Study: People who claim to worry about climate change use more electricity than those who don’t
By LU Staff on July 15, 2014 at 9:32 am
Al Gore’s deep, dark secret — that, in spite of his doomsday sermons, he spends more than 20 times the national average kilowatt hour heating, cooling, and lighting his 20-room mansion and pool house — has long been public knowledge. Less well known is that Gore is just one of countless hypocrites who insist that non-believers in climate change (aka heathens) do as they say, not as they do.
The Telegraph (UK) reports on a study commissioned by Britain’s Department for Energy and Climate Change, which finds that people who profess to be concerned about the eventual ravages of climate change are bigger energy hogs than those who say it is “too far into the future to worry about.”
The findings were based on the Household Electricity Survey, which closely monitored the electricity use and views of 250 families over a year. The report, by experts from Loughborough University and Cambridge Architectural Research, was commissioned and published by DECC.
Those surveyed were asked if they agreed or disagreed with the statement: “The effects of climate change are too far in the future to really worry me.”
From the study:
Taken all together, householders [homeowners] who strongly agreed they were not worried about climate change because it was too far in the future in fact used less electricity rather than more, counter to the hypothesis that households concerned about climate change use less electricity.
However, we found this was largely due to the effect of age, as older households were much more likely to agree with this statement, and also had lower energy consumption.
When we separated the pensioner households from the younger ones, there was no significant relationship between this statement and energy use in the pensioner group, and only a weak trend among younger households.
[...]
This means that policy makers cannot rely on stated behaviours alone in assessing the extent to which households turn off unused appliances.
Read more at
http://libertyunyielding.com/2014/07/15/people-claim-worried-climate-change-use-electricity/#8DO7fqqDQQzrJo2a.99
