>Why? IMO we should all avoid waste, whether that's plastic or energy.
Allow me to respond with a slight tangent:
Suppose you care about reducing plastic in the ocean. So you try to reduce your usage of plastic straws. You spend a whole lot of time convincing everyone you know to buy bamboo straws or such.
Plastic straws make up less than 0.1% of the plastic in the ocean. Meanwhile, fishing nets make up ~40%. Plastic straws are a hard problem to solve, and solving them accomplishes less than 1/400th of the fishing net problem.
And yet, we hear a lot about plastic straws but nothing about fishing nets. Why?
Because it's the more consumer-facing solution. It's vital that people focus on the solution that solves the problem, rather than wthe one that is most easily pointed to.
Should we do both? In theory, sure. But in practice people have finite time, and you have 30 seconds max before they start tuning you out, so you're better off giving your elevator pitch on fishing nets.
Using energy doesn't cause climate change. Producing energy from fossil fuels causes climate change. Humans don't need to minimise energy usage to fight climate change, instead they need to produce energy from non fossil sources. I wish we produced 10x energy that we do now but from renewable sources.
You're right, in the most meaningless sense of the word. I too wish we had 10x the energy from renewable sources, but we don't and won't for the foreseeable future. What we actually can do is get maybe 1/10 of our energy from renewable sources and then, to be sustainable, we need to use 1/10 of the energy we currently use.
