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Japan Striving For Energy Efficiency
diamond writes "The NYT has an article on how Japan is squeezing to get the most out of the costly fuel. 'The government recently introduced a national campaign, urging the Japanese to replace their older appliances and buy hybrid vehicles, all part of a patriotic effort to save energy and fight global warming.'"
Hey! Maybe they'll make up for Australia and the USA not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol!
Or not. You never know.
It's extremely impressive, though, that they could manage to triple the output of their industrial sector for the same energy consumption - makes me feel guilty about doing nothing at all about climate change in my own home.
--- Egads, I glow in the dark!
You want a new global trend? Try this one.
How long must we be a victim of fate and circumstance?
As long as it takes to change our minds.
I admit I just skimmed TFA, but what qualifies as a "national campaign?" Is it just adverts on TV, or are there tax breaks involved as well? During the Carter administration in the US, there were numerous tax breaks for individuals who did things like convert their houses to solar power. The percentage of solar powered houses (whether for electricty or water heating) in Japan greatly outpaces that of the US, but do they get tax rebates from it, or is it just regular Japanese environmentalism?
Sono koro, bokura wa, sore ga sekai no shinjitsu da to shinjite ita.
Has anyone done research on how much fossil fuel is used to produce the electricity to charge these vehicles. How much harm is done by disposing of the batteries that are no longer of use? Where is the rest of the story?
let's not forget that,
Japan is a leading car manufacturer (especially when it comes to "green" vehicles) so this would also benefit their economy.
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After all, Japan always had to import 100% of their petroleum needs, hence the reason why they've always emphasized high energy efficiency. That's why Japan has such excellent public transportation and why Toyota embarked on that research project in the early 1990's that resulted in the groundbreaking Prius hybrid drivetrain vehicle.
Also, because of Japan's very high population density and its huge demands on water, it's also the country where much of today's water-efficient plumbing originated. After all, it was the Japanese plumbing fixture company TOTO that helped originate the concept of not only low-flush toilets, but also toilets where you can choose the amount of water to use per flush for even higher water efficiency.
The easiest way to encourage people to use less energy is to tax energy consumption heavily.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
As a geek, I love clever solutions. Japan has a great track record at applying technology to day to day problems. But a lot of Japan's creative energy has gone into miniaturization, which makes sense for a gregarious people who also happen to live on an island. But there's only so far you can go with that.Also, for us Americans, diminishing returns with diminishing gadget size comes a lot sooner than it does for the Japanese.
I also don't think as a country you can look to Americans to develop much in the way in efficiency technologies. Our mentality when faced with shortage is to go out and find or create some more. But efficiency is just as valid a sphere for creativity as production, and it works just as well I think; better in some scenarios.
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I live in Japan and I haven't seen any national campaign. Besides, it's not like anyone keeps anything for more than 2 years here anyway. People are already replacing their old stuff with new stuff too frequently. As much as Japan loves to say how energy efficient they are, I have to wonder what all this facination with new products ends up costing energy-wise.
And it's not like the newer products have any reason to exist sometimes. I just got done fighting with my oven for an hour because my idea of an oven (a box that gets hot into which you put raw food and remove it when it's cooked) is very different from what the Toshiba marketing department came up with (a box with a million digital buttons on the front that ultimately control a big heating coil and a frickin' timer--but does so in the most circuitous and bizarre manner possible, so you know it's advanced).
Whatever happens with Kyoto, I think it's great to see a few governments here and there finally leading by example, and getting involved in encouraging and providing incentives for saving energy. Hopefully it'll get some power saving technologies and industries much more established than they were before, and some people might actually begin to realise that there are more benefits to being efficient than possibly reducing the effects that power generation might have on the environment. Some of it may even carry over into countries that initially didn't sign on to Kyoto.
In New Zealand, where I am, finding ways to save energy has almost become a necessity, albeit one that the general population is noticing very slowly. (The main theme at the moment is everyone wanting to build more power stations, but nobody wanting them in their back yard.) Call it lack of planning if you like, but the power situation here is at the state where we're presently on the edge of getting brown-outs.
The geographic isolation makes it necessary to be entirely self-reliant with power generation, and saving energy becomes a definite alternative to generating more. (Not all the time, but certainly much of the time.) Being someone who's quite enthusiastic about reducing light pollution, it's helpful to finally have some government bodies to deal with whose actual purpose revolves around finding new ways to save energy, such as this one.
My understanding, from having spoken to people there, is that the US Federal government is comparably hopeless at implementing energy efficiency schemes, for whatever reason. (That'd mean less jobs for all those americans in the power generation industry, right?) Apparently it's a much healthier economy when a few billions of dollars extra are circulating, even if it is for energy that's not actually necessary... but whatever.
If you happen to have an interest in energy efficiency, though, I've heard that state governments and more local authorities in general are often a lot more receptive about promoting it. I presume that it's probably much easier in states that buy more energy from neighbouring states than they sell. eg. Calgary (okay, that's Canada but it's in the same direction as the US from here) recently went through a programme of replacing every one of their street lights. It's expected to pay off entirely within six to seven years, through operating costs of the lights alone.
Because disposing of old appliances and manufacturing new ones saves energy and is good for the environment. . .if you make appliances.
