UPDATE: EcoSnoop responds – see below.
Now, you can rat on your neighbors, your company, even your friends and family. Thanks to EcoSnoop, there’s an app for that.
This can also be useful for catching those who talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk. This might just backfire on more than a few people. But since the green movement started this Stasi-esque information gathering campaign on “eco-offenders” [their word], that makes it OK to snap photos of green activists too, right? I could see some examples. Bill McKibben leaves lights on after leaving a room? Joe Romm takes his car instead of the bus? Monbiot lets his car idle at a stoplight? Jim Hansen uses electricity generated by coal? William Connolley leaves his computer on after a frenzied all-nighter of Wikipedia editing? Gore uses the elevator to his penthouse suite in SFO rather than take the stairs? Lots of opportunity there.
Now before the usual suspects get up in arms about my satire, let me say that I’m a fan of energy conservation. As many readers know, I walk the walk with my own energy saving measures. In fact just last week I upgraded part of my office to LED lighting, and I’m so impressed with it I’m going to showcase the product here. I’m not, however, going to turn in my neighbor because he left his porch light on one night or forgot to turn off his sprinkler when it rains. Yet you’ll find examples like that on the EcoSnoop web page. [Update: EcoSnoop has now removed those, saying they were “demo images” – see their note below -A]
Here’s what they say about the iPhone app campaign:
EcoSnoop for iPhone is an activism tool that allows green-aware users to assist and encourage corporate green initiatives.
What’s the big deal?
It has been estimated that as much as 30% of the energy consumed in office buildings is wasted.
This suggests a significant opportunity for energy use reduction, cost savings, and the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions through cost-effective energy efficiency opportunities.
To help identify the best opportunities, both from the perspective of the building owner and the utility, it is important to examine how, where, and when energy is used and the savings are likely to occur. (Excerpt taken from the National Action Plan for Energy Efficiency Sector Collaborative on Energy Efficiency Office Building Energy Use Profile)
Q: How can I help using my iPhone?
A: Users locate and report on eco-offenders by submitting pictures and descriptions of blatant abuse and misuse issues.
Q: What happens with my pictures?
A:The EcoSnoop website and iPhone applications are a centralized repository of environmental awareness and a tool for actively promoting energy conservancy and green awareness. By using the EcoSnoop iPhone application, the user becomes an important link in the chain of helping to report and mediate green waste (energy, pollution, etc.). Additionally, by going yourself and encouraging friends to utilize the website to add as much information as possible about the picture (address information, responsible party information, etc.) you are giving the EcoSnoop community the tools to encourage positive change!
EcoSnoop: We need your help saving the world…1 picture at a time.
Online: EcoSnoop.com
Twitter: @EcoSnoop
*An Appency Press Video Promo Reel – www.theappencypress.com*
h/t to WUWT reader Steve Keohane
UPDATE: A response from EcoSnoop who called me personally via telephone. Since their message seems to have missed the mark, I offered to elevate their message here. I believe this to be a sincere and reasonable response, and certainly nobody among us likes to see government or corporations waste energy. But the implementation here invites abuse. They ask for suggestions, let’s offer them some. – Anthony
{Anthony, for a posting to all users}
All,
Thank you for very much for the spirited conversation. We clearly have a lot of work to do to get EcoSnoop tuned into a constructive tool.
EcoSnoop is aimed at helping Government building owners understand when they are wasting energy. Energy efficiency hopefully is a non controversial solution in that it saves money, emissions and enhances national security. Our current policy is to prevent the posting of any information about ones residence. Unfortunately some old demo pictures are on the site, and they will be removed.
Our objective is to educate people on energy waste, not call them out. Our newer version which is still in work masks the location to all but the person who submits and the person who owns the building.
EcoSnoop is an evolving social community. As community, we need to maintain a certain decorum to assure everyone benefits from the “networks” observations to eliminate waste. As such, we ask that everyone follow some basic rules:
•Respect the Views of Others – EcoSnoop is not a political platform. EcoSnoop is about using technology and social networking to help people, companies and communities understand how awareness can eliminate waste, reduced CO2 output, and save money.
