HDTV Power Consumption

HDTV power consumption compared is a web page that all "green" fans of HDTV watching need to check out:


I'm just such an aficionado, as my What's on HDTV? blog can confirm. I have three HDTVs, one of which is listed in the chart: the Samsung LN52A650, which is a 52" flat-panel LCD set that uses 219.9 watts of electrical power when it's on.

That's 0.19 watt per square inch, a measure of the ratio of power used to screen size.

The Annual Cost column at far right gives the amount of money the TV costs to run over 365 days, assuming it's turned on for 8 hours a day and off for 16, based on the average price of energy in the U.S. during 2007, which was 10.6 cents per kilowatt hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. My Samsung costs $68.81 per year to run, on that basis. (Actually, my cost per kWh is about 50% higher than 10.6 cents, so 8 hours a day, 365 days a year would cost me a lot more.)

I also have a Sony KDL-40XBR2 40" LCD panel. It's not listed, but its big brother in the same model year, the KDL-52XBR2, is. It costs $95.58 a year, roughly half again what my 52" Samsung costs. But the Sony KDL-46XBR4 costs only $79.53; it's smaller (46") and it's two generations newer (XBR4, not XBR2). The 52" Sony KDL-52XBR6, which is two generations newer yet, costs $84.38 per year to watch, a clear improvement over $95.58 for the XBR2.

I also have a plasma flat panel, a smaller and slightly older version (32") of the Hitachi 55HDT52 listed as costing $128.01/yr. Yes, plasmas are inch-for-inch much more costly to run than LCDs. With just a few exceptions, the chart shows they're not remotely "green."

Going Green ... Moi?

Yes, moi!

As I indicated in previous entries, I'm reading Thomas L. Friedman's latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America, learning how we all need to dedicate ourselves to bringing about a "green revolution" which will wean us and the world away from carbon-based fuels and switch us over to renewable, sustainable, alternative sources of energy ... and thinking about how to make my own home greener and more energy-efficient.

I've discovered a great resource for going green: Consumer Reports' Greener Choices, a website filled with articles and product ratings that will assist anyone who wants to shrink their personal carbon footprint and help preserve the planet.

Code Green for America

America needs a new sense of national purpose, Thomas L. Friedman writes in his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America. We need to dedicate ourselves to bringing about a "green revolution" which will wean us and the world away from carbon-based fuels and switch us over to renewable, sustainable, alternative sources of energy. He says we are in a Code Green situation: either we step up to the challenge, or we see America's predominance in the world seep further and further away as we become ever more a "dumb as we wanna be," second-class society.

Friedman writes that we are now in our third decade of being on the wrong path, a sad trajectory which began with the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Whereas we initially responded to the oil embargoes and gasoline shortages of the '70s by imposing higher standards of fuel efficiency on our automobiles, under Reagan we backslid from that initiative, only recently to begin moving in the right direction again.

Under Reagan we began believing that government supposedly is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem ... and we (often in the name of opposing governmental "tyranny" over our private lives) enshrined economic deregulation and market values instead.

Friedman's book appeared a few months before the recent meltdown of our financial markets. His words, however, were prescient:

In some ways, the subprime mortgage mess and housing crisis [which has since triggered the financial meltdown] are metaphors for what has come over America in recent years: A certain connection between hard work, achievement, and accountability has been broken. We've become a subprime nation that thinks it can just borrow its way to prosperity — putting nothing down and making no payments for two years. Subprime lenders told us we could have the American dream — a home of our own — without the discipline or sacrifice that home ownership requires. We didn't need to study hard and build a solid educational foundation. We didn't need to save and build a solid credit record. The bank around the corner or online would borrow the money from China and lend it to us — with a credit check no more intrusive than the check you get at the airport when they make sure the name on your airline ticket matches the one on your driver's license. When the whole pyramid scheme, operated by some of our best financial institutions, collapsed [well, when it first gave signs of collapsing!] everyone from simple homeowners to unscrupulous lenders looked to the government for a bailout [you ain't seen nothin' yet!]. The politicians accommodated them, even though everyone knew that the lenders had not been betting that their customers' penchant for hard work or frugality or innovation would enable them to make the payments. They were simply betting that the housing bubble would keep driving up the prices of homes and that mortgage rates would keep falling — that the market would keep bailing everybody out forever. It did — until it didn't. As with our houses, so with our country: We have been mortgaging our future rather than investing in it.

