Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

February 28, 2008

Roof replacement

Filed under: Personal — cec @ 10:42 pm

We moved into our current house a little over four years ago (already?!). Over the past few years, we’ve found that the people who built it made some interesting choices. Some things were done very nicely and they cheaped out on other things. One of the places they cheaped out was the roof. It wasn’t bad enough to force them to replace it when we moved in, but we did have to get them to do some minor work. Since then I’ve had to go up there a few times a year and add some roofing tar or replace a vent boot. We’ve known that we’ll have to replace it some day for a couple of years now.

Well, some day is finally here. I guess we could patch it for another few years, but with my vacation payout from the last job and our tax refund, we had the money to do the replacement now. Looking at the different options, we were really hoping to go with a standing seam metal roof. It’s much more energy efficient and will probably not need replacing for quite some time.

We got some quotes and found that the roofers in the area are struggling due to the drought and one was willing to give us a great price (~22% below their normal cost and almost 40% below their competitor’s). I told them on Tuesday that we accepted their bid. Their started tear off today. So far, so good. Hopefully, by late next week, they’ll be done and we’ll have an Energy Star compliant metal roof in “aged copper.” (note: I think the color is less blue and more green than what that link seems to indicate)

I’ll post pictures later.

February 25, 2008

FISA extension and telecom amnesty

Filed under: Social,Technical,University Life — cec @ 11:10 pm

Few people have been on top of the extension of FISA like Glenn Greenwald. As a quick overview for folks that haven’t been paying attention to the issue:

  • Late last year a real potential problem with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (as written in the 70s and amended after Sept 11) was recognized. Namely, communication between two foreign entities that was routed through the US was subject to the law’s requirements for a court order. This was never the intent of the law and largely crept in due to the routing of Internet traffic through major US networking hubs
  • In addition to correcting this, the Whitehouse and the Republican congress pushed for a change to FISA that went beyond correcting the oversight and significantly extended the ability of the government to spy on citizens.
  • Congress couldn’t pass this permanently, but did pass a six month bill before the August recess, in large part because of scare tactics used by the FBI (releasing warnings of predicted attacks in DC)
  • Six months was up last week and the Whitehouse was pushing to: a) correct the known oversight, b) extend its ability to spy on US citizens without court order, and now they’ve added c) grant retro-active immunity to the telecommunications companies for illegally helping the government spy both before and after Sept 11th. And of course, if they don’t get all of this, we’ll die in our sleep, murdered by terrorists.
  • The Senate caved and gave the Whitehouse everything it asked for.
  • Surprisingly, the House didn’t and we’re now seeing extra pressure claiming that we’ll all die and it’ll be their fault. This is of course BS, but that’s the state of discourse in the country.

I don’t have much to add on the spying per se, but I will admit to being particularly offended and disturbed by the telecom immunity issue. Essentially, these companies started helping law enforcement to monitor calls, read emails, etc. well before September 11th. Their actions were not scared or patriotic, they were largely motivated by greed.

Even if this were not the case. Even if they only started cooperating after September 11th, there is no excuse for allowing extra-legal monitoring by law enforcement in violation of the 4th Amendment. While much of the monitoring may have been intended to track down terrorists, we know that tools of this nature are never used only for their intended purposes. They are always used by someone trying to get a little extra edge in a non-terrorist case or by a cop wanting to spy on a girlfriend.

Consider the following. I was the IT Security Officer for the university back in 2001. When September 11th occurred, everyone wanted to be as cooperative as possible with law enforcement within the bounds of the law. Within the bounds of the law was an important caveat. Late September of 2001, I received a phone call from an individual who identified himself as being an agent with the FBI (note, none of this is confidential – there were a few times that I was asked/instructed to sign the equivalent of an NDA; for reasons that will become obvious, this was not one).

The agent asked me for some information pertaining to an investigation on which he was working. I asked him to slow down a bit because I needed to confirm that he actually was with the FBI (and not some random caller) and then I would need a court order for the information (because, hey, I don’t want to be sued, he wasn’t asserting that this was an emergency situation, and my failure to follow reasonable procedure meant it might be me personally being sued, not the university).

The agent then starts to get very defensive and plays the terrorist card. “This person could be a terrorist, and if you don’t help me, who knows what could happen?” Taking things one step at a time, I asked for his FBI identification number. He wouldn’t give it to me. He did give me his name and a phone number I could reach him at. I called the FBI. After a couple of false starts, I was finally able to confirm his identity.