•No Personal Attacks – Do not use EcoSnoop to single out and attack people or companies. The best way to help people understand is through better information and cooperation. In taking pictures and making notes on the EcoSnoop site, think about what information will help a person or company understand how energy efficiency and waste reduction can help them improve profitability and community appeal.
•Avoid Mentioning Company Names – It is helpful to identify opportunities and describe ways to improve, but EcoSnoop finds the property owners take action quicker if they are not threatened or attacked. Sometimes when lights are left on at night it might be a simple instance of light night maintenance rather than persistent waste. The EcoSnoop community assumes everyone is well meaning, so given them a chance to take action. If they take no action, assume there is a good reason or work to better educate.
Since we are evolving, we are open to your ideas and suggestions. Please feel free to send your comments to us at snoop@ecosnoop.com.
We need a national effort in all countries to take pictures of the greenish politicians, every day. Flush that system with pictures of these people in their limousines. Especially the royalties.
… Gavin Schmidt taking a cab rather than the subway on “Cash Cab” in front of millions of viewers to see.
The Stasi go global
OK.
I’m going to read this again.
I’m looking for the “April Fool!” pop-up.
It’ gotta be in there . .
. . . . . .
. . . . . .nope,
. . .. . . .
nope, . . .
OK.
This is getting scary.
I too practice conservation.
Except on Earth Day, when I turn all the lights on.
I suspect that getting on this list will become a badge of honour for many, just to poke a green stick in an overly inquisitive, slightly creepy, busy-body organization.
Very heavily made up young woman.
Perhaps she went to the Tammy Fae Baker school of make up application.
She could save some energy if she didn’t trowel it on quite so thick.
“It has been estimated that as much as 30% of the energy consumed in office buildings is wasted.”
I wonder where they get that figure? CRU? ;->
People want to save energy – fine.
But what other people do with it, is nobody else’s business. They buy it, pay for it, it’s theirs and they can do whatever they darn well please with it. If I or anyone else wants to “waste” it, then It’s nobody else’s business. Period!
I sometimes throw food away too. Is it anyone else’s business? No!
I own it, and I do what I want with it. The energy-saving gestapo can screw off.
Quick someone report Gore’s house
WUWT Snoop,
Now which word was I not supposed to use?
The German G word for secret police?
The verb of turning a bolt?
The d-word that ends with a-r-n?
Which one one was it?
There was nothing wrong with my last post.
Everybody is watching everywhere. The world has gone mad.
Let me conduct an experiment,
From 1933 to 1945, Germany was ruled by the National Socialist Party. The German secret police at this time was called the Gestapo. You can read this at Wiki.
“…Now before the usual suspects get up in arms about my satire, let me say that I’m a fan of energy conservation. As many readers know, I walk the walk with my own energy saving measures….”
Each unto his own. I don’t.
Oh, I’ve no difficulty with using energy, and other resources, economically. But I reject conservation for conservation’s sake. To do this implies that you think, as do greenies, that, for instance, water is a fixed resource. It isn’t.
What IS a fixed resource is the transmission system. Water and electricity are both limited by (in the UK) the 1880-1950 built utility system. This was built to service demands of 50 years ago, and is presently creaking. It needs upgrading. However, since Thatcherism, it has been run by private enterprise, who are interested in squeezing profit out of an existing transmission system, but NOT investing in new reservoirs or power stations for the benefit of people in 50 years time.
Vast amounts of water cycle past our houses every day. Vast amounts of electricity could be provided on tap – cheaply too, if only the generation and transmission system were up to it. But it is far more profitable for the privatised utilities to try to get us to use less of their product (while still charging us the same money) so that they can defer the awful moment when they have to go to their shareholders and ask for finance for capital expenditure.
So long as we drink the green KoolAid and voluntarily limit our use of resources, the provider companies will continue to fail to invest in growth. I try to use as much water and energy as I can without wasting it. Doing so increases the demand, and makes it harder for the utilities to avoid putting in the necessary investment by pretending that the planet is being saved…
It’s the G word…isn’t it?
REPLY: Yes, so that we can catch certain words used in flammable or insulting context. The spam filter can’t differentiate between a history discussion and an insult. – Anthony
No doubt, version 2.0 will allow ‘offenders’ to pay a carbon offset ‘fine’ with a single mouse click.
