Japan Striving For Energy Efficiency 540
diamond writes "The NYT has an article on how Japan is squeezing to get the most out of the costly fuel. 'The government recently introduced a national campaign, urging the Japanese to replace their older appliances and buy hybrid vehicles, all part of a patriotic effort to save energy and fight global warming.'"
Woah! (Score:4, Insightful)
Or not. You never know.
It's extremely impressive, though, that they could manage to triple the output of their industrial sector for the same energy consumption - makes me feel guilty about doing nothing at all about climate change in my own home.
Re:New trend? (Score:1, Insightful)
Encouragement? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does Buying Hybrid Vehicles Really Help? (Score:1, Insightful)
and boost their economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Japan is a leading car manufacturer (especially when it comes to "green" vehicles) so this would also benefit their economy.
This is not news. (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, because of Japan's very high population density and its huge demands on water, it's also the country where much of today's water-efficient plumbing originated. After all, it was the Japanese plumbing fixture company TOTO that helped originate the concept of not only low-flush toilets, but also toilets where you can choose the amount of water to use per flush for even higher water efficiency.
Tax increases (Score:5, Insightful)
Go Japan! (Score:5, Insightful)
I also don't think as a country you can look to Americans to develop much in the way in efficiency technologies. Our mentality when faced with shortage is to go out and find or create some more. But efficiency is just as valid a sphere for creativity as production, and it works just as well I think; better in some scenarios.
Huh? Where? (Score:5, Insightful)
And it's not like the newer products have any reason to exist sometimes. I just got done fighting with my oven for an hour because my idea of an oven (a box that gets hot into which you put raw food and remove it when it's cooked) is very different from what the Toshiba marketing department came up with (a box with a million digital buttons on the front that ultimately control a big heating coil and a frickin' timer--but does so in the most circuitous and bizarre manner possible, so you know it's advanced).
Re:Does Buying Hybrid Vehicles Really Help? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tax increases (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tax increases (Score:5, Insightful)
In my eyes, you certainly aren't paying the environmental costs (ie the approximated costs of restoring the destruction you've caused) of burning the fuel you use (I've seen calculations in the 2-3 per liter range - would be around $15 per gallon, I think). Even you aren't from the US as I think, but a co-european of mine, you certainly aren't paying those gas prices.
Hooray for energy saving (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever happens with Kyoto, I think it's great to see a few governments here and there finally leading by example, and getting involved in encouraging and providing incentives for saving energy. Hopefully it'll get some power saving technologies and industries much more established than they were before, and some people might actually begin to realise that there are more benefits to being efficient than possibly reducing the effects that power generation might have on the environment. Some of it may even carry over into countries that initially didn't sign on to Kyoto.
In New Zealand, where I am, finding ways to save energy has almost become a necessity, albeit one that the general population is noticing very slowly. (The main theme at the moment is everyone wanting to build more power stations, but nobody wanting them in their back yard.) Call it lack of planning if you like, but the power situation here is at the state where we're presently on the edge of getting brown-outs.
The geographic isolation makes it necessary to be entirely self-reliant with power generation, and saving energy becomes a definite alternative to generating more. (Not all the time, but certainly much of the time.) Being someone who's quite enthusiastic about reducing light pollution, it's helpful to finally have some government bodies to deal with whose actual purpose revolves around finding new ways to save energy, such as this one [eeca.govt.nz].
My understanding, from having spoken to people there, is that the US Federal government is comparably hopeless at implementing energy efficiency schemes, for whatever reason. (That'd mean less jobs for all those americans in the power generation industry, right?) Apparently it's a much healthier economy when a few billions of dollars extra are circulating, even if it is for energy that's not actually necessary... but whatever.
If you happen to have an interest in energy efficiency, though, I've heard that state governments and more local authorities in general are often a lot more receptive about promoting it. I presume that it's probably much easier in states that buy more energy from neighbouring states than they sell. eg. Calgary (okay, that's Canada but it's in the same direction as the US from here) recently went through a programme [calgary.ca] of replacing every one of their street lights. It's expected to pay off entirely within six to seven years, through operating costs of the lights alone.
Re:New trend? (Score:3, Insightful)
A cynic who looked at the whole thing closely, beginning to end, might just come the conclusion that the whole thing smacks at least as much of trying to get consumers out spending as it does "saving energy."
Hey everybody, get in the car. We're going to drive to the mall shop for Gaia!
KFG
Re:Does Buying Hybrid Vehicles Really Help? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Woah! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just trading problems? (Score:4, Insightful)
they can be contained , atmospheric pollution can't.
