Heavyweight physics prof weighs into climate/energy scrap

>While 40W may be small compared with the bigger picture, it is still energy that is completely wasted

The bigger picture is all that ever matters when we're discussing fungible goods such as power. The concept of an "order of magnitude" is fundamental to engineering discussions. 40W is just not significant when talking about the power consumption of an average American. Because of this, when you multiply 40W times the number of Americans and compare it to the total power used by all Americans, it is still insignificant on the important scale. It does not matter that if we all unplugged our TV sets when we're not watching them that we'd save enough electricity to power 10k households, because 10k households is insignificant when compared to the number of households in America.

>and Americans just got a lot more exercise from getting up from the couch and walking to the TV.

No, they didn't. A lot of Americans just got a tiny bit of exercise each. They're still all fat and out of shape (1). You're playing with the third decimal place here, or worse.

>Again, this is an issue that should be solved with better product design.

Due attention to the concept of orders of magnitude directs us to work on the things that matter, not the things that are marginal. This helps us overcome the all-too-natural urge to moralize over every trivial action. In point of fact, this issue _should_not_ be solved with better product design if that effort is better spent on things that really matter. If you could decrease power transmission losses by 50% over high tension lines, for example, you'd swamp the contribution of eliminating appliance standby power consumption many times over (I would guess).

Finally, this principle effects every aspect of one's life and is probably a very good indicator of the kind of person who would succeed in a startup environment. If the "We Must Do Everything We Can" principle invades you or your startup, you will be doomed to failure. You will not have a reliable way to sort out the important from the unimportant, the central from the peripheral, nor the vital from the irrelevant. You cannot afford to be fiddle-f@#king with trivial layout issues when you really need to be getting a product out the door, for example.

(1)This is just a bit of rhetorical license. Not all Americans are fat, nor out of shape.

Not quite - the "waste" is just emitted as heat, which will often be useful.

For comparison, coal-related deaths: http://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2006/01/us_...

Pollution: http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c02c.html

Oil: http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/OCEAN_PLANET/HTML/peril_oil_pol... http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN07427618

Pick your poison.

You can still save a few <currency> on your annual bill by switching the lights off when you don't need them and using energy-saving bulbs. OK, so that's probably in the order of 1% of your bill, but still, 1% for something that takes virtually no effort at all.

What he's shown is that not all energy-saving tips are equal. Unplugging your power adaptor isn't really worth the effort. Turning your thermostat down half a degree, using a colder washing machine cycle, driving 5mph slower or more evenly or without air conditioning and not reboiling the kettle when it's still hot are all little actions that can have a significant effect on your energy usage.

What could happen, though, is that cars will become a luxury item for more and more people. That's slowly happening now, as oil gets more expensive. Cars will get smaller. They'll emphasize efficiency. They will still be bought, but will be driven less and less. Perhaps there will be one car per household rather than two or three. A lot of cars will just be for show: They will look really fast, sitting there in their beautiful garage.

Eventually cars might end up where horses are today -- a few high-tech racecars, some recreational cars in upper-middle-class garages, some working cars in poor areas of Third-World countries, and a rich literary tradition -- tales of the wild Carboys and their lives on the highways of 1960s Las Vegas. (Come to think of it, we've already got the literary tradition.)

Or, cars might just become passe. People's tastes can change on a dime, if the price is right. Some of us were hip enough to hate SUVs before it was cool [1], but everybody is starting to hate them now. Large numbers of people used to be really into horses, square-rigged sailing ships, steamboats... but once gas got cheap there was no turning back.

Or maybe somebody invents Mister Fusion and we're all saved. Or it turns out that plug-in electrics plus breeder reactors plus solar panels make the car culture work for another two hundred years, which is rather more likely but hardly guaranteed.

[1] Or, rather, before hating SUVs became so mainstream that it was no longer hip. Perhaps the hipsters of the mid-21st century will all own enormous nuclear-powered SUVs.