I can hear you already asking yourself, we all know that energy efficiency is good for the environment, so what kind of play on words is this? What kind of game is he playing here? The game here is to look at the bigger picture. We tend to always look at the smaller picture. Oh my new car only emits this little amount of carbon per Km (or mile), I liked it so much I had it specially flown from Japan to Europe so I can order my own customised one. And voila, the damage is done.
Let’s take another example. What happens when you want to decrease the carbon footprint of your house and also the heating bill? You install insulation. So you insulate the wall, you insulate the loft, you double glaze your windows and you wrap the whole house in a blanket. And just to make sure that the heat doesn’t really escape you have put half a metre thick insulation on your walls. In order to manufacture this insulation however, some energy was expended and some carbon was emitted. As you add more and more insulation the savings this extra layer of insulation does is not as much as the first layer of insulation. What you want to do is to only add more insulation if it is going to save more carbon than was used to manufacture it, ship it, install it and get rid of it at the end of its life. So there comes a point where adding more insulation will not save as much carbon as was emitted to put it in place. This means that you are actually harming the environment by installing more insulation. You are better off letting the heat escape from the house.
So it is important, in the midst of our extreme enthusiasm to be as green as possible, to realise that sometimes we can take it too far. And when we do take it too far, we end up hurting ourselves and the trees we love. So take it easy and keep an open mind.
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