Now, just months after the book appeared, the bill has come due. We've learned to our chagrin that unchecked market forces can impose their own tyranny. Government intrusions supposedly amount to tyranny, say some, though I'd say it's a benign tyranny of regulation, order, and control; when markets go kerflooey, we endure a toxic tyranny of chaos. We can name our poison.

With the election of Barack Obama, we have chosen regulation, order, and control over chaos. Obama says he wants an "Apollo program" for energy ... which is exactly what Friedman means by Code Green for the restoration of American preeminence:

[Code] Green is not simply a new form of generating electric power. It is a new form of generating national power — period. It is not just about lighting up our house; it is about lighting up our future.

Welcome to the Code Green Blog

In his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America, Thomas L. Friedman writes of "Code Green," his designation for the green revolution which is needed to wean America and the world away from a dependence on carbon-based fuels and to switch us over to renewable, sustainable, alternative sources of energy. Though I am only in the middle of reading the book, I have decided its topic merits a regular blog. Thus, this new blog: The Code Green Blog.

We all need to get serious about Code Green — not just sometime in the near or distant future, but today. Most of us have heard about the various reasons why, but Friedman, a respected columnist for The New York Times, brings them all together into a systemic approach that is fresh and compelling.

The crux of the problem: Our high carbon-based energy usage spews carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases — gases that trap the sun's heat — into the atmosphere at breakneck speed. Even more greenhouse gases result from the vast deforestation of our tropical regions to increase the stock of farmland, and yet more from millions of additional cows belching(!), day in and day out, as agriculture expands around the world to feed ever-increasing multitudes.

Before 1750 and the Industrial Revolution there were, for ten thousand years at least, around 280 parts per million of CO₂ in the atmosphere, and global temperature had held steady since the last Ice Age. Since then, atmospheric CO₂ has risen to 384 ppm, as global temperatures have gone up by 0.8 degrees Celsius owing to global warming. The planet is showing signs of a fever.

We are now on the threshold of seeing atmospheric CO₂ concentrations rise yet more precipitously; it will take a concerted effort to head off carbon dioxide concentrations by 2050 that are double or even triple those of the baseline year 1750. Global temperatures are expected to rise by a further 2 or 3 degrees Celsius by mid-century. Unless we start doing something now to avoid it, we will face massive "global weirding": stronger hurricanes, deeper droughts, massive forest fires, missing snowcaps, scanty snow runoff, flooded coastal areas, enlarged deserts. Ecosystems will run askew; species by the millions will be endangered or extinct.

A major reason why greenhouse gas emissions and global temperatures can be expected to rise exponentially between now and mid-century is that advancing cultures with huge populations like China and India are rapidly joining advanced nations like the U.S. and those of the European Union in their profligate middle-class consumption patterns. This world is not only growing hot, it is growing flat (because of the leveling effect of the emerging new middle classes, fed by the communications revolution of recent years) and it is growing crowded (because the 6.5 billion people in the world today will expand by another nearly 3 billion individuals in the next few decades).

In other words, we have a huge problem on our hands — even without taking into account that our habit in America of consuming massive quantities of foreign oil is keeping petrodictators in business in countries that, to say the least, do not wish us well. In the Middle East and the larger Muslim world the effects are even more disastrous than they are with respect to our semi-adversaries like Russia. Muslim dictators and monarchs (many of them our nominal allies) funnel American petrodollars to our worst enemies to run schools to train the next generation of 9/11 attackers. How dumb is that, for us in our petro-complacency to finance specifically those very people who wish us the worst?

As Friedman points out so chillingly, the Osama bin Ladens and al-Qaedas of the world feed on the poverty and hopelessness of Muslim populations whose political leaders are too benighted to spread the oil wealth and develop an enlightened middle class in their own countries. We must accordingly starve the oil beast by denying it our dollars, so as to force it to reform in the way that Arab countries that have already started to run out of oil have begun to do. Nothing can do more than our "going green," post haste, to engender peace and stability for us and for the wider world.

In short, the whole future of humankind's greatest aspirations depends in key, interlocking ways on Code Green.