Electricity: personal reflections

 This post follows on from a previous one about the cost of marginal electricity. I wanted to expand on a point I made there about a carbon tax.

          The problem is that some of us don’t have that much electricity to move. I use 4 energy-saving 60W bulbs, a PC and a laptop, a fridge and a microwave (to reheat food I usually cook on Sunday), all of which need to fit into my evening and can’t be moved. Over the course of the evening (5-10pm, peak period, assuming I’m home) that’s perhaps 3KWh, with my daily electricity usage not much bigger; no more than 3.5KWh in total. Average daily usage is maybe 12KWh per household, but since about 1/3 of households are unoccupied (26.7m households, 18m families, with some 330k households containing multiple families) daily usage in occupied homes is more like 16KWh per household.

          I do use more energy than just my electricity bill. I never use heating, but my shower uses hot water from the gas boiler, which I assume requires about as much energy as an electric shower, so that’s an extra 1.5KWH every day. In contrast, average households use four times as much energy from gas as from the mains electricity supply. The average consumption per year is 16MWh/household, or about 60 KWh/day for occupied homes.

          This is where the real savings are, which is why there has been a lot of focus on insulation and double-glazing, to cut heating bills.

          As we broaden our horizons beyond electricity to a more holistic view of energy usage, we see far more opportunities for savings and personal decisions. This is why a sensible carbon tax is so important. With a carbon tax that treats carbon dioxide emitted from beef production, car driving or lights treated the same, we can all prioritize our lives sensibly. We shouldn’t need to use complicated carbon calculators to guess whether our actions make sense or not by giving information on a myriad of different aspects of our lives. A sensible carbon tax, universally applies, would ensure that the markets deliver what we need, and that we can balance costs across our lives.

          Without this ability to compare and balance costs, we can get sidetracked by relatively unimportant concerns. For example, electricity, although important, is not as important as heating or transport. Turning lights off, or using energy-saving bulbs, is important because there is no significant cost in doing so, but is far less important a saving than some others, such as turning the heating down and wearing a jumper.

          Meaty diets emit more carbon than vegetarian diets (5.6 kg CO2/day compared to 3.8 kg/day. However, about 40% is from fertilizer use, and some figures add a large amount to account for deforestation. Organic home-grown meat avoids a lot of this cost. For example, the EU has an average CO2 emissions for beef of 12 kgCO2/Kg beef, but Brazil is more like 23. Beef is 10-11 times more carbon intensive than other meats, and the same source shows that North American crops can have carbon intensities of over 1 KgCo2/Kg food (because there are values over 1 of tonnes of CO2 per hectare, and example productivities of similar values of tonnes of grain per hectare). It is clear that the source of the food is very important, and simple divisions of meat or cereal are not sufficient. Emissions in the UK from agriculture are 9% of our total, of which over half is fertiliser and 30% from sheep and cow waste, including uncovered slurry pits.

          I eat meat, producing an extra few kg of Co2 a day. But that meat powers my bicycle and stops me needing to heat my home. Gas produces 0.203Kg CO2/KWh, so by saving all heating costs (let’s call it 2/3 of the heating bill, the remaining 1/3 going on the hot water I do use) I save 8.1 KgCO2/day.

          Estimates are that roughly 1/3 of national energy usage is on transport. Cars emit on average 14.3kg of CO2 per gallon of petrol, and cars, vans and motorbikes use about 12.6 million tonnes of petrol per year in the UK, and 12.4 million tonnes of diesel (all transport use is about 50 million tonnes, so personal transport is half of all usage; buses and coaches use about 1.2 million tonnes per year). If I return to the rough calculations, 1/3 of national energy use is transport, of which half is personal transport, giving us a national average of ½ our domestic energy use, or 30-40 KWh per day. I save all this in carbon by not driving to work, or even around after work. I don’t know how much the average person drives, but a vegan who saves no more than 3 Kg of CO2 per day over me on diet (and more like 2) would need to drive less than 10 miles a day (at 50mpg) in order not to destroy that carbon saving.

