And industry. And transportation. And commercial or public buildings. Taking into account only personal electricity consumption and disregarding all the rest that makes society work is deeply myopic
As a rule of thumb - electricity consumption in developed countries is about 1 kW per person, once everything is accounted for. Energy consumption is about 5 times as much
I was talking explicitly about electricity only. It's clear that I depend on so much more for all the surroundings to work. But the figures I pulled out are for electricity only and our country has 26% of its electricity generated by gas, which we could get rid of if people would use less electricity, which I believe is totally possible.
I haven't talked about anything else. But even this tiny area can make a difference. This is where people have most or even all the control.
Energy is energy whether it's electricity or something else. Europe's primary energy source is fossil based, either oil or gas, which of course mostly comes from Russia.
If you want to reduce your reliance on oil and gas from Russia, then you need to reduce your consumption of both materials regardless of how it's used. That means more than just converting your electrical supply to non-fossil source, it also means converting your heating supply as well (wood briquettes do horrific things to air quality, inner cities would become no-go zones for asthma suffers if we swapped gas for wood briquettes). Indeed the majority of household energy consumption in Europe is directly burning gas, not using electricity. So turning off light bulbs will have negligible impact on Europe's gas needs.
True! Our heating is to a large part based on fossil sources, but we started to move towards more renewable sources, like wood briquettes - which would be CO2-neutral. Indeed we could switch at least 50% of our heating to climate-neutral sources right now.
The renewability of wood briquettes is dubious at best, it's not clear the carbon emissions from biofuels is being properly accounted for, because many place don't consider the carbon release at time of burning, but rather at time of harvest. Unfortunately the rules of accounting for carbon emission at time of harvest aren't great either, with it being possible to simple not account for the carbon emission by claiming a clear-cut forest is still a forest, so no land use change has occurred, and thus no need to account for carbon emissions resulting from land use change (which is the trigger point for computing the carbon emission of cut trees).
In addition burning biofuels like wood briquettes and wood pellets at home release horrific amounts of carbon monoxide and other small particulate from incomplete combustion. Stuff that does horrific things to local air quality, we'll see the return of impenetrable smog to our cities, and health warnings telling asthmatics not to go outside for risk of dying due to inhaling all the nasties.
The source of heating is not what's the most important (in any case an (electrical) heat pump is always going to be more energy efficient, everything else pales in comparison).
Insulation is really the most important thing to reduce a building energy consumption (some buildings are even built with zero heating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_heating_building), along with air-tightness and heat_recovery_ventilation.
Seriously. Modern insulation + heat pump/heat recovery ventilation makes it possible to heat a 140m2 house in the far north of Sweden for a whole year with a few thousand kWh.
Does no one else see the irony in cutting down forests, some of the very things we are trying to preserve by reducing atmospheric CO2, as a means to reduce CO2 emissions? The phrase "can't see the forest for the trees" seems very apt here.
See also: clearing land (including fragile desert ecosystems!) for solar farms vs residential/urban solar, biofuels in general, subsidizing EVs which encourage poor land use and sprawl vs legalizing denser housing and building better public transport, etc etc etc.
When you burn wood, the CO2 released into the atmosphere gets re-absorbed by the next batch of trees that you're gonna burn next year. The overall process can be carbon-neutral, neither increasing nor decreasing the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
Once gas comes out of the ground, it's guaranteed to get into the atmosphere one way or another, and it's never going back down in there.
> Forests are recyclable.
Forests, like many other ecosystems, take hundreds of years to stabilize and mature. Clear cutting an area destroys far more than just the trees in that area.
No, but when second growth or plantation forests are cut down for heating/electricity it puts pressure on more mature forests for timber products, wood pulp, etc. The plantations/farmed forests could be instead used for these products.
You can use managed forests for those too. This isn't an either/or problem.
Deforestation is bad, but it doesn't happen because people want timber. Deforestation happens because people want to use that land for something other than growing trees, the most common reason being to make room for cattle pasture.
If you want to save the trees, don't stop burning wood, almost all wood products available today come from sustainably farmed managed forests. If you want to save the trees, stop eating beef. Also palm oil.
Unless you're living on 5 m2 you're not including heating, which is the biggest consumer of energy.