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People Who Claim To Worry About Climate Change Don't Cut Energy Use
schwit1 (797399) writes with news that a UK study has found that folks concerned about climate change don't do much to conserve power at home. From the article: Those who say they are concerned about the prospect of climate change consume more energy than those who say it is "too far into the future to worry about," the study commissioned by the Department for Energy and climate change found. That is in part due to age, as people over 65 are more frugal with electricity but much less concerned about global warming. However, even when pensioners are discounted, there is only a "weak trend" to show that people who profess to care about climate change do much to cut their energy use. The findings were based on the Household Electricity Survey, which closely monitored the electricity use and views of 250 families over a year. The report (PDF), by experts from Loughborough University and Cambridge Architectural Research, was commissioned and published by DECC.
High power use doesn't have to be dirty: Replace coal, methane, and petroleum with nuclear, wind, solar, etc.
Global warming is a money/power grab, the ultimate in "Do as I say, not as I do" diplomacy.
Maybe 20 years ago, there would have been a chance of doing something effective. That time is past. And as the comments here doubtlessly will show there are still enough dumb fucks who do even at this late time not "believe" in global warming. (As this was somehow a religious question...)
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Wrong.
The cost of labor is influenced by the design of the machines. They're not designed to be repaired or maintained.
They don't use modular parts that can be easily swapped out or upgraded. Everything is intentionally made to be difficult to maintain.
How many machines have you taken apart? Imagine for a moment you were a designer of such machines. How would you design the machine if you wanted it to be easy to fix, maintain, examine for problems, etc?
Completely differently.
If the machines were built properly they'd be cheap to fix. What is more, most people could just do it themselves. Like replacing a lightbulb in most cases.
Do you buy a new house when a light bulb burns out in your home?
That is precisely what most people are doing when they buy a machine because the last one "broke"... it didn't break. Some little part in it wore out. That's it.
I have some older laser printer that have been in continual operation for 20 years.
TWENTY YEARS. Do you know how I've kept those going? I bought the replacement parts. They were 3D printed by a guy in Idaho.
Cost me 40 dollars to buy the bits. They're tiny little bits of plastic with little bits of rubber stop grabbing the paper properly after about 10 years.
What was cheaper? Replacing 20 laser printers or buying replacement parts?
And now you might say "oh but those printers aren't as fast or have as many features as the new ones or the drivers are hard to get working."... True on all counts.
The poor performance of those printers isn't really a problem since everyone pretty much just has their own printer and they're more then sufficient for that task.
And assuming you wanted to get better performance could be upgraded by swapping out some old parts with some new ones. Most of the printer has nothing wrong with it. Some electronics and motors might need to be swapped at most. A tiny fraction of the mass of the whole printer.
The drivers is a pain in the ass but that's just a question of poor support rather then something inherent.
Long story short, you like having disposable machines? Fine... never complain about the environment or the damage you're doing to it then. Because that attitude is what is causing the problem. If more people like you saw the light this whole issue would just go away.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
He suggested 32 MPH is good for a 10 year old car that's built to the safety standards in America. US cars from 2009 are a lot better too.
And the main reason European cars get better mileage is that they're smaller and lighter. We drive serious distances here in the US, and if our cars were as light as European ones, our fatal crash statistics would suffer enormously. I would not want to be driving the style of car that get better mileage in the EU, because they're smaller and lighter, into a car accident on a big American road like I95.
Visit List of countries by traffic-related death rate and sort by "Road fatalities per 100 000 motor vehicles" if you want some hard numbers on it. The highest entries are Malta, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Chile, Spain, Switzerland, UK, Finland, Ireland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Notice a pattern? That's the trade-off when everyone drives around tiny cars. The EU Econobox is a deathtrap by American standards.