od energy group read

We also learn, moreover, that traffic kills one million birds per year in Den- mark. Thirty-times-greater horror! Thirty-times-greater incentive to ban cars! And in Britain, 55 million birds per year are killed by cats (figure 10.6).

United Kingdom

focus too much on economic feasibility and they miss the big picture.

The UK has made it onto the winners’ podium. We may be only an average European country today, but in the table of historical emitters, per capita, we are second only to the USA.

26, 440, and 330

but you should find it easy to redo the calculations for whatever country or region you are interested in.

using a world population of six billion

1 ton per year per

Yes, the area of China’s rectangle is about the same as the USA’s, but the fact is that their per-capita emissions are below the world average. India’s per-capita emissions are less than half the world average. Moreover, it’s worth bearing in mind that much of the industrial emissions of China and India are associated with the manufacture of stuff for rich countries.

With numbers in place, we will be better placed to answer questions such as these

This heated debate is fundamentally about numbers.

if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little.

BP’s website

“Okay – it’s agreed; we announce – ‘to do nothing is not an option!’ then we wait and see how things pan out...”

One kilowatt-hour per day is roughly the power you could get from one human servant. The number of kilowatt-hours per day you use is thus the effective number of servants you have working for you.

But electrical energy can also be converted to chemical energy. In an alternative world (perhaps not far-off) with relatively plentiful electricity and little oil, we might use electricity to make liquid fuels;

paving 5% of the UK with solar panels seems beyond the bounds of plausibility in so many way

We use about as much to heat and cool ourselves (in Britain) as we use to move around in our cars, while lighting uses onlu a graction of that energy - especially using low energy fluorescent bulbs or the new generation of LED lights. Hydro-electric power in Britain, however, even with generosity from the wet Highlands, will only deliver about one third of the small amount of energy we use to light ourselves. How unfortunate that such accidental power-concentrators as mountains and streams are not more plentiful, and not just, maybe, for the energy benefits.

Loch Sloy’s surface area is about 1.5 km2, so the hydroelectric facility itself has a per unit lake area of 11 W/m2. So the hillsides, aqueducts, and tunnels bringing water to Loch Sloy act like a 55-fold power concentrator.

A more modest luxury is an electric blanket. An electric blanket for a double bed uses 140 W; switching it on for one hour uses 0.14 kWh.

patio heaters

Feb 7 2009. Join the Group Read. Chapters 5 and 6. Flight and Solar Will solar energy technologies allow us to sustainably take those long-haul flights to get our winter dose of sunshine? On the way, we discover that flying intecontinentally once per year has an energy cost slightly bigger than leaving a 1 kW electric fire on, non-stop, 24 hours a day, all year, despite the fact that modern planes are twice as fuel-efficient as a single-occupancy car. It may be no surprise, therefore, that Airline businessman Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, has developed a Swiftian the solution to the problem: " The best thing we can do with environmentalists is shoot them."

my own domestic gas consumption

It’s been estimated that making each unit of petrol requires an input of 1.4 units of oil and other primary fuels (Treloar et al., 2004).

The total amount of car travel in the UK is 686 billion passenger-km per year, which corresponds to an “average distance travelled by car per British person” of 30 km per day.

I want to estimate the energy consumed by someone who chooses to drive