It turns out that he was sort-of an agent. Actually, he was an agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). Ostensibly, he was on loan from the ATF to the FBI in order to assist them in their cases. Instead, he was working on an ATF case and trying to use his newfound FBI authority and the tragedy of September 11th to get information that he could not normally obtain. If I remember correctly, the FBI told me not to call him back and that they would handle it internally.

Granted that all of this occurred before these agencies were pulled into the Department of Homeland Security and the processes may be better. However, any time someone claims they need new powers to keep us safe from terrorists, I remember this incident and become a little more wary. If there is a demonstrated need for a new law enforcement power, then it should be discussed, weighed against civil rights and the constitution, voted on and enacted if passed. The sum total of the argument for the power should not be, “we need it or you will die!”

p.s. C&L and Mark Fiore have produced a good/amusing video illustrating this tactic.

February 23, 2008

Power companies – update

Filed under: Social — cec @ 12:19 pm

Interesting. Shortly after posting about power companies, I received a comment from Progress Energy correcting me about the plans. It seems [pure speculation here] that Progress has some sort of “blog response” team up in Maryland or northern Virginia. Anyway, I misnamed the program that I had been offered, as the comment says, it was indeed the “Balanced Bill” payment plan where you wind up spending some 11% more over the course of the year for the privilege of knowing that your bill will be 1/12th of a fixed amount. There is (apparently) a different equal payment plan which is comparable to what we had with Duke Power. However, it’s not the money maker that the Balanced Bill program is and so it is not heavily advertised. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find details of the plan online. The closest I can get is here, which seems to be lacking in specifics.

Interestingly, the News and Observer ran an article this morning about the Balanced Bill plans and how the state might ban them. Not for the surcharge – how you want to waste money is your own business, but as I noted, they create no incentive to save energy. From the article:

“This is the kind of thing that creates a disincentive for saving electricity,” said NC WARN Director Jim Warren. “This is the old utility business model: maximum sales of electricity and talking green to the public.”

The Utilities Commission could rule on the dispute within 30 days. The commission approved the billing programs for both utilities as recently as 2004, but last year the regulators re-opened the case because of the concerns about energy waste. Critics said customers who pay a fixed bill regardless of usage have no incentive to turn out the lights, turn down the thermostat or otherwise conserve, because they pay the same price, regardless.

Those critics appear to be right. According to data from the utilities, customers who enroll in the program show a jump in electricity use that can approach 10 percent over three years.

10% in three years. Considering that the programs aren’t that old (started in 2002 and 2004 for Duke Power and Progress Energy respectively), that’s a huge increase that could potentially sustained for a longer period of time. It’s good for the power companies – after all, if you use more this year, then next year’s bill will reflect that. And if you use well beyond what they’ve budgeted for you, well, they can always cancel your participation in the plan.

February 21, 2008

Total eclipse of the heart, um moon

Filed under: Photography — cec @ 9:48 am

It was a rough night to try to get any pictures of last night’s total lunar eclipse. For long durations of the evening, you couldn’t even see the moon for all of the cloud cover. I did manage to get a few pictures. Most of them were slightly blurred because of the long exposure time and the 900 mm of focal length. However, some came out quite nice. The general process I used was:

  • set the camera to manual focus, auto focus will only screw you up here
  • play with the exposure compensation to get different effects. best results on exposure were about +1.0, however, that meant an exposure time of twice as long 🙁
  • set the camera on a two second delay (maybe should have used 5 seconds) to allow the camera shaking to die down after I hit the shutter release
  • wait until there was a break in the clouds
  • shoot

Probably the best shot I obtained is the one below:

February 19, 2008

Power companies

Filed under: Personal,Social — cec @ 9:08 pm

When K and I got home today, we had not one, but two different offers from the local power company (Progress Energy) to enroll in their equal payment plan program. The first was a generic flier touting the benefits of having a consistent power bill. You sign up and based on your past two years of power consumption, they compute your monthly bill and that’s what you’ll pay all year long. They’ll recompute a new amount 12 months later. We had something like that with Duke Power in Durham. They computed your recent average. You paid that for 11 months and then settled up on the 12th month, paying less or more depending on actual use.

