An interesting article on BBC about what individual actions actually matter in the fight against climate change/global warming.

Professor David MacKay advocates normalizing energy use into kilowatt-hour (kWh). Using this metric, he then compares the amount of energy saved as a result of various “green” actions. To give you an idea of the kWh-metric: in Great Britain, an average person consumes energy worth 125 kWh per day (for transport, heating, manufacturing, and electricity).

Among the perhaps not-so-surprising findings: turning off your phone charger makes no difference whatsoever, electrical cars are way better than hydrogen cars, heat pumps are a good way to save energy, wind micro-turbines on roofs are basically useless, etc. Check it out.

Update: Thanks to “eagle-eye” Jaska for spotting a bug in the units. Our physics teacher used to rant and rave against falling for that common error and of course I fell for it! “Kilowatt-per-hour” is wrong, it’s “kilowatt-hour”. Duh.