Charlie Bell wrote: > On 18/02/2010, at 11:29 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > > >> On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 12:00 PM, Charlie Bell <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> >> >>> On 13/02/2010, at 7:05 AM, Keith Henson wrote: >>> >> >>> Examples such as water tanks, solar hot water, decent insulation are small >>> steps that if taken by large numbers of people can massively lower the >>> demand for energy. >>> >> That's not as true as most people hope. All the saving you can make >> in a year are blown on one short aircraft trip. >> > > If you're talking per capita CO2 emissions, yes you're correct. If we're > talking energy usage across a city (especially mainly suburban cities like in > Australia), we're talking significant savings through these steps - they're > the low-hanging fruit that it's crazy not to get on with. Tanks compared to > desalination, for example, are so sensible and yet there's a push from > politicians to huge wasteful desal. We've got our per capita mains > consumption down to under 100l a day, and a few more changes to our home > system will take us to using no more than 10l/pp/pd. This across a city the > size of Melbourne can save at least 200gigalitres per annum, which would save > building the 788GWh per annum desal plant planned for Melbourne is expected > to use. Melbourne's power stations burn lignite... so you'll see the sorts of > real consumption savings that can be achieved easily here with ease. There's > no one-size-fits-all solution of course, but with some leadership we can save > a lot of waste which is just as important as transitioning to new forms of > energy production. > > For a little while longer I work for the local electric utility. We had a newsletter item that the Australian "leadership" had ruled out nuclear as an option and instead was making a bet on carbon sequestration from coal plants ... which will surely pan out eventually.
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