Hell we could blast the batteries to the moon and leave them there , we cant just vacuum up the atmosphere
Re:Does Buying Hybrid Vehicles Really Help? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does Buying Hybrid Vehicles Really Help? (Score:4, Insightful)
As they exist today electrics and hybrids do not help in reducing overall pollution or save energy, although they could be a great boon to cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo for local reductions. That simply means that the pollution goes where there is less of it now though.
And they're not as much of a boon as bicycles. In LA it is usually sunny and pleasantly warm; and the last time I looked up the statistics 90% of the population lived within 5 miles of work.
It takes 20 minutes to drive to work, and 15 to bicycle. Thank God for modern time saving devices that threaten our lives and effectively bankrupt us pursasing, maintaining, fueling and insuring ourselves against the damage we're going to do with them. What would we do without them?
KFG
Re:Tax increases (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on how the tax is structured. If you just put a flat tax on gasoline, yes that is unfair. But if you tax by efficiency of the vehicle, and set a zero tax level at something reasonable like a 1.5L engine, then the impact should be small,
And Japan will suceed (Score:4, Insightful)
And Japan will succeed. Meanwhile, here in America, our government and big bisiness seem to be each others' ally as their policies still encourage heavy dependence on foreign oil and the use of fuel-inefficient vehicles! No wonder the best selling cars are Japanese.
It seems all the so called American innovation is no where to be seen. I'd like to know in which field America is leading the world.
We fly the oldest fleet of passenger aircraft among the industrialised countries,
All our electronics are Asian imports,
We are outsourcing our industrial base to the extent that the home grown textile industry is under seige,
I hear with the present policies, almost one-half of our defense hardware will be manufactured by foreign companies by 2018!
Briliant academicians now rather to to Scandinavia than come to USA,
Our healthcare system is the worst performer in the G7, even Cuba beats us in some cases, and on and on and on.
I pitty the generations to come.
Re:Does Buying Hybrid Vehicles Really Help? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Does Buying Hybrid Vehicles Really Help? (Score:2, Insightful)
You are assuming the playing field is level. It is not.
KFG
Daylight saving time (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Start using daylight savings time -- right now, Japan uses the standard time all year.
2) Join an appropriate time zone in the first place. Tokyo is in the same zone (UTC+9) as Korea.
As a result of this, in Tokyo during summer, it starts getting light out before 4AM, and the actual sunrise is before 4:30. I live in Tokyo and can tell you this is almost as traumatic as the summer humidity.
The sun never almost never sets later than 7:00 and seemingly everyone here stays up under lots of electric light pollution until the last train rush around 11:30-12.
So additional ways for Japan to save energy and be less reliant on imported oil do present themselves imho.
Re:An easy way to save a lot of energy (Score:3, Insightful)
The rating of a PSU is a maximum. Your system is going to use the same amount of power no matter what PSU you have in it. Your hard drive does not all of the sudden become more energy efficient because you swapped a 400w for a 250w. You've merely limited the capacity of your system.
Futhermore, by using an older power supply, you may actually be using more energy. However, I do not know the efficiency comparisons between old and new PSUs. The assumption would be that newer PSUs are more efficient, but this is not always true.
Kyoto Protocol is a scam (Score:2, Insightful)
OTOH, if you just wanted to screw a low-population-density nation like America that's heavily dependent on cars/trucks/etc, Kyoto's an effective way to do it.
Meanwhile, the trendy leftists here in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor won't allow high-density housing to be built so half the workers can't live near their jobs in the city, assuming they could afford the property taxes in the first place. But they'll scream bloody murder about President Bush not signing a treaty that very few of its signatories have a prayer of living up to, and tut-tut about how all the farmland surrounding the city is disappearing.
On the bright side, the feds recently made government agencies stop specifying Intel PCs, so maybe they'll start buying relatively efficient Athlon 64's instead of Intel blast furnaces. The EPA "Energy Star" program has been brilliant too, giving the marketing weasles something to latch onto. So there's a little progress.
Re:Kyoto Agreements (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Woah! (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the whales would disagree with you on that.
Re:Does Buying Hybrid Vehicles Really Help? (Score:2, Insightful)
A Prius, or a hybrid Accord, or a hybrid Odyssey, isn't intended to be the most fuel efficient vehicle possible - it is intended to be the most fuel efficient for that particular size and category of car. Of course you can buy a largely unusable micro-car and get close to the same fuel economy, but that's sort of missing the point.
