We live in a world where our demands upon the environment are ever larger, where the population grows at an exponential rate and where technology advances in leaps and bounds.  The result is an ever increasing demand for resources, and an ever-increasing demand for energy.  Our energy is produced (in the main part) by burning fossil fuels, and hence produces pollution, thus an inevitable conflict ensues: between our demand for less pollution, and our demand for more energy.  We talk of switching to cleaner energy, and using renewable sources…  but perhaps we should also think about simply reducing the amount of energy we use?  Whilst this might be quite easy to agree to however, when we look at the situation we can see that in fact, it is proving to be a lot harder to achieve.

In today’s society, given the increasing focus on climate change and the influence of human activity on this, there are several organisations which track how we produce and use energy.  Often this tracking can use multiple data sets – all of which can be quite confusing, and much of which (sadly) doesn’t compare like to like.  However looking at data from 1990-2015 there are several clear trends:

• The energy we produce today is 10% cleaner that it was
• Each person uses 50% more energy today
• Population has increased by nearly 40%

(According to the International Energy Agency there has been a clear increase in energy-related CO² emissions since the year 2000 of 40%…  and energy related CO² emissions according to some studies make-up some 25% of all CO² emissions.)

As the use of renewable energy increases, and the reliance upon fossil fuels for electricity production decreases the cleanliness of this energy production should increase.  Yet through all of this, populations keep increasing, and in parallel to this our individual energy consumption keeps rising.  Despite then our efforts to ‘turn off lights’ and ‘close the fridge door’… despite our appliances becoming more efficient our consumption of electricity (per capita) is on the rise.   Beyond then the simple initiatives of not boiling a full kettle of water for a single cup of team, what can be done?

Maybe a first step would be to look at the ‘conveniences’ with which we surround ourselves; the appliances which spend the majority of their time in stand-by mode.  What about the energy that we don’t ‘use’ but which we nevertheless ‘consume’?  Our smart phones suck power from the grid with every call, every tweet and every minute spent playing solitaire or candy crush…  our televisions remain on stand-by all the time so that we can avoid the arduous task of having to stand up to turn the television on, and having to wait those 4-5 seconds whilst the equipment warms up.  Our wifi networks remain connected, even when we have left for work, and our washing machines sit patiently waiting for the pre-programmed time to kick-in so that we can hang the washing out to dry rather than wait the hour for the load to finish after we return home.  The smart speaker, which sits there, permanently on and permanently waiting for our commands to play some music or to search the web, or the home security centre waiting for us to log on and check the cameras or push the button to close the curtains.  All of these additions to our lives use power, and however small the amount, that power needs to be produced.

Our entire ‘digital’ life is supported by energy, it is not just my computer that is switched on when I am browsing the internet, it is also the internet infrastructure… the server on which this blog is saved is never turned off, neither you nor I may be reading from the web site, but it is nevertheless there, all the time.  This is not a situation which looks like changing any time soon either.  Technology is moving inexorably towards a permanently connected world with the arrival of the ‘Internet of Things’, a conceptual reality where all things can talk to each other, sharing data about each other.  Devices that can allow us to de-ice the car window before we have finished our breakfast and warm up the house before we arrive home are becoming the trend (if not yet the norm).  Does every single one of our appliances really need to have  clock on the display?  Look around your house and see how many gadgets there are that have an LCD display on them with a clock function (and I bet all the times are different too!).  Does your oven really need to have 15 different cooking ‘modes’ – or could we make do with simply a heat regulator and a fan on and off switch?  Do we really need automated air freshener systems that squirt out fragrance every x minutes?

Technology is not and should not be seen as (I don’t think) our enemy, and arguably if we possessed technology that could produce boundless energy with no impact on our environment, we could be forgiven for spending time looking at ever increasingly stupid ways that we could expend such energy.  The truth is however, we don’t…  so perhaps we should treat energy as what it is – a non-renewable resource.  Perhaps we should ration it.  Many countries operate an energy policy which sells energy cheaply at certain times and more expensively at others.  Well how about we change that to a policy which sells energy only to a certain limit – and then cuts us off.  There is no need to question the clock on the oven, simply allow each person a certain amount of energy and let them choose how it should be used.  As for the internet… maybe we should turn that off for a couple of days a week too… it couldn’t hurt could it?