You probably don’t think of it, but most of what you do to “go green” in your everyday life isn’t as straightforward as it seems. Last year, 2015, was the hottest year ever recorded in human history, and temperatures have been on an uptrend for several years. Today people are led to believe that small changes in their behavior, such as turning off your lights when you leave a room, are going to be the changes that stop climate change. While some of these changes seem logical, when you look at the facts, these changes may not make the impact people think they will. As an environmental science major, I’d like to distinguish the misconceptions from the truth.
One of the biggest pieces of advice people are told to save energy is to turn off their lights when they leave a room. This seems like pretty sound advice, and it used to hold true when incandescent light bulbs were widely used. But they have been phased out for the most part and replaced by compact fluorescent lamps, or CFLs, which work differently. CFLs take more time to light up due to the fact that their fluorescence is produced by a chemical reaction with mercury. Over time, the more you turn these light bulbs on and off, their lifespan decreases, causing you to waste more energy every time you turn on the light bulb. So, if you only plan on leaving a room for a short amount of time, it could save you more energy to keep the lights on.
Another way people try to be more environmentally friendly is by using electric cars. People assume that because they don’t use gas to be fueled, they don’t have emissions and don’t use fossil fuels. In this scenerio, the fossil fuels are really out of sight, therefore out of mind. The only way electric cars would be better for the environment is if the energy used to generate the electricity it’s running on is renewable. If it’s coming from the local power grid, then it’s probably powered by some sort of fossil fuel, whether it be coal or oil or gas. Therefore, when charging an electric car, you’re using just as much energy from fossil fuels, maybe even more (when considering the energy it takes to be transported), than conventional cars. The same goes for emissions, where there is still just as much greenhouse gas and other air pollutants coming from the power plant than would be coming from the car.
Finally, many people are now condemning large appliances such as dishwashers and laundry machines as large sources of energy consumption in their homes. While they are using the most energy and water in the home, it is actually more efficient to use a dishwasher than it is to hand-wash dishes. It takes much more water to individually wash dishes in a sink, and if the drying component of the washer is turned off, it saves more energy. The same can be said of washing machines as well, as long as the washing cycle is set to cold water instead of hot, the machine saves more water and energy than hand-washing clothes. Many people believe that just because these machines use a lot of electricity and water at once that they aren’t good for the environment, but they’ve never stopped to measure how much water they use when they wash by hand.
While not every environmental habit that we misunderstand has been discussed, hopefully you can be a more critical consumer of environmental information. While some things sound logical when being argued, it doesn’t mean it’s the truth.
