Vampires and Leeches
At UPenn, my friend’s dorm has an animated polar bear. It lives in a snow world that melts when people use more energy. A lot of the time, the poor thing is swimming for its life, or drowning!
The sad thing is that the bear’s ice floe is melted sometimes when hardly anyone is there. That’s because all the cell phone chargers, laptop chargers, TVs, video games and everything are using energy even when they’re turned off. The chargers and screens use a lot! And that’s even if the screen is dark or “off,” and if there’s nothing on the charger. They’re energy vampires. You don’t even know they’re sucking electricity, and they’re not doing anything useful for anyone but the electric company.
What you do about it is unplug everything, or you put it on a power strip and turn that off. It’s really amazing how much energy it saves.
That got me thinking about all kinds of things that I do that cause global warming. Like, when I buy a shirt, the cotton was grown in Egypt, shipped to Indonesia, woven into cloth, shipped to Korea or Malaysia, sewn into this shirt, shipped to the US and stuck in a warehouse, trucked to the Gap at the mall, and then I drive to go get it. My shirt has seen much more of the world than I ever will! And when I buy it, that tells the company to do the whole thing again and make another one.