Category Archives: Energy efficiency

Yes, 100 Companies are “Responsible” for 71% of Global Warming Emissions: So What?

Whether 100 or 100,000, it’s consuming the fossil fuels extracted by these companies that ultimately drives climate change

The Takeaways

(see also medium.com version)

A Zombie Statistic

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From 17,000 kWh/year to less than zero: my experience with energy-efficiency and rooftop solar in Mesa, AZ

I wrote several hundred pages of a book that amounted to exhorting people to alter their own habits of residential energy consumption (turn down the heat, you rogues!), as well as upgrade their built environment  (e.g. insulate the attic) and appliances, or even, *gasp*, add solar to their roofs.  All this because the numbers, at least in the abstract, showed that such banal acts of conservation (not counting solar) can reduce the carbon footprint of residential energy use by at least 30-50%, from a baseline average of about 12 metric tonnes (1 tonne = 1 metric ton) of CO$_2$-equivalent (CO$_2$e).  But a demonstration of how, over the course of roughly 5 years, the net energy use in my house actually fell progressively from around 17,000 kWh of electricity per year down to less than zero (net) seems in order.

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