We had liked the Duke Power plan. It equalized payments. You could track whether you were on target to have a higher or lower 12th month bill. And you only paid for what you used because in that 12th month you settled up . With that experience we looked into the Progress Energy version. That second mailer from Progress contained our actual numbers if we wanted to sign up. Unfortunately, it told us that our average monthly usage was $X and that they proposed to enroll us in the equal payment plan program at (something like) 120% of X per month. The claim of course is that if our use increases by more than 20%, we’ll be insulated from the increases of yearly fluctuations, etc. Of course, there are no refunds if you use less. So essentially, we have no incentive to conserve power and we’re likely to lose money. Wow, where can I sign!

Of course, it’s not all shiny green conservation at Duke power either. I was flipping through the N&O today and ran across an interesting Point-of-View letter from Jim Rogers (president and CEO of Duke Power). The POV letter was promoting their Save-a-Watt program as a cheaper, better alternative to renewable power sources – a program to promote power conservation. If you read the letter, you should quickly note that it’s missing one thing: details on the actual program.

Fortunately, the details aren’t hard to dig up. The proposed program would add $15 per year to every customer’s power bill. This fee would be used to promote energy conservation and provide discounts on energy efficient appliances. Interesting. It does have the down side that those too poor to afford new appliances are subsidizing those who can afford it, but I’ve heard of worse ideas. That said, it seems a bit counter intuitive that a power company would want to cut into their profits by encouraging conservation. Silly me. I haven’t described the other half of the plan. The company would then take the projected conservation amounts and would increase rates to cover 90% of what it would have cost to produce the amount of conserved energy. Their claim is that consumers are now saving 10%! Everyone’s happy, we don’t have to produce power from renewable sources and we can still claim that we are green!

Huh?!

It’s a shell game. It’s the old riddle of “where’s the missing dollar?” It only sounds reasonable if someone’s throwing out numbers fast enough that you don’t add up what they mean.

What Duke Power is proposing to do is to make a projection for energy consumption over the next N years without the program. Essentially, it’s a table that says in each year, the area will consume so much energy. Then each year thereafter, they look at how much energy was actually used. For every kilowatt-hour that isn’t used, their rates will increase so that they earn 90% of that missing kilowatt-hour. Save 100 kwhs – pay Duke Power for 90 kwhs.

Hrm, perhaps a more specific example is in order. Let’s assume that I run a small power company for my house. K is currently using 1 kw of power I produced through a RAIHW: redundant array of inexpensive hamster wheels. To produce my 1 kw of power, I’ve got 100 hamster wheels connected in a serial and parallel configuration. Assume that each hamster costs me $10 plus another $5 for food each year. So my infrastructure costs are $1000 in hamsters, plus another $500 in food each year. If we used 1 kw in 2007, I’m going to predict 10% year over year growth: 1.1 kw in 2008, 1.21 kw in 2009, 1.33 kw in 2010, etc.

Assume that on top of the amortized infrastructure costs plus the operational costs plus profit (call it $800 per year), I charge K a $10 fee (I’ll use the money to encourage her to change out an incandescent for a florescent bulb). According to my projections, I need to increase capacity by 10% in 2008 – or 10 new hamsters. Assuming the infrastructure costs are amortized, we might expect our power costs to go up 10% ($80) to $880 per year.

But what if my projections are wrong? K only uses 1 kw in 2008. Well, as a producer, I’m happy. I don’t have to buy 10 new hamsters (saving $100) and I don’t have to feed any new hamsters (saving $50). But wait! I’m missing out. I’m not getting the profit on that 0.1 kw of power. Under the Duke plan, I’ll still get 90% of that money. Even though I have no additional expenses, K’s power bill will be $872 per year. I get $72 free and clear; and K “saves” $8 per year because without my charging a $10 fee, she never would have replaced that incandescent bulb, so she would have used 1.1 kw. See, we’re conserving hamsters, K’s power bills increased less than I projected they would have, even though she used no more power. Everyone should be happy.

Duke Power claims that this is their incentive to increase conservation through education and programs to help purchase more energy efficient appliances. Of course, it’s also an incentive to game the system and make unreasonably large growth projections. Even if you assume that doesn’t happen, it’s a great deal for Duke Power. The program is funded by a fee. You earn enormous profit margins off of energy that you aren’t producing. You get to claim that you are a supporter of energy conservation. And you get to tell the environmentalists that want you to build renewable (or in some cases nuclear) power plants to go to hell, while building CO2-intensive coal fired plants when needed.

