Jacob":2pgyvubd said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromyth
The vacuum thing is part of a wide and effective energy saving strategy across the board.
Wide? yes - pervasive.
Effective?
It's the same "strategic thinkers" who intend to apply the same idea to
electric kettles!!!! If you don't appreciate why this is stupid beyond words, yet is likely to become law affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people, I suggest some GCSE-level physcs would help.
It is far too easy to dismiss such people as utter morons, but they are not so. They are, in fact, yet again giving in to the lobbying of the big manufacturers, at the expense of the little guys. In this case we can guess the names of the big manufacturers, the smaller businesses being specialists like Numatic, who make truly excellent vacuum cleaners, and who have been steadily taking market share off the bigger guys for a long time.
Consider this: the directive only applies to domestic appliances, not "industrially-rated" ones. Which type are likely to run daily for hours at a time, and which for minutes? Which is likely to fail quicker - a big, lightly loaded motor, or a small one running at or near its theoretical maximum (which in addition has been cost-reduced to blazes)?
If you make stuff for the consumer market, designed-in obsolescence or failure is important. The "perfect" consumer product fails a few months out of warranty,
so it has to be replaced, and it cannot be maintained. Back in the day, this was an unfortunate by-product of the cost-reduction aspect of the product lifecycle, but nowadays it is deliberate.
How environmentally effective is it to scrap, dismantle, salvage *some* materials, throw the rest into landfill, then re-manufacture essentially the same thing, package it, market it, distribute and sell it
only for the same cycle to be endlessly repeated every two or three years. If you assume cost to be a reasonable proxy for energy use, the cost-of-sales for consumer products is very commonly 70% of the retail price.
So who benefits from this? Not the consumer; certainly not the environment; but big business.
Jacob"It's no coincidence that euro sceptics also tend to be climate change sceptics and would dismiss these things as "worthy". In fact there is a major crisis and if anything the introduction of fossil fuel reduction measures are now too slow and too late. But it's only through larger institutions that we stand any chance of dealing with these things on a global scale.[/quote said:
The Americans would say you'd drunk (deeply) of the Koolade.
I am a convinced environmentalist. I have had solar panels on the roof, since long before they were a subsudused bubble. Mine are NOT electricity generating, because that is stupidly inefficient and inappropriate use of solar power at these latitudes - you can store hot water cheaply and easily and usefully, but you cannot do this with electricity. Mine have one moving part, and the electronics cost about as much as an old-fashioned transistor radio. Sadly the company that made the panels has now gone bust, because of the subsidies and promotional hype given to electric panels.
I am horrified by the windmills etc. that now blight the landscape (and seascape). They have been built at huge energy cost, their maintenance cost is enormous, and they by their very nature are incapable of contributing significantly to our energy needs. Similarly the solar panels on roofs. We haven't yet begun to really see the cost of these things but there will come a day, pretty soon now, I expect, when property values are adversely affected by their presence, because they will attract higher insurance premiums and a requirement for expensive maintenance.
Meanwhile, in order to ensure continuity of supply, the National Grid Company here is reduced to contracting the diesel standby sets of companies with large plants, to maintain the voltage and frequency of the grid on not-windy days (and night-time). Base-load generation stations such as Drax and Didcot, around which our national grid topology was designed in the 1950s and 1960s, and which could have relatively cost-effectively had scrubbers fitted to their exhausts, have been too-rapidly shut down and demolished. THEY HAVE NO REPLACEMENTS PRESENTLY.
A cynic would think someone wants to bring us to our knees by destroying what used to be one of the most efficient power grids on the planet, replacing the core generation capacity with too-small and wholly inconsistent and unreliable systems that cannot fulfil the role.
I oppose it, not because I don't believe in anthropogenic global warming (I do, actually), BUT BECAUSE IT IS POLITICISED AND STUPID POLICY.
If the EU's ideas policies and propaganda are the answer in these circumstances, boy it must have been a dumb question in the first place!
But sadly it was a real, serious question, and the EU is doing its bit to ensure we actually DON'T have effective answers. Meanwhile big business grows fat, ensuring we replace our consumer products as frequently as they can force us to.
Have you heard of the term "greenwash"?
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