Business is more important to our government than people are.
I’ve been playing 5ish minute songs whenever I shower recently so I don’t take too long and waste water just because I want to be personally more responsible but man, it’s really hard to feel it’s worth caring sometimes when there’s so much water being gleefully dumped into AI and various other large scale wasteful practices
Tell me your didn’t understand electricity generation without saying the words 🤣
Many things follow this pattern, but not all. It’s important to recognize when you’re being fed outright lies by the real villains and when you’re actually part of the problem. Don’t pretend corporations are solely to blame if those corporations can only do what they do because you willfully pay them for it. When they have a monopoly on necessary goods, sure, they’re entirely the bad guys. When they would do harm whether or not you pay them, same thing. But don’t act like the corp is the bad guy and you’re the poor little victim if you’re choosing to empower the bad guys when you have the option to spend your money ethically instead.
We do not choose to exist within capitalism, nor do the working classes control the state in capitalism. People do not choose to empower corporations, their control of capital and the state is what gives them power.
This is not an accurate understanding of the problem. The entirety of generation capacity for almost all of electrification (except for the last few years and for a very small number of power plants) has been built to handle peak load. Peak load only exists for something like 50 hours out of the entire year. The lights in Time Square represent base load, as they are always on. Turning off the lights in Time Square would do absolutely nothing to manage peak loads as compressors are far and away more energy intensive than lighting is.
The evidence we should be looking for is whether they require turning off AC in commercial buildings during peak load. Instead what we find is that ConEd is literally paying commercial real estate operators to reduce energy consumption during peak while asking residents to do it voluntarily without offering them compensation.
That’s how you know the game is rigged. Not through base load lighting, but by literally paying commercial land lords to do something that residents are asked to do for free.
The lights in Time Square represent base load, as they are always on.
I don’t see how that means turning them off at peak load wouldn’t lower peak load. It would also send a message that society is taking the issue seriously.
If you look at the difference between base load and peak load, it would be obvious that the lights are inconsequential to peak load.
Peak load consists of base load plus variable components. Turning off some of the base load reduces peak load.
So is my air conditioner. It’s not like me turning the dial up a few degrees is going to keep the world spinning properly. /s
It’s not just Times Square just like it’s not just my AC. Times Square is a visual representation of how seriously the city and it’s residents take the issue. If those lights are blaring, then I assume a whole lot of other corporate power consumption is likewise excepted.
For sure that’s a better analysis of the whole thing. Although, I do think it is worth noting how much energy is devoted to stuff like advertising, which is ultimately not productive use of energy. And if that wasn’t done in the first place, there would be more energy to go around avoiding the problem of not having enough of it at peak ours.
how much energy is devoted to stuff like advertising
And stores and businesses leaving the lights on inside, even at night when the place is closed and nobody is there. And lighting up their entire giant parking lot all night as well, all night every night, even though they’re only open during hours of darkness for a few hours each day.
I know it’s not that much energy in the grand scheme of things, especially now that everything is LED. But still, their complete disregard for energy savings – such that they can’t be bothered to install a simple timer circuit – irritates me.
(I suspect that they’re also leaving the HVAC running at full capacity overnight as well. That might be a more significant waste of energy.)
Exactly, and that’s just one example of massive waste. Another one is the fact that around half the food produced is just thrown away because it’s just more ‘efficient’ to do that. Capitalism is an absolutely insane system.
HVAC is not left on over the weekends in most office buildings in NYC. There are incentives and certifications and standards that drive that.
It would be real easy to fix the problem. There’s a handful of people controlling these industries.
I honestly have yet to see meaningful CO2e reduction methods that do not involve less consumption in some way.
Renewables help greatly.
