Watt Wise, Kilo-Watt Foolish

Burke’s post about the difficulties of measuring small savings is interesting throughout (ht: Megan McArdle).

It talks about how hard it is to know whether a certain action that saves money saves enough money to be worth it. However, it becomes even more relevant if you re-read it mentally replacing “saves money” with “saves energy”. Many of the myriad of energy-saving measures we hear advocated fall into the save the world by turning off the light when you are taking a dump category: feel-good meaningless in the big scheme of things (here’s a simple heuristic: if you can’t tell the difference on your electrical bill, then it doesn’t make a difference environmentally either).

Some people would counter-argue that small environmental measures such as unplugging the laptop charger when not in use should be promoted because they raise awareness even if they are mostly meaningless. I think, however, that we have a mental environmental-caring budget and if we promote the meaningless measures we crowd-out the possibly meaningful measures (like eating less fish).