Regarding evidence - this isn't some mysterious dark science, and it's remarkably easy to measure the fuel efficiency of a vehicle. The Accord hybrid isn't the most fuel efficient car on the planet, but you get the power and comfort of a high-power car with the fuel efficiency of a small 4-cylinder. Pretty much a win/win.
http://www.toyota.com/vehicles/modelselector/mpg.
Re:Does Buying Hybrid Vehicles Really Help? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why yes, yes I do. I'm currently working on HP/electric hybrid vehicles myself, eliminating the internal combustion engine entirely from the equation.
It works by recapturing energy that would have been dissipated as heat on the brake pads.
No it does not. It works by combining elements of both combustion and electric motors, hence the term hybrid. Regenerative braking is a feature that may be included in any vehicle which uses an electric motor for propulsion, but is not in any way innate to such a system and many electrics and hybrids do not use regenerative braking.
Take your basic diesel/electric locomotive, for instance (hybrids aren't even vaguely "new" technology and go back to the late 1800s in automotive use).
In any case you are falling prey to the narrow focus point of view. You see energy being saved in one area and simply assume that that equates and an overall savings of energy.
What, do you suppose, is the energy cost of creating such a system?
I'm not talking about "gas milage." I'm talking about true, overall savings of energy. Current hybrids do not save energy. They obtain their "savings" by stealing it from some some other point in the chain not immediately obvious to the "consumer" who owns and operates one.
For instance, the manufacture, disposal and recycling of batteries for the electric motor.
Just because an engineering tradeoff has been hidden from your view doesn't mean that it hasn't been made, and may even represent an overall energy loss to give you your feeling of a gain, represented by slightly better gas milage.
One of the reasons hybrids are so expensive is because they are not mass produced in the sense that an Escort is mass produced. .
But the main reason is because you, as the consumer, is paying for those energy costs up front, instead of dribbling it out every time you fill the tank.
If somebody were so bold as to actually build a hybrid on a proper foundation (which relies strictly on the electric motors to provide drive, the combustion engine being there merely to turn a generator) things might improve somewhat, but the public does not seem ready to adandon the idea that a combustion engine is necessary somehow to provide drive.
KFG
Re:Things change fast - try to keep up. (Score:3, Insightful)
Except the largest percentage of energy in the US comes from COAL.
Every time one of those idiots charges up their car from the grid, that's more radioactive soot thrown into the air. Gee, thanks.
Re:Kyoto Agreements (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Things change fast - try to keep up. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tax increases (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's the straight story: you buy more gas, you pollute more, you use the roads more, you pay more tax. Get over your "woe is me, I'm a poor mofo" whining. If you want to start arguing about including a car efficiency factor or car weight factor in the tax, fine. Because those differences actually matter. But stop complaining because someone else worked harder in life to make more money than you.
Sheesh.
Re:Kyoto - the impossible dream (Score:3, Insightful)
Fine... but what is the U.S.'s alternative plan to fight global warming? As far as I can tell, the current plan is to deny that the problem exists, and hope it will go away.
Re:Kyoto - the impossible dream (Score:4, Insightful)
While in the US, we've ignored Kyoto, pumped more pollution into the Greenhouse, and so continue to face the damaging consequences. A little bit less, thanks to Japan's participation (and the rest of the participants). But, by the same token, the world is still facing the Greenhouse, because the huge US contribution continues unabated. We're getting a "free ride to hell". When we could be saving our own necks, and everyone else's, with any degree of compliance.
How about our own declaration, less than the limits of Kyoto, but still mandated to have impact here? We'd be independent, we'd set our own model that works best for our unique situation, and we'd actually reduce the threat of disaster. Rather than the "all-or-nothing" rejection of Kyoto, so convenient for so many rich, powerful polluters, and so threatening for all of our lives.
Re:New trend? (Score:4, Insightful)
> Nah, saving energy is unamerican.
Doesn't it count as a "global trend" if 19/20 people on the face of the earth do it, then?
I know that Americans have a reputation for thinking USA == The Whole World, but that's rather OTT... (^_^)
Re:And Japan will suceed (Score:1, Insightful)
Somebody said the same ignorant bullshit to the revolutionaries in the 1770's, the abolitionists in the 1850's, the New Dealers in the 1930's, civil rights and antiwar activists in the 1960's, and so on...
Fortunately, this is (supposed to be) a free country, so people who don't like the status quo and "can't take it anymore" are often those who set the future agenda for our society. Sometimes they get what they want, and sometimes they don't. But the morons chanting "love it or leave it" to anyone with a complaint never do - society keeps on evolving, despite their simplistic, anti-democratic jeers and fervent efforts to bury their heads in the sand. Neener neener!