Anyway, seems like quite a good plan – can someone take a snap of air force one please?
Thanks for posting my comment 9:28:03
Didn’t understand why the delay there.
I think I’ll throw some railroad ties in my woodstove, make some lovely black smoke, turn all the lights on, warm up the van and leave the front door open … then take a snap.
Bring it on…
WOW! What ever happened to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
kwik, *extremely* good idea – flush the system!
Also, several thousand pictures of cow’s behinds would both be accurate (all that methane, dontchaknow) and also a good learning experience as to why maybe you don’t want to take in every picture the public can send you.
And now that I think about it, the subject of those pics would be essentially the same as the subjects you suggested, Kwik.
Was that a brown shirt that Stacey was wearing??
I’m gonna guess that EcoSnoop is going to be buried with photos of Al Gore taking off, Al Gore in his motorcade…DiCaprio on the set with exploding gas barrels to “get the shot”, Pachauri jetting off to play cricket, …or pics of the carbon footprint of a Sheryl Crow concert??
…and I’ve got to turn off my security porch light after midnight lest I be the focus of brown-shirted greenies while Coke sponsors a car race of 3mpg guzzlers going around in a CIRCLE ??
First off, any and all consumption of electricity is anti environmental. All heating is anti the environment.
Batteries use toxic metal and heat driven manufacturing processes. Wind power is incredibly poluting building the towers and blades. The grid is built using mind boggling quantities of material and giving off heat from every wire that has electrical resistance. If you drive an electric car, less than 5% of the name plate capacity on a wind generator arrives at the street in the form of forward thrust for your car. The down time of the blades, the loss in the transmission lines, transformers and batteries is massive.
Probably get arrested under the Counter Terrorism Act in England.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8413016.stm
Wait, did the girl introduce herself as “Stacy,” or as “Stasi” at the beginning of the clip. Odd coincidence.
Guys, don’t let the LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender) spokespeople get under your skin. They scope out EVERYBODY.
So. How green is an iPhone? Is it a valid device to use to ‘report’ conservation matters?
Low paid like myself are maintaining lower bills through efficiancy right now.
If society as a whole became 100% efficiant and the energy providers (to maintain profits) put up bills,I and many like me, would have no room for manouver.
If the ‘warmists’ get their way, billions of people will have a worse standard of living than what their grandparents had to put up with when they were young.
Micheal Moore should make a film about what the implications a 20-80% cut in Carbon would mean for poor people in the west.
No car therefor no job,bland diet and freezing your nuts off half the year because you can’t fly too somewhere warm for your holiday.
Ha I’m going to have fun snapping smokers! All that nasty methane lol
Be careful what you wish for… You may get it.
Does anyone know who funds this site- or other relationships?
As clarification- I mean the Eco-Snoop
Stacy, would you mind if we turned out the lights?
there would have to be some serious concerns for the whistleblower at this stage
LED’s Anthony? any good? I have tried them but found the light too harsh.
” John (09:46:42) :
I think I’ll throw some railroad ties in my woodstove, make some lovely black smoke.”
My Grandfather was known as BlackBilly ’cause he burnt cut up sleepers with all the lovely tar oozing out.Problem was that the old place only had an open fireplace and he did like to sit right up to the heat..
I think the iPhone uses more energy than a leaky faucet.
I don’t see this a being anything more that fluff….Let’s be honest, how many of us actually believe that iPhone users are going to interesting in what other people are doing.
“Like Hang on a minute BFF, I need to like take a picture of someone turning on their lights and send it someone because they’re like wasting energy…” (Bang) the sound of said iPhone users walking into light post…..
But back to snooping, its an indication of how twisted folks who join up to any cult become and the AGW one is no different
Cute video.
Dell is one of my company clients. They tell me each American PC contains within it 600 border crossings of components. Amkor or some other supplier has parts and pieces that turn into components that come from Singapore or malaysia etc and arrive in the U*S for final shipping and packaging. Her little PDA has maybe 300 parts crossing border events.
Her top she wears came from asia and arrived in a shipping container.
Tell her to weave her own cloth from her own sheep or cotton patch.
Fresh cow doodoo is a great orgainic make-up base in Afrika. It is local and has no harmfull additives. Her hair? the hair dryer is an energy hog.
