I’m working from home today and, as I sit here (a) on a conference call going nowhere and (b) freezing in my basement with the thermostat set to 60F, I began to wonder: is turning down the heat really worth it?
After some investigation, I feel a bit better that I’m not trying to re-establish all the world’s glaciers here in my office for no reason. First, it looks like 27% of residential energy use is taken up by space heating, another 12% by space cooling. Here in our household, we’ve reduced thermostat temperatures by 5 degrees F in the winter alone. According to this site, bumping the temperature up or down 2 degrees can reduce your carbon output by 2,000 pounds.
While 2,000 pounds sounds big, I always feel lost in all the units associated with quantifying my footprint. So, to check my understanding, it looks like the average house in the U.S. has a footprint of 20 metric tons (and of course, those bastards switched to metric just to mess with me). There are about 2,200 pounds in a metric ton (yes, I knew that on my own, and no, I definitely did not rely on google–just get out of here). So, changing by a couple degrees can reduce your footprint by a bit under 1/20. If you reduce by four degrees, that’s 10%-ish. And for us, that’s 10% is just in winter.
Someone should check my math here. Odds are it’s wrong.
Long story short, this doesn’t seem to be for naught (sighs, as he reaches for his parka).
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