I am beginning to hate the phrase 'carbon footprint'. Its approaching the annoyance I feel when the weather man tells us it will be 'largely' something. The word you're looking for is mostly.
Anyway I recently saw that renowned 'scientist' KT Tunstall on the news advising us how we can avoid wrecking our planet. By the way we can add the word scientist to my above list whilst we are here. If you visit your local university and ask to do a science degree I imagine they will send you down the corridor to fetch them the proverbial long stand.
Anyway KT or (K8 perhaps?) tolds us we must unplug our mobile phone chargers if we are to save the planet. Clearly this, and lets be polite, idiot has been watching the TV and in parrot like fashion has regurgitated the latest news story wholesale. This particular story has been sent chineese whistpers style straight from some academic report which calculated the amount of energy wasted by people leaving their mobile phone chargers plugged in. What the story didn't do is put it in perspective. When it comes to carbon dioxide emissions its always going to sound big and scary if you say how many million tonnes of CO2 is used by something but lets do a serious comparison here:
A large car speeding on the motorway (perhaps driven by a famous musician) at about 90mph will be using about 60kW of power. Car engines are about 20% efficient at these speed, if they can do it comfortably, so that means the car will use about 300kW of power at this speed.
A mobile phone charger uses about 3W (0.003kW) when not in use which is a whole 100,000 times less than the nasty person SPEEDING on the motorway. True the power station is just under 50% efficient typically so you can half this 100,000 but still for every second that one car is speeding you can run 50,000 mobile phone chargers.
Now bearing in mind that to double a car's speed requires almost 8 times the power (yes 8!!!) then if that person slowed to just under the speed limit, 60mph, they would only use about 90kW as opposed to 300kW. Having said that they would ofcourse be using it for longer but only 1.5 times as long 90mph/60mph so the total energy require reduces by a ratio of 2.2.
If they drove a smaller car - particularly one with a smaller frontal area then they could reduce their power consumption below 50kW at 60mph.
So if KT wants to tell us how we can really save the planet she can ditch the headlines and tell us something unpopular and that most people dont want to do. Dont speed in your car you planet killing speeders.
Originally posted by itdontgo: I am beginning to hate the phrase 'carbon footprint'. Its approaching the annoyance I feel when the weather man tells us it will be 'largely' something. The word you're looking for is mostly.
Anyway I recently saw that renowned 'scientist' KT Tunstall on the news advising us how we can avoid wrecking our planet. By the way we can add the word scientist to my above list whilst we are here. If you visit your local university and ask to do a science degree I imagine they will send you down the corridor to fetch them the proverbial long stand.
Anyway KT or (K8 perhaps?) tolds us we must unplug our mobile phone chargers if we are to save the planet. Clearly this, and lets be polite, idiot has been watching the TV and in parrot like fashion has regurgitated the latest news story wholesale. This particular story has been sent chineese whistpers style straight from some academic report which calculated the amount of energy wasted by people leaving their mobile phone chargers plugged in. What the story didn't do is put it in perspective. When it comes to carbon dioxide emissions its always going to sound big and scary if you say how many million tonnes of CO2 is used by something but lets do a serious comparison here:
A large car speeding on the motorway (perhaps driven by a famous musician) at about 90mph will be using about 60kW of power. Car engines are about 20% efficient at these speed, if they can do it comfortably, so that means the car will use about 300kW of power at this speed.
A mobile phone charger uses about 3W (0.003kW) when not in use which is a whole 100,000 times less than the nasty person SPEEDING on the motorway. True the power station is just under 50% efficient typically so you can half this 100,000 but still for every second that one car is speeding you can run 50,000 mobile phone chargers.
Now bearing in mind that to double a car's speed requires almost 8 times the power (yes 8!!!) then if that person slowed to just under the speed limit, 60mph, they would only use about 90kW as opposed to 300kW. Having said that they would ofcourse be using it for longer but only 1.5 times as long 90mph/60mph so the total energy require reduces by a ratio of 2.2.
If they drove a smaller car - particularly one with a smaller frontal area then they could reduce their power consumption below 50kW at 60mph.
So if KT wants to tell us how we can really save the planet she can ditch the headlines and tell us something unpopular and that most people dont want to do. Dont speed in your car you planet killing speeders.
And of course, you're much less likely to have a serious accident. And if you could take passengers to save them travelling in another car you'd reduce the total carbon footprint a lot more.
Originally posted by itdontgo: If you visit your local university and ask to do a science degree I imagine they will send you down the corridor to fetch them the proverbial long stand.
Reminds me of my first job when I was sent to the stores for a box of atomic weights. My how we laughed - you just go to give to those scientist types!
