You bastards and your eco-criminal MICROWAVE OVENS
Now class, we all know what totally irresponsible, EVIL, eco-criminal behavior looks like, right?
No question, when the average “environmentalist” thinks about people wasting the planet’s vital resources, the venal, selfish, brutish Hummer comes to mind. This is what Darth Vader would have driven, tearing up lilacs and spewing smoke. Oh yeah, pure satanic lust is what makes you buy one of these monstrosities.
Wait a minute, hybrid car owners — don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back just yet. I discovered a lot of dirty laundry about you guys too.
What I love about systems analysis is that it reminds you to take a much broader view of the world. In this week’s The Economist they have their Technology Quarterly, which rounds up the implications of a bunch of technologies. And in there I discovered what the TRUE face of energy-wasting evil is:
Oh, don’t pretend you don’t have one. It’s the NEW face of malevolence the MICROWAVE OVEN.
Before you think I’ve lost my mind, check out “Pulling the plug on standy power” in The Economist. It turns out that there are billions of devices that waste as much as 5% percent of energy consumption by staying in “standby mode.” Even though the microwave take 100 times more power than the digital clock to actually cook food, 99% of the time it’s just sitting there, slowly draining power to run the clock. Just like your damned VCR. And the DVD player that’s sitting there, sucking away your children’s ability to live on the planet.
Seriously, this is another design issue, where we can make significant (five percent!) increases in efficiency with no noticeable loss of lifestyle. This is a fascinating point — could you save 5% of your country’s energy consumption just by having a windup clock instead of a little digital clock in 12 places around the house?
This is another example of the fact that we shouldn’t wait for a miracle technology to bring zero-point energy — we have tremendous progress we can make by simply being mindful.