Amish are half hearted dwellers in a sustainable lifestyle. No electricity of any kind is the first to go. No mechanical transportation of any kind next and living in an urban set up is also 100% wrong. She can’t eat meat of course and eating organic nuts for protein generates flatulence which is another grand tabboo. It is illegal to sell her raw dairy product which would enhance her digestion and reduce rumblings beginning in the sigmoid colon.
For me i luv getting an environmental sermon. I can help them do a self assessment and they don’t like it.
Looking at the site … it does not seem to be very popular. My guess is that they will have had more traffic from this WUWT post than the total previous traffic since launch date.
sounds like 1984
They just got it back up and running, it crashed with all the pictures from Copenhagen.
I agree whole heartedly with Cathy, this is getting extremely scary. I’m not sure if you caught my last post with the “Wish we’d all were ready” song lyrics.
Life was filled with guns and war,
And all of us got trampled on the floor.
I wish we’d all been ready.
Children died, the days grew cold.
A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold.
I wish we’d all been ready.
And there’s no time
To change your mind
The Son has come
And you’ve been left behind.
A man and wife asleep in bed,
She hears a noise, turns her head he’s gone.
I wish we’d all been ready.
Two men walking up a hill,
One disappears, one’s left standing still.
I wish we’d all been ready.
And there’s no time
To change your mind
The Son has come
And you’ve been left behind
The Father spoke, the demons died.
How could you have been so blind?
And there’s no time
To change your mind
The Son has come
And you’ve been left behind.
No, And there’s no time
To change your mind
The Son has come
And you’ve been left behind
I hope we’ll all be ready.
You’ve been left behind.
I hope we’ll all be ready.
You’ve been left behind.
I hope we’ll all be ready.
You’ve been left behind.
I submit it again. I saw the movie along time ago, but it’s content and that song keep coming back to me. Especially, when I read articles like this one.
Like my brother-in-law said a few months ago “If they try to put a chip in me I’m running far far away.”
[snip – sorry I don’t know that info to be public, so can’t post it]
To some people, reporting on others IS happiness…
Some say the biggest eco-crime is having too many kids.
Would this app by any chance encourage people to start photographing big families they see at the mall?
Perhaps they can stalk the family back to their home for tagging, and web-shaming? If this was comedy it might be funny, like the organ donor sketch… “we’ve come for your kidney”, “but i’m not dead yet!”
What a silly silly app.
And she says most businesses are only too happy to comply with these idiots when they come in their door and point out their profligate ways.
Right.
What GP said… About 20 reports since August, and most of them by one person. And not to be mean, but Stacey truly has a face for radio.
What a load of Ecopoop!
P Gosselin (09:39:29) : “It’s the G word…isn’t it?”
What? We can’t say Al Gore anymore?
Note that the burgundy-lipped spokesperson (whose name is even “Stāsi”) refers to energy use as “offenses.”
But, seriously, volks, does this tattle-tale application have genuine appeal for people of other than 2nd grade mentality? I sure hope not. But that would be bad enough. Imagine a million little Khmer Rouge informants armed with cell phones.
Wouldn’t it be fun to quickly amass photos of Schmidt, Mann, Jones, Trenberth, Hansen, Gore, DiCaprio, and all the hardcore AGW alarmists’ homes with …. their beautiful Xmas lights all aglow??
Quick…before they get on to us and the unplugging begins!
–How many watts does it take to light up an Appency Press set??
My money says no less than 10k, and that’s conservative.
PaulH (09:26:00) :
“It has been estimated that as much as 30% of the energy consumed in office buildings is wasted.”
I wonder where they get that figure? CRU? ;->
Has it been Peer-reviewed?
I had a 10 grams more than my choco rations would normally allow and they Eco-snooped me.
Does anyone have that photo of Al’s new boat plugged in at the dock? That would be a great picture for that website.
He kind of has to where he lives (unless he buys Al’s indulgences), but one thing is information available on the internet. He resides in Kintnersville, PA and works in Manhattan. That’s 65 miles each way.
Probably rides a horse.
REPLY: No, it is known he has an apartment in Manhattan that he uses on weekdays. Commutes back to the farm on weekends.
