“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” — this message says it all.  Buy good quality stuff, make it last as long as possible, don’t buy disposable, and let’s start to cultivate a culture of repairing and maintainence.

Here is a list of energy news items that the WattzOn team found most interesting in 2008:

• CO₂ is officially a pollutant (maybe) – In a ruling by the Environmental Appeals Board (a panel within the EPA), it was decided that the EPA has no valid reason to not limit CO₂ emissions from coal plants.  Confusingly, the EPA has recently overruled itself by stating that officials cannot consider greenhouse gas outputs in judging applications to build new coal-fired power plants.  So, it’s back up in the “air.”
  
• We need to be at 350 PPM of CO₂ — James Hansen of Columbia University, and NASA’s head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, published a landmark paper: “Target Atmospheric CO₂: Where Should Humanity Aim?” in which he argues for an atmospheric CO₂ concentration of 350 parts per million (PPM) for humanity to be safe on this planet.  As some background, pre-industrial Earth had a CO₂ concentration of around 275 PPM, and for years policy makers have set a target regulatory goal of 550 PM — twice that number.  More recently, 450 PPM has been proposed as a better goal by the EU and a few others.  Unfortunately, recent evidence has shown that the Arctic sea is melting at an alarming rate and a giant ice sheet in Greenland is starting to slide into the ocean.  This is the reality with the world today at 383 PPM.  Hansen points out that this means we set overly lax targets and proposes the 350 PPM goal with tons of paleo-climatic data to back him up.  We need to bring the CO₂ in our atmosphere back down to this concentration.
• Energy scientists primed to enter government — US President-Elect Obama has nominated Steven Chu to be the Secretary of Energy, and named John Holdren as the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology / Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy / Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.  As the President-Elect puts it, “Today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation.”  Chu deeply understands the implications of energy production and efficiency (he has been quoted both as saying “Coal is my worst nightmare” and “What the world does in the coming decade will have enormous consequences that will last for centuries. It is imperative that we begin without further delay.”).  Holdren, further emphasizing this message, has supported a carbon tax.
• “Driving is the new smoking” — our nominee for "quote of the year".
• Ethanol is not the answer — Mark Jacobson, of Stanford University, published results of a survey of alternative energy sources and concluded that ethanol stands out as the big loser of the study, falling behind “clean coal”.  According to his mathematical ranking, we should be looking very closely at wind.
• “Hypermiling” — The Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year.  According to the Oxford University Press Blog,
  

  “hypermiling” or “to hypermile” is to attempt to maximize gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one’s car and one’s driving techniques. Rather than aiming for good mileage or even great mileage, hypermilers seek to push their gas tanks to the limit and achieve hypermileage, exceeding EPA ratings for miles per gallon.

  That, combined with a multitude of different software applications (like Fuelly) to help people track their miles per gallon, is showing us that fuel efficiency has hit mainstream consciousness.

• Record oil prices — This summer we saw the highest oil prices ever (even when accounting for inflation). However, and tied into the next point below, we have also experienced the fastest drop in oil prices ever recorded.
• We’re ending the year in a global recession — the only known way for the world to reduce CO₂ emissions and fossil fuel dependence. The four most significant drops in energy usage were recorded during the Great Depression, during the oil crisis of the 1970s, during the recession of the 1980s, and the week after 9/11/2001 (when the world stopped flying). Now seems like the ideal time to try to focus our efforts on getting out of the recession in a way that will also help us be energy sustainable in 2009.

Tell us what we’re forgetting!

We just found out that Business Week has us listed as the best ideas in 2008!

“There’s been a lot of talk about carbon footprints this year, but that’s just a sliver of the story. The root of the carbon problem is the way we use energy, which is the idea behind WattzOn, an easy-to-use Web-tool that lets individuals calculate their total energy consumption by answering questions like how many miles per week they drive, how many toothbrushes they own, and how many vegetables they eat. WattzOn helps users estimate the energy required to make and deliver the items everyone buys and uses.”

And, to further our point, they also name carbon offsets as one of the worst ideas. To which we have to whole-heatedly agree: offsets don’t change behavior.

Apparently a lot more than one thinks! Ever since attaching my Fuelly account to my WattzOn profile, my commuting slice jumped up by almost 2kW! And this seems to be true across the board. We found that most people actually didn’t have a good idea on how much they drive, how efficient their car really is, and how that all ties into the energy usage conversation. But your car knows all that information — in fact, WattzOn is continuously learning from Fuelly users.

That’s why we absolutely love Fuelly, and encourage everybody who is concerned about energy usage and who also drives a car to use it. Learn how much fuel your car uses, understand that number, and own it. You are the only person who can get your total mileage down, and get your car’s efficiency higher (by driving more responsibly and maintaining your car). Sign up for Fuelly, and then link it to your WattzOn account.

Its really easy to link your accounts together. Just drop yourself into your commuting page, click on the “Import driving data from fuelly.com” link, and just type in your username. We’ll fetch your data for you, import it into the system, and start to track it for you.

This really starts to show off the direction that WattzOn is going in — we’re building out the tools to bring in data from other sources on your behalf. We’re gathering your real data, and by providing transparency in where you are using energy, we’re hoping to help further the energy conversation.

Most of what we do all day at WattzOn is sift through numbers and try to understand how people are consuming power in their lifestyles. Now that we have been up and running for a while, we’ve learned quite a bit about our users’ energy consumption habits. We never give away individual people’s values without the user’s explicit permission, but WattzOn has been learning from its users — to that end, we’ve put together a quick look at the “average” American Wattizen’s home energy consumption.

This data is more of a conversation starter — we know we have work in front of us. We’re throwing this out there to get people talking. More specifically, to each other and to us! We’re continuously going through our data sets, using that data to learn about our users, and, most importantly, changing our users’ experiences and relationships with their energy usage. We already know of tons of ways to improve what we’re doing, but we’re always excited to hear more — leave us a comment on this blog post, or just drop us a line at us@wattzon.com. We love e-mail.

More…

In response to our blog post about paper cups vs traveler’s mugs, we wanted to suggest a traveler’s mug you could get. Proudly display to others that you are not using a paper cup, and also have an energy consumption label on the back to educate yourself.

If you already own a traveler’s mug, don’t buy a new one! Instead, get two stickers that you can put on your mug: both the this is not a paper cup sticker, and the energy consumption label sticker.

Grab the mug and stickers for yourself or for friends and convince others to stop using paper cups. While you’re at it send us@wattzon pictures of your mug.

Update (3 Dec 2008): In response to a few tweets, yes, we’ll be updating the stickers and the mug designs every so often to make sure it stays in sync with the changes in the travel mug’s EED entry.