I Am a Light Bulb

What if I told you that you could save 3 tons of CO2 if you just flipped a light switch? Wow!

Wait, what if I said it was 100 tons? Would you know the difference?

Here's a quiz. How much is a kilowatt-hour? Is it a lot of electricity or not very much? What if I said that if you put all the barrels of oil we use in a year end-to-end it would reach to the moon? How about the sun?

I'm convinced that most facts we hear about the environment are dumb. Because they don't mean anything to us. Here is a great one I recently read on an eco-minded website: "If everyone put an insulation jacket on their hot water tank, we'd cut CO 2 emissions by 900,000 tonnes - enough to fill around 182,000 hot air balloons."

What does that even mean? I'm pretty sure nobody knows.

Facts like this are basically pointless. How are we supposed to live in a way that's more energy conscious, and ecologically friendly, when the world is presented to us in this way? It's not that the data aren't there. It's just that they don't mean anything because they aren't tied to things we know. (Who has a good gut feeling on the size of a hot air balloon?)

So I'm going to start over. I'm going to wipe my mind clean of anything I think I know about energy and the environment, and I am going to start with something I am familiar with. And I'll make it the center of my understanding about energy and the environment. I'm going to start with the human body. I am one, so I have a feel for what it is.

Now here's a genuine and honest question. If I asked you to compare your human body to a household appliance, in terms of the energy it uses, what appliance would you say uses a comparable amount of energy? Most people say refrigerator. Or freezer. And some people say dishwasher. So here is the simple (and amazing) answer:

I eat about 2,400 Calories per day.
There are 1.163 Watt-hours per Calorie.
So I use 2,781 Watt-hours during each 24 hours.
And so my power is about 116 Watts, or just a little more than a light bulb.

Women use fewer Calories, requiring only about 90 Watts. So I'm going to kind of take an average, and just say that people's bodies use about 100 Watts.

So I am Chuck.
And I am a light bulb.

And that is my first energy lesson to myself.