When Less May Be More
The following, written by Bryan Walsh, appeared in Time Magazine (1 Mar 2010):
“What do dieting and energy policy have in common? The SnackWell effect. The comes from those tasty little cookies that are advertised as being lower in fat and sugar. And they are–which often leads dieters to eat more of them than regular cookies and then wonder why they’re not losing weight.
It turns out there’s a SnackWell effect for energy use too–and it may make it tougher for us to cut back on carbon. When environmentally conscious consumers buy an energy-efficient dishwasher, for example they may feel less guilty about running the machine more often and as a result may not end up saving much on their utility bills. Likewise, studies indicate that people who install more-energy-efficient lights lose 5% to 12% of the expected savings by leaving them on longer.”
“That doesn’t mean energy-efficiency measures . . . are useless. But it does mean that cutting back on energy consumption, like dieting, is not an excuse to gorge ourselves on less guilty pleasures.”
July 17th, 2010 at 5:55 am
I’ve been into environmentalism for 20 some odd years now. I’ve always wanted to find a way to reduce our usage of the electrical grid, which I’ve done to some extent with a few solar panels, but I can’t really afford anything that would power the whole home. I’ve been looking into building a cheap magnetic generator (here is one example I found, but I’ve been wondering how hard it would be. Have you had any experice with this or others?