California's water saving brings bonus effects
Jan 2018, phys.org
California had a major drought, maybe a couple years in a row, circa 2016. Things got so bad they had to enforce water saving efforts. There were signs on people's lawns that said "Brown is the New Green".
They didn't hit their target, but they did a pretty good job. But the real news is that they did better than the energy efficiency efforts.
In other words, asking people to save water actually saved more energy than asking people to save energy.
This should be somewhat obvious to people who know something about public water infrastructure - it uses a heck of a lot of energy to run these things. So, obviously, saving water would mean saving energy.
This "discovery", however, leads one to imagine other ways of getting people to do things, or nudging people's behavior.
The drought made the water problem palpable. Brown literally was the new green. I flew to California during this time, and you could see the levels of the rivers and Lake Mead; you could see where they used to be. It was undeniable. Our energy crisis is a bit less palpable. The scale is too large, both in space and in time, for us to feel any urgency from it.
I mention this because perhaps the reason water-saving yields more results than energy-saving is the sheer visibility of the problem. But the more interesting possibility here is that people are not really that hard to manipulate, that is, if you're willing to be deceptive about what you want them to do. We can leave it at that.
image source
No comments:
Post a Comment