> we average 2.4KWh per day
Unless you're living on 5 m2 you're not including heating, which is the biggest consumer of energy.
Unless you're living on 5 m2 you're not including heating, which is the biggest consumer of energy.
As a rule of thumb - electricity consumption in developed countries is about 1 kW per person, once everything is accounted for. Energy consumption is about 5 times as much
I haven't talked about anything else. But even this tiny area can make a difference. This is where people have most or even all the control.
If you want to reduce your reliance on oil and gas from Russia, then you need to reduce your consumption of both materials regardless of how it's used. That means more than just converting your electrical supply to non-fossil source, it also means converting your heating supply as well (wood briquettes do horrific things to air quality, inner cities would become no-go zones for asthma suffers if we swapped gas for wood briquettes). Indeed the majority of household energy consumption in Europe is directly burning gas, not using electricity. So turning off light bulbs will have negligible impact on Europe's gas needs.
Insulation is really the most important thing to reduce a building energy consumption (some buildings are even built with zero heating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_heating_building), along with air-tightness and heat_recovery_ventilation.
In addition burning biofuels like wood briquettes and wood pellets at home release horrific amounts of carbon monoxide and other small particulate from incomplete combustion. Stuff that does horrific things to local air quality, we'll see the return of impenetrable smog to our cities, and health warnings telling asthmatics not to go outside for risk of dying due to inhaling all the nasties.
See also: clearing land (including fragile desert ecosystems!) for solar farms vs residential/urban solar, biofuels in general, subsidizing EVs which encourage poor land use and sprawl vs legalizing denser housing and building better public transport, etc etc etc.
When you burn wood, the CO2 released into the atmosphere gets re-absorbed by the next batch of trees that you're gonna burn next year. The overall process can be carbon-neutral, neither increasing nor decreasing the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
Once gas comes out of the ground, it's guaranteed to get into the atmosphere one way or another, and it's never going back down in there.
Fuel wood comes from farmed forests that re-plant every tree they take down to recycle the forest every 25-30 years.
Deforestation is bad, but it doesn't happen because people want timber. Deforestation happens because people want to use that land for something other than growing trees, the most common reason being to make room for cattle pasture.
If you want to save the trees, don't stop burning wood, almost all wood products available today come from sustainably farmed managed forests. If you want to save the trees, stop eating beef. Also palm oil.