What’s not to love?

February 13, 2008

WordPress title plugin

Filed under: Technical — cec @ 11:01 am

One of the things I dislike about blogs (and actually most webpages) is that the static content is formatted very nicely using different fonts, etc., but the dynamic content is all pure text.  And since there are only a few fonts you will find on every computer, the text all looks pretty much the same: sans or serif.  On my own blog, I find that particularly annoying.  I’ve got, what I think, is a nice clean looking theme that reminds me of a Victorian-era journal (except perhaps not that fancy).  But all of the titles and dynamic content are plain text.

To fix this, I’ve been experimenting with the creation of a new WordPress plugin.  It’s fairly simple as these things go, but could be pretty nice.  Basically, it hooks into the_title and automatically replaces the text with an image of that text in a font you’ve selected and sets the ALT tag to be the original text (allowing it to degrade cleanly).  Unfortunately, at least with my theme, this screws up a number of things.  So now I’ve made the hook an option and your other choice is to modify the theme itself to call the plugin function where appropriate.  I’ve started modifying my theme along those lines so that all of the titles are rendered in the (free) Renaissance font.

Since the ALT tags are set properly, I don’t think that this will cause any problems.  But if you can think of a good reason why this is dumb, please let me know.

February 12, 2008

Vicarious sadness

Filed under: Personal — cec @ 11:11 am

About eight months ago, a gentleman with the same first and last name as mine started using gmail. Not a big deal except that the difference between our gmail addresses is fairly small and hard to notice. So every once in a while, I receive email intended for him and I’ll point that person in the right direction. Beyond that, my only real contact with him has been some minimal email communication, usually after I’ve pointed someone new his way.

Over the weekend, he lost his daughter in an accident and I am surprised at how much it’s affected me. Here is this person that I barely know, we have nothing in common but a name and yet, I am genuinely saddened by his grief. I’m sure it doesn’t help that a number of people have sent him misdirected condolence messages. At the same time, I am reminded that millions of people die every year around the world.

The grief that my namesake feels is felt by millions of people every day, but we are largely blind to it. A hundred thousand civilians die in Iraq each year and again, without a connection to the individuals, it’s just a number. A thousand US troops die each year and we start to feel a little connection to them and their families – a little compassion, a little vicarious sadness for their loss.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to feel personally saddened by every death that happens around the world – it would drive me crazy. At the same time, we should realize that every death causes someone, somewhere to be distraught. Every time we kill or allow someone to be killed, a family is devastated.

February 10, 2008

Moving day update

Filed under: Personal,Technical — cec @ 3:57 pm

The ISP move went reasonably well.  There were a couple of minor glitches.  One was a character set problem when I tried to take the most recent database snapshot from Linksky.  I’m not entirely certain what happened, but I wound up with extra characters after some punctuation marks.  Rather than spend too much time with it, I just grabbed the latest post and dumped it into the Dreamhost site and changed the time.

The other was a cute problem with my email.  I had done a major synchronization between the two mail systems a day or so before, so all I had to do on moving day was a periodic sync of the Inbox.  Unfortunately, in playing on Dreamhost’s control panel, I managed to delete my mailbox.   So I had to do another major synchronization and I lost any mail that arrived on Dreamhost only.  Fortunately, there was only one thing that was important and I could ask the sender to resend.

I think I’m all set now.  We’ll see how things go over the next day or two now that DNS *should* have settled out.

February 6, 2008

Moving day

Filed under: Personal,Technical — cec @ 11:05 pm

Saturday is moving day. Nope, we haven’t bought a new house. We hope not to have to do that for a long time. It’s time to change ISPs. After only 10 months with Linksky, I’ve had enough. In the past year, between working on the non-profit’s website and my own, I’ve had the following issues:

  • arbitrary version changes with no notification
  • random breakage due to “security” upgrades – like the time w e couldn’t do anything with a friend’s account or email because his last name contained the letters “curl”
  • random lockouts of service
  • insults from the security “guru” because he thinks he knows more about Unix and IT security than anyone else around
  • etc.

