm? I know Elm is a domain specific language, but does it have any disadvantage that I should know of before starting with it? <comment><USER2> My experience, which is of course _my_ experience, has been that programming languages built on JavaScript such as Elm and ClojureScript wound up being harder to learn than Vanilla JavaScript. The reason I think is that JavaScript programming is really two different things. There is the language, JavaScript and its syntax and semantics...this is where the differences between imperative and functional and object oriented techniques show up. Dynamic versus static typing and namespacing/modules also show up as differences between the languages.

The other JavaScript is the Browser/DOM API. This is not syntax and semantics. It is approximately function calls to a standard library. Elm and ClojureScript and TypeScript and what have you, may wrap this in a library or a different API. But, at least for _me_ , this does not solve my problem of being unfamiliar with the underlying abstractions. Even worse, once I scratched the surface to learn an abstraction, for example Service Worker, I was on Mozilla Developer Network looking at JavaScript. Without understanding JavaScript, I gave up "official professional" documentation for ClojureScript or Elm "amateur" documentation of the underlying JavaScript abstraction.

Finally, _my_ specific conclusion about Elm was that it is not worth _my_ effort to keep up with breaking changes. Blog post code samples and tutorials seem to go out of date every few months. Not just a little, but irreparably out of date. If Elm ever stabilizes around a spec or something like a spec, I may take another look. But for _me_ , it feels like a case of perfection as the enemy of excellence.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would say that you should consider using Elm instead of JS if you are building a web application and you care about reliability and maintainability.

With Elm you will have a ridiculously stronger guarantee that what you write won't break at runtime. The type system and compiler also allows you to refactor with confidence.

Vanilla JS, unless you write exhaustive unit tests, gives you neither of these benefits.</comment>