My Old Refrigerator in Forbes & the 3.3 Billion
Good morning,
I am writing with two items today:
A refrigerator update.
My recent Forbes columns.
I have a wattmeter. And I’m not afraid to use it. Indeed, my wattmeter and my kitchen refrigerator play significant roles in my new book, A Question of Power, and my new documentary, Juice. (By the way, you can pre-order the film now on iTunes. Release date is June 2.)
I measured my refrigerator's electricity use as a benchmark because it provides an easily understandable metric that illustrates the vast disparity in global electricity consumption. My 15-year old Whirlpool used close to 1,000 kilowatt-hours of juice per year. Today, there are roughly 3.3 billion people in the world who are living in places where per-capita electricity use is less than that paltry sum.
During the coronavirus lockdown, the Whirlpool started acting up. Rather than wait for it conk out – and face the possibility of being marooned at home without plenty of cold Hans' Pils – I replaced it with a spry new LG. The two refrigerators are similar. Both came with two doors, an exterior ice and water dispenser, and the same amount of interior space (26 cubic feet).
But the LG is more efficient and substantially quieter than the old Whirlpool. Shortly after the LG arrived, I plugged it into my watt meter. The spec sheet said it would use 715 kilowatt-hours per year. But my wattmeter said it will use less: about 385 kilowatt-hours annually. In other words, my new LG uses less than half as much electricity as the old Whirlpool. But it still provides a useful yardstick. Today, about 1.2 billion people live in places where per-capita electricity use is less than 400 kilowatt-hours per year.
See below for a graphic that I made to accompany my article. It gives another way to see the enormous disparity between the High-Watt and Unplugged worlds.
Read the rest of my piece in Forbes.
My other articles in Forbes
Last month, I began contributing to Forbes. It's a great platform that gives me latitude to write about issues I care about. On May 15, I published a piece on a subject I've been covering for more than 30 years: the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. I first wrote about the mass kills of migratory birds in the oilfields of Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I published pieces in the Christian Science Monitor, Tulsa Tribune, and Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. In my Forbes piece, "Subsidizing the Slaughter: Big Wind Kills Another Bald Eagle, Gets More Federal Subsidies," I explain that the Trump administration has quit enforcing the MBTA even though the wind industry is now killing far more migratory birds every year than what the oil industry was killing back in the 1990s. Wind turbines are also killing some 2 million bats per year.
Last month, I published a piece about the efforts of several high-profile academics to censor Michael Moore's new film, Planet of the Humans. That censorship effort went on at the same time that one of the academics was being ordered to pay the legal costs of the defendant in a SLAPP suit that he had filed as part of another effort to silence debate over renewable energy.
Here's my review of Michael Moore's Planet of the Humans, which provides a much-needed expose of renewables, but is also unremittingly pessimistic. Thomas Malthus has been dead for more than 200 years, but his views ride again in this new film, which, despite being 20 minutes too long, has been viewed over 8 million times. The film continues to cause controversy and was recently pulled off of YouTube due to a complaint about a possible copyright violation.
You can read my other Forbes pieces here.
Thanks for your support.
All the best,
RB
What can you do?
1. Buy A Question of Power
2. Preorder Juice on iTunes.
3. Follow me on Twitter.
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Thanks!