The last straw for me came earlier this year when a gallery page broke. I tried to login to diagnose the problem and found that they had removed my SSH access. When I emailed, I was to ld there is a “security issue” that makes sites with SSH more vulnerable and that they were looking for a workaround and would re-enable SSH by the weekend. Outside of dictionary attacks on passwords, this is really complete BS. Of course, the weekend came and nope, no SSH. Another week rolled around, no SSH. Forget this.

I started looking around for alternatives. I’m using Pair Networks at the office and they are okay. Hunter pointed me to Dreamhost. Yeah, I know they had recent billing issues, but no one can touch their current hosting offer (500 GB of storage) + 5 TB of data transfer per month, unlimited domains, Python, PHP and RubyOnRails (I don’t want to develop in RoR, but my preferred todo list program, Tracks, requires RoR), etc. With all of that and $50 off of a one year contract, I had to go Dreamhost.

Within 10 minutes of signing up, I had Tracks running on a mirror domain. Yay!

Then I started trying to migrate my current domains off of Linksky and onto Dreamhost. This turns out to be more than a little tricky without SSH access! I finally told it to create a backup. The backup turned out to contain all db, email and file data – great! That’s sort of easier than tar-gz directly. Unfortunately, the file was 1.5+ GB. I tried ftp-ing it from Linksky (ironically, the great security gurus have disallowed SSH, but allow/require unencrypted ftp with your main account and password). Unfortunately, ftp is apparently rate limited. At times, I was getting only 1 byte/second and it failed after downloading about 50 MB. Fine, I tried to use the web file interface to move the backup into webspace where I could wget it from Dreamhost. Oops – the web interface doesn’t move, it copies then deletes. After copying 420 MB, it failed. I couldn’t SSH into do a soft link or a move, the web interface had no softlink capability. I finally punted and wrote a 1 line php script that created the softlink into webspace. After all of that, I was able to download to DH (though it seemed to temporarily fail at 1.5 GB).

You start to see why I might be looking to change ISPs. The great irony to cap it all off: importing the gallery db, moving the files into place and updating the config to point to the new db completely resolved the gallery problems. There was nothing to diagnose, nothing to fix, on DH it worked, on Linksky it didn’t. It was probably another silent “upgrade” or “security fix” Linksky applied that broke it.

Hopefully I won’t have to change from DH any time soon. In the meantime, most everything seems to be up an running on the DH mirror domain. I’ll change the DNS servers on Saturday, so there may be a little weirdness until that settles out. If I can get GoDaddy to lower the TTL on the authoritative DNS servers for the domains, things may resolve even faster.

February 2, 2008

CO2 emissions and compact fluorescent bulbs (updated)

Filed under: Social,Technical — cec @ 2:37 pm

There’s something about the idea of global warming that seems to drive people of a certain mindset completely insane. You start seeing things like: “the planet’s not warming up!” “Okay, maybe it is warming, but humans couldn’t possibly be causing it.” “Fine. We are causing global warming, but we can’t do anything about it.” “What, we can? Well it’ll destroy our economy.” “You mean it won’t? Well, you must be French.”

And then you get guy’s like Andrew Longman whose argument runs something like, “I don’t believe in global warming, but you do. And congress’s ban on incandescent bulbs is going to put out more CO2 which in your mind means we’re baking the planet. Stupid liberals.” Then, after derisively stating that liberals are not hard headed quantitative types, proceeds to lay out an argument that is so stupid, a 12th grade physics class could take it apart.

Unfortunately, a 12th grade physics class isn’t here right now, so we’ll have to do it ourself.

Longman’s argument is that incandescent bulbs replace some portion of the normal heating used in a house. An NPR story told him that electric heat is more efficient than burning natural gas – in terms of CO2 emissions per unit of heat, therefore, by converting to CF bulbs we are using less electricity to heat our homes and more natural gas therefore, we are putting out more CO2 than if we used the original incandescents. He then proceeds to describe liberals as soft headed and laughs that their silly utopian dreams are undone by lack of an engineering mindset.

That’s a challenge that’s hard to resist. So let’s take this apart. First, Longman doesn’t realize that he’s comparing three different kinds of heating. He’s simplified to two: gas and electric. But let’s be quantitative and list all three:

  1. natural gas heaters
  2. electric resistive heaters
  3. heat pumps

Natural gas heaters burn natural gas, heating air that is then circulated around the house. Pretty simple idea. Relatively efficient.