A cynic who looked at the whole thing closely, beginning to end, might just come the conclusion that the whole thing smacks at least as much of trying to get consumers out spending as it does "saving energy."
Hey everybody, get in the car. We're going to drive to the mall shop for Gaia!
KFG
Atmospheric pollution is allot harder to deal with than disposal of batteries.
they can be contained , atmospheric pollution can't.
Hell we could blast the batteries to the moon and leave them there , we cant just vacuum up the atmosphere
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
And Japan will succeed. Meanwhile, here in America, our government and big bisiness seem to be each others' ally as their policies still encourage heavy dependence on foreign oil and the use of fuel-inefficient vehicles! No wonder the best selling cars are Japanese.
It seems all the so called American innovation is no where to be seen. I'd like to know in which field America is leading the world.
We fly the oldest fleet of passenger aircraft among the industrialised countries,
All our electronics are Asian imports,
We are outsourcing our industrial base to the extent that the home grown textile industry is under seige,
I hear with the present policies, almost one-half of our defense hardware will be manufactured by foreign companies by 2018!
Briliant academicians now rather to to Scandinavia than come to USA,
Our healthcare system is the worst performer in the G7, even Cuba beats us in some cases, and on and on and on.
I pitty the generations to come.
Two suggestions for Japan if they would like to save energy.
1) Start using daylight savings time -- right now, Japan uses the standard time all year.
2) Join an appropriate time zone in the first place. Tokyo is in the same zone (UTC+9) as Korea.
As a result of this, in Tokyo during summer, it starts getting light out before 4AM, and the actual sunrise is before 4:30. I live in Tokyo and can tell you this is almost as traumatic as the summer humidity.
The sun never almost never sets later than 7:00 and seemingly everyone here stays up under lots of electric light pollution until the last train rush around 11:30-12.
So additional ways for Japan to save energy and be less reliant on imported oil do present themselves imho.
Did you actually see that difference in your energy bill, or did you create it with hand-waving?
The rating of a PSU is a maximum. Your system is going to use the same amount of power no matter what PSU you have in it. Your hard drive does not all of the sudden become more energy efficient because you swapped a 400w for a 250w. You've merely limited the capacity of your system.
Futhermore, by using an older power supply, you may actually be using more energy. However, I do not know the efficiency comparisons between old and new PSUs. The assumption would be that newer PSUs are more efficient, but this is not always true.
Ever ask yourself why the Kyoto Protocol excluded China, India, Brazil, etc? If you were really trying to solve global warming (ignoring the warming and cooling periods that happened for millenia before industrialization), wouldn't you at least want to include China? Wouldn't you want to encourage nuclear power plants to replace coal-fired ones?
OTOH, if you just wanted to screw a low-population-density nation like America that's heavily dependent on cars/trucks/etc, Kyoto's an effective way to do it.
Meanwhile, the trendy leftists here in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor won't allow high-density housing to be built so half the workers can't live near their jobs in the city, assuming they could afford the property taxes in the first place. But they'll scream bloody murder about President Bush not signing a treaty that very few of its signatories have a prayer of living up to, and tut-tut about how all the farmland surrounding the city is disappearing.
On the bright side, the feds recently made government agencies stop specifying Intel PCs, so maybe they'll start buying relatively efficient Athlon 64's instead of Intel blast furnaces. The EPA "Energy Star" program has been brilliant too, giving the marketing weasles something to latch onto. So there's a little progress.
You were correct to recieve flak for that idea - it would completely destroy the internal economy of the US. Consider how much of the inter-state commerce of this country is transferred via single drivers in semi-trucks, and you can see how this idea fails even the most casual reality check.
Except the largest percentage of energy in the US comes from COAL.
Every time one of those idiots charges up their car from the grid, that's more radioactive soot thrown into the air. Gee, thanks.
Please help metamoderate.
...and least here in Californistan, we already pay that fine in the form of a 58cent surtax on fuel.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Fine... but what is the U.S.'s alternative plan to fight global warming? As far as I can tell, the current plan is to deny that the problem exists, and hope it will go away.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The consequences of polluting with Greenhouse gases are bad, regardless of any agreement accepted or denied. Japan might meet only a large percentage of their Kyoto obligations. What are the consequences? Less bad than ignoring Kyoto. And their economy is far from failing as a result of majority compliance. While there's little, if any, consequences from the treaty itself for less than total compliance.
While in the US, we've ignored Kyoto, pumped more pollution into the Greenhouse, and so continue to face the damaging consequences. A little bit less, thanks to Japan's participation (and the rest of the participants). But, by the same token, the world is still facing the Greenhouse, because the huge US contribution continues unabated. We're getting a "free ride to hell". When we could be saving our own necks, and everyone else's, with any degree of compliance.
How about our own declaration, less than the limits of Kyoto, but still mandated to have impact here? We'd be independent, we'd set our own model that works best for our unique situation, and we'd actually reduce the threat of disaster. Rather than the "all-or-nothing" rejection of Kyoto, so convenient for so many rich, powerful polluters, and so threatening for all of our lives.
--
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> > Hopefully this starts a global trend
> Nah, saving energy is unamerican.
Doesn't it count as a "global trend" if 19/20 people on the face of the earth do it, then?
I know that Americans have a reputation for thinking USA == The Whole World, but that's rather OTT... (^_^)
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