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from the read-this-while-having-a-nice,-hot-cup-of-tea dept.
When you hear about businesses with a high environmental impact or activities with a high carbon footprint, you are probably more likely to imagine heavy machinery, engines and oil rather than hairdressing. Yet hairdressing, both as a sector and as an individual activity, can have a massive carbon footprint.
Hairdressing uses high levels of hot water, energy and chemicals. Similarly, in our homes, heating hot water is typically the most energy intensive activity. For the cost of a ten-minute shower that uses an electric immersion heater, you could leave a typical television on for 20 hours.
So while it helps to turn lights and appliances off, the real gains in terms of reducing energy usage are in slashing our use of hot water. A quarter of UK emissions are residential and, of those, the vast majority come from running hot water. The longer it runs and the hotter it is, the more energy intensive (and costly) it is.
Mostly the hot water used carries a high carbon footprint, but the chemicals in shampoo don't help either.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday February 13 2019, @12:56AM (1 child)
Most of our water consumption is due to flushing our toilets.
While I reside maybe four miles from the Mighty Columbia River, to maintain a constant water pressure, our water is pumped up a hill then up into a large, tall water tank. There's a lot of people here, we flush our toilets quite a lot so the carbon footprint due to pumping that results from our collective flushing is considerable.
Quite likely a more-severe carbon impact comes from the lack of any consideration as to maintaining laminar fluid flow when pumping water through increasingly-many branches of increasingly-narrower pipes. Go to your local hardware store then examine a Pipe Tee. Gas and residential water Tees are crudely cast iron, with lots of sharp edges, nooks and crannies so as to cause turbulence.
There is also the incredibly complex Control Systems problem of adjusting input to an arterial pipeline - not just water, but high pressure - and so high-density - natural gas, petroleum, and the various gases used by chemical plants - while at the same time, a vast array of consumers adjust their own usage by abruptly opening and closing the valves.
The electrical grid has that very same problem: because of Magnetic Inductance, it's very hard to start-up the mains after a power failure. After my Dad had been studying for his MSEE for a little while, quite abruptly whenever we had a power failure - at the time in Moscow, Idaho, such failures were commonplace - he would _demand_ we turn off all the light switches so as to not load the system!
With water pipes, if you too-forcefully restrict the output, or too-forcefully increase the water input, you'll get a burst water main.
In the case of high pressure gas pipelines, for example all the way from Siberia to Western Europe, the consumption patterns of the end-users can only be very loosely modeled, while at the entrance to the pipe the entire Natural Gas Production of Siberia is fed into just a very few wide, strong pipes.
That gas input is under very high pressure, and so possessed of quite a lot of intertia - and so momentum and kinetic energy.
That had the eventual result that a significant contributor to the breakup of the Soviet Union was a gas pipe that detonated immediately next to a passenger train.
The whole Soviet infrastructure was just like that. That led many Westerners to _incorrectly_ regard the Soviets as backwards, or as taking no pride in their work of what have you.
In Reality, the Communists were _far_ more afraid of America than the Americans were afraid of the Communists, and for _very_ good reason. Consider this excerpt from an address that then-California Governor Ronald Reagan delivered to a banquet of Republican State Legislators and GOP Big-Wigs:
During his 1980 Presidential Campaign, Reagan said the following ON LIVE TELEVISION during an interview by Televangelist Jim Bakker:
During his tenure, Reagan regularly invited leading religious figures in to the White House that they may be given National Defense Briefings by the Pentagon and our Intelligence Agencies.
And who could possibly forget?
What leads me to assert that the very-closest we have come to Global Nuclear Annihilation was _not_ the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the early years of his Presidency:
Not long after the Fall Of Communism, I read a former Soviet Spy's account of being inserted into London, where each night he counted the number of lit-up windows in the British Defense Industry headquarters then reported them back to Moscow.
Too Many Lit-Up Windows Would Result In A Soviet First Strike.
If you ever wonder just _why_ I write the particular way I do, it's because I have long known that I am the very most _creative_ - if not actually the most-lucid - if I write when I haven't got enough sleep!
For reasons I have no clue about, I as well write quite a lot better code that way too.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @05:07PM
... and the point to this stream-of-consciousness ramble was what exactly?
Something about flushing toilets leading to nuclear armageddon and lots of scared russians, I think.