A paper about the wasteful energy usage of dryers:
https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/ene_14060901a.pdf
On average, Americans dry five loads of laundry a week, spending about
$100 a year to power a typical electric dryer, or $40 a year to operate a
similar natural gas dryer. In total, dryers now represent a $9 billion
annual national energy bill – about 6% of residential electricity consumption
and 2% of residential natural gas consumption. They consume as much
electricity per year – 60 billion kWh – as the entire state of
Massachusetts, and are responsible for 40 million metric tons of annual
carbon dioxide emissions. By any measure, their energy use and
environmental impact are large enough to be worth doing something about.
Of course that does mean we should stop with _both_.
That's absurd. Energy use is not the problem. Burning carbon fuel we dug out of the ground and spewing the carbon into the atmosphere is the problem.
I want a future where no human has to waste time thinking about drying their clothes, because that's a more interesting world.
I want a future of abundant and cheap energy. Why don't you think we can get there?
We are talking about drying clothes. The sun (and wind) _is_ abundant and free for at least some part of year (yes, depending on your location). I'm not talking about not using dryers any more at all, but that it is quite easy to not always use one. And most people in 'developed nations' still don't use one.
I've just found some data for Germany: 43% of households in Germany have had a dryer in 2021.
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/516868/umfrag...
In the UK the numbers are higher: 58% of households in 2018
https://www.statista.com/statistics/289140/tumble-dryers-in-...
Numbers from the 90s:
USA: 72% Belgium: 39% UK: 32% Netherlands: 27% Switzerland: 27% West Germany: 17% France: 12% Italy: 10% Spain: 5%
https://www.infoplease.com/world/economic-statistics/percent...
> Energy use is not the problem.
Not necessarily directly, no. But somebody needs to build and maintain 'stuff' that generates, 'transports' and uses this energy. So in the end there is a need for more of many other resources too.
Currently, there is no path to generating abundant and cheap energy without fossil fuels, and fossil fuels only seem cheap because they're not pricing in global warming.
All other forms of generating power are more expensive overall, or much more limited by other issues. Solar is very cheap, but having enough solar + storage to power a northerly country for a bad winter is decidedly not. Not to mention, the cheap storage solutions (batteries) don't actually scale up if you want to move entirely to solar + wind (there simply isn't enough lithium in the world, or at least not enough mined per year to achieve 100% solar + wind in a few decades).
Even that's generous because households often consist of multiple people with separate financial systems, so they'd be sharing the dryer metrics, but multiplying the Bitcoin wallet metric. That could make the ratio already much higher at 3:1 or 4:1
That's not even getting into peak hour timings. A financial network needs to run all day, you can incentivize people to run dryers at off peak hours quite easily.
Lastly, either way it's just whataboutism. We should be reducing all energy waste, including dryer usage, not pointing to it and saying "well why don't you care about that, therefore mine is fine"
All waste is bad.
Is it wasteful to have a 1000W gaming PC that only one person can use at a time when a Nintendo Switch uses a tiny fraction of the power and can support up to 4 players?
I think it is, because I don't personally value PC gaming. But I also don't think it's right for me to dictate how people spend their money (energy allotment) just because I think it's a wasteful use of energy compared to other things they could be doing.
Clothes dryers in the US alone (5% of humans) use the same order of magnitude electricity as global bitcoin mining. This claim is based on this back of the envelope estimate from the guy who led the decentralized identity project at Microsoft, ION, which also uses bitcoin as a foundational layer, https://twitter.com/csuwildcat/status/1361342448014778369
And these US clothes dryers are probably responsible for much more carbon emissions, because where people choose to live doesn't necessarily correspond with the cheapest or greenest energy sources, unlike bitcoin mining which is ludicrously mobile.