          My calculations show that it’s hard to track carbon. I’ve done quick and simple calculations using average figures, but these are only rough calculations. If I saw the cost to the world of my actions directly, through a carbon tax that directly affected by expenditure, I would be better able to live environmentally.

How to devise moral principles

Why choose 'death of a conscious, pain-feeling life-form' as your arbitrary distinction?

Do you think this defintion holds up for the purposes of defining meat-eating as harmful?

My quibble is with the link between harm and morality. I see no reason to base morality on causing harm. I chose to lead into this by pointing out that you have already qualified 'harm' as 'harm to pain-feeling, conscious animals'. The more qualifications one introduces, the closer one might come to your opinions, but these qualifications really need some sort of justification. Since the whole argument rests on this proposition, I think that discussing it further is worthwhile.

I think that the further qualifications come not through any set of fundamental principles that lead to them, but in an attempt to rationalise moral beliefs that are already held. This sort of 'post hoc justification' is common (as far as I know) in philosophy and science, but is really not good enough.

I suggest that we start with looking at why we do not cause harm to others and defining very clearly a moral principle there before we start trying to apply it to practical cases.
If we always think of the practical cases as we're devising a principle we might bias our ideas of what is logical by trying to make the principle's conclusions fit our preconceived notions rather than finding a sound principle and applying it in order to decide what our notions should be.

Animal rights

'Derek: Try me. I would honestly like to know what it is that makes it ok to eat cows but not humans. But if you aren't articulate enough to explain it then don't bother.

CG: How can I explain this to Derek?'

Cows are incapable of giving consent to the rights and responsibilities of society. They therefore do not get the same rights as those who do.

Longer answer:
Firstly, no, there are some humans who cannot give consent. Typically, they already have or might in the future (disabled people and babies respectively). You could build an argument about that.
If he queries why consent is important, you can similarly ask why the ability to suffer is important, that probably being the basis of his views. Both are arbitrarily chosen. He can use the argument to query your opinions, but his opinions are just as vulnerable. The conclusion therefore is certainly not to avoid eating cows.

Next up, he'll ask why rights and responsibilities go together: why a cow must consent to the responsibilities of society before it can have rights. At this stage we have to admit that it could be granted legal protections by society without consenting to them, but we will also point out that there is no over-riding moral justification for such protections.
Rights and responsibilities go together because they are the inverse of one another. The right not to be murdered is simply everyone else having a responsibility not to murder you.

At this stage we are getting into quite fundamental ideas about whether rights are fundamental and universal, which they quite clearly are not.
You could say that it is incredible that he can imagine an obligation governing a person who has not consented to it. That's a perfect description of a fundamental right: if a cow has a fundamental right not to be eaten, then this is the same as an obligation on me not to eat it, despite me never agreeing to such a thing.
You could also ask him whether predators in the wild are criminals. He will probably come up with some foolish notion that 'they know no better'. We can ignore his assumption of superiority, and bring up an interesting point of established law:
ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking it.
We can also wonder why being able to think suddenly gives us obligations, without even consenting.

Let us quote a wise old man (Albus Dumbledore): 'it is the choices we make that truly determine who we are'.
Thinking is not a choice. Consent is the choice. Consent is the action. If I am a criminal simply by virtue of my ability to think then I have been condemned for something that I cannot control.

That is the morality of fundamental rights. They grant rights on the basis of characteristics that are beyond the control of the being that is being given those rights, and are also beyond the control of the beings that must respect those rights. Fundamental rights therefore impose responsibilities, based solely on the belief of the person ascribing those fundamental rights. If we're going to choose arbitrary characteristics, we could just as easily choose humanity as the characteristic that determines whether a being gets rights or not.

On the other hand, if we believe that such an imposition is impossible to justify, the only way that responsibilities can govern a being is if that being has consented to them. This makes much more sense, since the consequences (being wrong or right in a moral sense) are now dependent on our actions, not on arbitrary characteristics such as being able to think, and we typically view moral judgement as being a way of judging actions.