A blog on saving energy

Seeing a polar bear on TV looking totally shriveled is a bit of an epiphany: it makes you think how much we’ve screwed up the Earth in the past hundreds of years. Usually, we blame the “evil” large corporations for mining, cutting, drilling and burning chunks of our planet; but is it really their fault? At the end of the day, it’s our own demand for convenience (nice word for “lazyness”) that caused it.

But all is not lost. If each of us works little by little, a great deal of improvements can be accomplished. This blog is dedicated just to that: to offer practical tips and tricks on how to live better, more sustainable, and spending less.

In the following articles, I’m going to focus mostly on energy saving tips, as usually energy is taken for granted as a cheap product; I mean, we do recycle and all (well, some of us do), but how often do we think about what electricity is and how it is produced?

For example this table (thanks to www.lowimpactliving.com/  for providing it) shows how much carbon dioxide is generated (data for the year 2000) for a Kilowatt-hour, in USA:

So, when you think of it, it’s not just your bills that would get slashed if you would reduce your electricity consumption: greenhouse effect would take a step back too.

Let’s analyze further:  the Australian national average Electricity consumption is of 6,570 kWhs per year (18 kWh per day). This includes a child that leaves lights on all the time, two computers running, two televisions, and a swimming pool with pumps for filtration and heating. Now, let’s say that our energy is produced at the average conditions from US – taken 1.40 lbs Co2/KWh. That means almost 5 tons of carbon dioxide per year, per household. And that is gas, so one tone spreads over a very high volume. With the ozone layer hole getting larger, maybe it’s time to consider a greener lifestyle…