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13Mar/101replies

The Whole Eco-movement is So Misunderstood

Everyone is going green

Nowadays you’ll see everyone going green. Electric cars? Energy efficient lightbulbs? Buying local? It’s a trend that’s going in to all parts of our life. No, even more, it’s peer pressure. If you don’t “care” about the environment, then you’re not cool.

It’s just energy efficiency

But here’s my problem with it, it’s nothing new. It’s just being energy efficient.

Not using those lights or that aircond? **Turn it off. **

Your car is burning your fuel really fast? **Make it more efficient. **

The food you buy is shipped from really far away and burns fuel? Buy local.

Well actually, as you can see I have no real problem with going green and saving the environment. I’m a very nature-friendly guy. I love trees. I keep a huge collection of preserved trees in my house on shelves (read that as books). I don’t eat vegetables because I don’t like killing plants (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!). And my whole family loves animals to death (I think my weirdest pet was a bat).

But I have a problem with people just pretending to join the green movement for the pure cool factor of it.

False sense of accomplishment

When you have no idea what green actually means, you don’t do the research. You don’t know what you’re doing. You only follow the trends.

Trend #1 Earth hour. One hour a year where people turn off their lights. Great idea, but some people instead feel that they’ve done their part. And that’s it. So airconds are still left on. Office PCs aren’t shut down at night. Did you know that if you save 1 minute of electricity a day, that’s 365 minutes in a year? 6 hours right there. 6 whole Earth hours. much better than 1 don’t you think?

Trend #2 Electric cars. The Tesla Roadster is a marvel of engineering. Truly. But it’s not an environmentally friendly car. I know it doesn’t burn anything. But think, it has to charge it’s batteries right? From an electric socket? Which is connected to the country’s power grid. Which gets energy from power plants. Which still mostly burns COAL. So no, the Tesla Roadster isn’t eco-friendly.

What we should really do

Just don’t waste. It’s that simple. Don’t waste. That goes for leaving the lights and aircond on when you pop out for an hour, leaving the tap on while brushing your teeth, and leaving the engine running while you wait for someone outside the post office. Don’t. Turn it off.

I don’t particularly care about how the temperature will change by  2 degrees Celsius in 50 year’s time. I do care that we’re not being energy efficient.

Must be the electronic engineer in me talking. Optimization… Meh.