Of course, very few people heat their homes with electric resistive heaters. This is the “emergency” or “auxiliary” heat setting on your heat pump. You run electricity through something resistive and generate heat. It’s a one to one conversion of heat for electricy. Every watt you put in, you get one watt of heat out. Run it for a length of time, and you can covert to watt-hours or BTUs. Now wait, I mentioned that you get electric resistive heaters by running electricity through a resistor – that’s a light bulb! Okay, we now know that light bulbs are electric resistive.

It’s very expensive to use electric resistive heat. So most people using electric heat use a heat pump. Think reverse air conditioner – you air condition the outside in winter extracting the heat and putting it into the house. A given heat pump, operating at a given temperature differential will have a specific coefficient of performance (CoP). Essentially, how much electricity does it take to extract a given amount of heat. Depending on circumstances, that CoP may be between 2 and 5. In other words, it takes 1 watt of electricity to extract between 2 and 5 watts of heat from the outdoors and move it inside. Hrm, now we’re starting to see how NPR got its numbers for pounds of CO2 created heating a house with electric vs natural gas.

But of course, Longman has challenged us to be quantitative and so we must preserve persevere. Let’s look at his example. Assume you have a house that contains 30, 100 watt bulbs that are always burning. In his example, a conversion to 20 watt compact fluorescents would mean that instead of getting 3000 watts of heat from the bulbs, you now get only 600 watts of heat from the bulbs and have to burn the equivalent of 2400 watts worth of natural gas. Using his soft, fuzzy, NPR numbers (that he’s misunderstood), Longman says that you emit less CO2 with the incandescents.

But he hasn’t really shown that. So let’s do the math. Basic numbers we’ll need:

  • CO2 emissions per unit of heat from natural gas
  • CO2 emissions per watt-hour of electricity
  • watt-hours consumed using our 30, 100 watt bulbs over a period of time

According to the Natural Gas Association, 1 billion (1,000,000,000) BTUs of heat from natural gas produces 117,000 pounds of CO2.

According to the Department of Energy, we produced 1.341 pounds of CO2 per kilowatt hour of energy generated in 2000. (Note, this is generated, some power is lost in transmission, so this is an upper lower bound for [CO2 generated by] power energy used in a home).

Now we’re getting somewhere. So 30 bulbs at 100 watts each, use 3000 watts of power or 72 kilowatt hours per day. That works out to 96.552 pounds of CO2 per day for heating your home with light bulbs.

What about natural gas? Well, we don’t have a CO2 pounds per kwh for natural gas, but since the CoP of a light bulb is 1.0, we have a conversion from electricity to heat. Our 72 kwh of electricity converted directly to heat turns out to be 245800 BTUs. Which turns out to generate 28.7586 pounds of CO2 if produced by natural gas. Of course, we haven’t replaced100% of our light bulb heat by switching to CF bulbs, only 80%. The other 20% is still [comparable to] electric resistive. So if we take 80% of 28.7586 and add 20% of 96.552, we get 42.311 pounds of CO2 generated by using 30, 20 watt CF bulbs.

Now, unless I’ve forgotten my basic math, 42.311 pounds is less than half of 96.552 pounds. So, I think that means that Longman was full of crap and is apparently a fuzzy headed conservative and not really a quantitative man at all.

Q.E.D.

Updated:

Oh, so I forgot to look at summer when we’re trying to cool the house. Turns out that the difference is even greater. In the summer, all of the heat is waste heat – we don’t want it and we need to get it outside. Assuming we’ve got a high efficiency air conditioner, it takes about one watt-hour of power to remove five watts-hours of heat, i.e., let’s assume a CoP of 5.

In the summer, running Longman’s 30, 100 watt bulbs 24 hours a day still takes 72 kwh per day plus we’ll need to run the a/c for another 14.4 kwh per day. That gives us a total of 86.4 kwh creating at least 115.824 pounds of CO2.

If we assume that all of those bulbs are now 20 watt compact fluorescents, then we require 14.4 kwh for light, plus another 2.88 kwh for cooling. Total of 17.28 kwh per day for lighting and cooling the lighting. Those 17.28 kwh will create… 23.17 pounds of CO2. Or not surprisingly, one fifth the CO2, since the bulbs use one fifth the electricity.

Of course, not everyone is going to use 30, 100 watt bulbs for lighting 24/7, but the relative proportions stay the same.

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