David Emery Online

Environ-mental

4 July 2007

You can’t failed to have noticed how the current hot topic is the environment; are you “green”? What’s your carbon footprint? Do you recycle? Obviously none of these questions or topics are new as such, but they seem to be ever more prevalent in the media, mostly due to the potential good PR celebrities can manufacture by appearing to be “green”.

Of course, most of the spiel is utter nonsense.

Take the Toyota Prius, for example, which is one of the worst cars on the planet but yet every celebrity (and hence every clueless sheep) seems to have one. I’m sure you won’t find too many people willing to defend the looks, specification, interior design or passenger space as they’re all very sub-par for the high price you pay. ‘But!’ I hear you say ‘It’s very green!’ (imagine said with utter smugness). Well, no it’s not. Yes, the MPG is relatively high, but in this country – unlike the US where most of the celebrity owners roam – we have diesel, which means we have really quite a lot of cars that will do a similar milage on a tank of fuel. And that’s without taking into consideration that the Toyota published figures are all fudged to be artificially high.

The main point though is that MPG or carbon emissions don’t tell the whole story; while they may be simple to understand, hence their popularity, they just aren’t representative. If you take into account the total environmental impact of the car over its entire life, including manufacture, the Prius comes out worse then most cars, as the batteries it uses are very inefficient to make, and contain shed loads of nasty chemicals. It all adds up to make the Prius have no redeeming features – worth bearing in mind next time you see some insufferably smug buffoon drive past in one.

Now, with something like a car taking in the complete picture is difficult but still possible – most “green” issues have so many elements (like trying to calculate a carbon footprint, for example) that the exercise it for all intents and purposes is pointless. Hence, I think that if we do really care for the environment (and I’m not convinced most people do, other then going along with what they think they’re supposed to care about) then wasting are time trying to quantify things we should just try and streamline our day-to-day processes, in a more environmental-friendly way.

Yes; helping the environment is a usability problem.

Made easy enough, either simply by process or technical advances, most people will pick the more environmental option assuming all else is equal (although you can get away with charging a little more). Energy saving light-bulbs are a great example of this – it’s a little change, with no difference in usability. They wouldn’t have any real chance if they didn’t fit existing fittings, as that would make it just too difficult for people to switch.

I’m going to close with a simple idea I had last night to solve the simple problem of leaving things on in your home while you’re out. I know I do it all the time, because there’s no easy way of turning everything off and then turning them back on when you get back.

What if plug sockets had an extra state, as well as on and off, named “Always On”. Then, by your front door, you had an additional switch with a little house power on/off logo on – pushing it would turn everything that was “on” off, leaving the “Always On” things on, and pushing it again would turn them on again. Then, hitting that switch when you leave and then again when you come back would be so easy – you’d have to have a good reason not to. Simple and easy, and the “on” state could be a middle state between “Always On” and “off”, and hence the switch would behave like a normal on/off switch if you didn’t know about the middle state.

Environmentally friendly needs to be people friendly as well.