MAKING TROUBLE

average daily allowance for two reasons: 1) It sounds Why would I want to bring this up in MAKE maga-fair. 2) It sounds familiar; we should consume a zine? Partly because the solutions we seek are, in roughly 2,000-calorie diet to be healthy. essence, engineering problems, and we need you There are 60× 60× 24 = 86,400 seconds in a day. to go out and start solving those problems. But also That means on the day you drink this bottle of because when I think about the future, it doesn’t energy drink, you are using about 90W. That’s right, look so good unless we change the way we generate drinking that single bottle and disposing of it is like and consume power. This will require everyone to keeping an old incandescent light bulb on all day. change the way they do pretty much everything — If you drink a bottle every day, it’s like you have your and that’s the good option. The bad scenario is that own personal light bulb following you around — we don’t change much, we kill all the supporting always. Illuminating, eh? And I didn’t even count the ecosystems, and descend into a future that makes energy required to make the drink inside! Tank Girl look like a fairyland paradise. So why didn’t I use carbon footprint as a measure? And finally, because it seems to me that buried in Well, CO₂ is sort of the enemy here, but it’s the the maker ethos is a fundamental part of the solu-secondary effect caused by our lifestyles. If you tion. Makers reuse things. Makers repurpose things. calculate in terms of CO₂, it’s tempting to believe Makers repair things. I will bet that a handmade table you can “offset” that carbon by planting a tree. That built to last 200 years has an energy label not much might be true in the far future when carbon pro- different from an IKEA table built to last 7 years — grams are well-managed and stable, but there’s except for the fact that you can amortize that energy no guarantee that the tree you plant today will last over a time period almost 30 times as long. That forever and not simply return that CO₂ to the atmo- means it effectively uses ¹/₃₀th of the energy. sphere when it dies. I prefer to measure our impact High-quality things that are appreciated, repaired, in SI units (International System of Units), because and handmade become an important part of your there can be nothing ambiguous about the results. life. My hope for a more beautiful future is that we

Every act of consumption we engage in has will have fewer things pass through our lives, of consequences — consequences that are not very higher quality, and love them more. visible to us. We aren’t presented with the ramifica- So go energize yourself by making an heirloom-tions when we purchase the product, we don’t see quality, reusable water jug. the direct repercussions of the single act, and our only way of seeing the end result is by abstract association with headlines like “Polar Bears Dying for Lack of Ice,” or “Dolphins Choking on Plastic in the Pacific.” I suspect we’d act a little better if we knew the consequences of our actions at the point of purchase. Here’s an attempt to kick us off in that direction. Perhaps one day all products will sport both labels: nutrition facts and consumption facts.

If you’re interested in learning more, I recently gave an extended talk on this subject at O’Reilly’s ETech conference, and the slides and accompanying text are available at wattzon.com.

Saul Griffith is a co-author of Howtoons and a recent recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Work, Energy, Power

Work is the exertion of a force over some distance. I perform work on an apple when

I lift it from the ground to a table.

Energy is the ability to do work. It’s a measure of how much work you can do, whether it be moving apples, or heating your house.

Power is the rate at which you consume energy or do work. Lifting the apple quickly onto the table requires more power than doing it slowly, but the same amount of work is performed.

I chose watts as a convenient unit to do all my calculations in. Wattage is a measure of power, which makes it independent of time. People often ask “Watts per what?” The correct answer would be “Watts per always.” It’s the average. If you are burning

a 100W light bulb, it’s using 100 watts (joules per second) whenever it’s turned on.

So I can conveniently use watts to add together the things I do that happen on markedly different time scales: the yearly things, the monthly things, and the daily things.

Thinking of your life in light bulbs might help you build an intuition for your power consumption.

Remember: “Watts per al ways.”

26 Make: Volume 14