My lights use 8.5 Wh apiece.
The notion that consumer savings will make a dent in our problem has a few problems with decimal places. This is, by-and-large, a capital-driven problem. It's probably true that a reduction of individual consumption of stuff would be more beneficial than our energy use, too...but then that creates a new problem for that capital, too. So not only is avoiding the collective-action problem probably easier, but it's more effective, too.
2. How many aluminum smelting plants are there? How many light bulbs? The decimal places seem to go the other way.
This Wikipedia page -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aluminium_smelters -- lists a bunch of aluminum smelters. While it says it's incomplete, its existence implies it has most of them. I doubt there is a page listing all the light bulbs. Once habitualized, turning them off takes negligible extra time or effort.
3. I don't mean to be flippant, but are you arguing against conservation?
This chart is old, but has a nice quick visualization of where you might want to focus.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/styles/large/publ...
At least showing that for residential use, upgrading your AC, refrigerator, etc is probably higher impact than focusing on lighting.
2. OK. Aluminum smelters and oil refineries and frigging box factories and everything else. Start summing up. Those numbers don't show what you want them to show, I'd wager.
3. I'm arguing that it is a hell of a lot better to go after the people who actively benefit from disproportionate use because they are causing the deepest externalities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_New_Ze...
Aluminium per year: 720000GWh
20W (100W equivalent CFL) Lightbulb on half the year: 87.6KWh
Aluminium = 8.21917808 × 10e9 lightbulbs
Probably wrong in many ways, but I'll post it here anyway.
Then again your lights used 40-60w apiece just few years back.
Going to Mars requires a large organization (or a bunch of them) creating significant incentives for people to work on that goal, i.e., paying $bignum to many employees and suppliers - or it's not going to happen.
In the exact same manner, practically reducing energy consumption would require a large organization (or a bunch of them) creating significant incentives for people to reduce consumption, e.g. governments enforcing a significant carbon tax that raises the cost of electricity so much (or some other policy that brings visible, practical impact on each particular individual depending on their actions) that untold millions of people will be strongly motivated to change their habits - or it's not going happen.
Concrete-based construction is popular because it is easy, fast and cheap, but the hidden costs are the massive associated emissions.
Timber by contrast is harder to work with, but locks the carbon into the building, which hopefully will remain standing for many decades.
Also if your goal is just to reduce carbon in the atmosphere you literally DO chop down trees and make sure they don't rot (timber into lumber and plywood) and the you can bury them under a sarcophagus or something.
In short, if your utility is building vs removing carbon from the atmosphere, you choose what to do.
Why don't people do this on a planet wide scale?????? What is the downside? Seems it would be an amazing natural carbon sink. What are the downsides and obstacles?
If private companies planted trees they could monetize all that timber also!!
The early plants (billions of years ago) went through a few generations before other organisms evolved to feed on their carcasses, so they just ended up buried deep underground, trapping their carbon (and lowering the carbon concentration in the atmosphere) until we came along and decided to dig them up and burn them, throwing all that carbon in the air again.
You might be understating the time frame here a little bit. Most estimates I have read said it took about 60 million years before evolved the ability to break down lignin.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mushroom-evolutio...
But where to plant them? Around here(rural Wisconsin) anything that isnt roads, houses, or farmland is trees. Trees require the same soil as food.
They could plant more in the city, which would lower air conditioning costs by providing shade. But mature trees are a safety hazard, as they can fall during storms.
Are you telling Indians or Africans that they cannot even have electric cooking? Coal stoves kill thousands each year. Remember, you guys only have like 5% of the population.
You can limit your consumption -- it is grotesque -- but much of the rest of the world don't even have one lightbulb.
It's actually cheaper too, though there's an up front investment needed. Some charities are selling the devices in exchange for the weekly kerosene outlay, so that the project is self funding.
Until then, the energy your aunt Sally uses to run her AC pales in comparison to the amount of wasted energy being sent into space every second and so it's always worth doing research to capture that excess. There are plenty of rungs on the energy ladder before then, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy)
In particular, capturing 100% of the solar energy hitting just the Earth would get you 10000x the US' electricity consumption in 2009. At those ratios, saving energy is just a bad idea compared to capturing more: If a key scientist has to spend even 1 day sorting his recycling or hunting for a more efficient AC, you may have already lost out.
"100% of Earth's inefficiently-allocated incoming solar energy" is too subjective to earn a Wikipedia entry, but I assume it's a substantial fraction of the entire "100% of Earth's incoming solar energy".
Starting points include getting past the belief that happiness or society depends on electrical power as much as it does. We need some, but nowhere near what we're using.
Also accounting for costs that are currently externalized.