Probably Jerry Seinfeld’s old apartment 😉 – A
Gores home office:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1840348/posts
Hey on my linux system I can have as many desktops I wish, with one computer and one display! Will I receave a price now?
If Eco-nuts were serious:
a.) They’d invent a roof shingle that not only converted sunlight to electricity and, thereby, let the world eliminate all the coal fired power plants and nuc-reactors, but also be a neutral heat reflector.
b.) They’d apply the technology in a.) above, to streets, roadways, autobahns, interstates, country lanes, and sidewalks.
c.) They’d have a telethon every year and buy up the Amazon rain forests and stop the wanton destruction of the global environment by those seeking a few grains of gold.
d. They’d convert every sanitation system on the planet into eco friendly biogas production sources.
e. They’d place the world’s biggest eco friendly heat pump across Northern Africa in order to heat Europe through the winter months.
Nope! They’re just not serious.
By using the EcoSnoop iPhone application, the user becomes an important link in the chain of helping to report and mediate green waste…
The Greens are the real waste.
—-
P Gosselin (09:28:03) :
I sometimes throw food away too.
Yes, but you don’t (can’t) waste it. Some other species will make use of it: bugs, bacteria, rodents, etc.
This is not so in the UK, as we now have a “czar” reporting to the government that we are wasting food. So we have different laws of the universe.
These guys will have some big corporate names suing them rather quickly.
Anthony.
In fact just last week I upgraded part of my office to LED lighting, and I’m so impressed with it I’m going to showcase the product here.
Question.
What is the difference between a halogen light bulb and an electric heater.
Answer.
Not much.
So you use low energy lighting and if you save 500w of power, you lose 500w of heating. Result is, the heating stays on longer to make up the 500w of lost heat input. Therefore you only save money when the lighting is on but the heating is off. But of course the time you need the lighting is when the sun has gone to bed and it’s getting cold. Of course if you live in a really hot country you will save the most but most do not.
How about a simple experiment comparing a halogen bulb and an LED bulb in a glass dome with an electric heater to maintain the temperature for the led. Most of the savings are illusary with the saved electricity cost going onto the gas bill.
Saving money is fine; saving “energy” isn’t.
There is only one truly finite, irreplacable resource and that is TIME. It make no sense to “save” energy by burning “time”.
I’d be very interested to hear what you think about the LED lights Anthony. I am none to impressed with CFL’s. I made the switch to CFL’s 5 years ago and find they do not last anywhere near as long as promised. I have not had to buy a single one since as they have all failed prior to the warranty running out. Hardly a sound thing environmentally speaking. My main question with the LED’s has to do with the same thing; longevity. My Christmas lights are all LED’s. They are going on 5 years old as well, and still work well. As I said, I am most keen for your article.
Cheers!
Do they recommend what color (colour for you Brits) shirt should be worn while doing this –
Brown – or green?
.
.
This is part of the brainwashing and turning kids who do not know better into the green gestapo…
See this:
http://www.isil.org/resources/lit/green-gestapo.html
Or this:
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/carboncops/
Or you can order a bumper sticker to protest…
http://www.zazzle.ca/the_green_gestapo_bumper_sticker-128688781222941464
Very sad state of affair.
The solution is easy: LET US RECYLE THE GREENS
I’m also excited about LED lighting possibilities (keep us posted), but I don’t need someone in my business when I choose to drive my GMC Sierra over my hybrid. Besides, I didn’t sign up for the AGW bandwagon, but for those who did, I see this as fair game!
I am dreaming of a new career in the ECO-police. Its important to get as low member-number as possible.
Imagine…. probably a green uniform… High brown boots…
An officers cap, with perhaps…an eagle up front?
My son could be in the green-jugend… Learning every day about tree-hugging and AGW?
As I arrest eco-criminals, promotions will surely come, and
I will rise up in the system and finally become a sturm-tree-fuhrer.
NOT!
“But, seriously, volks, does this tattle-tale application have genuine appeal for people of other than 2nd grade mentality?”
You’ve just defined the warmers. Everytime I get into a conversation/debate with a warmer, his/her inability to look beyond his/her little narrow focused world astonishes me.
What about all the energy used by the 12 million iPhone batteries to take the tens of millions of pictures of buildings with security lighting. (Because you know these folks will inadvertently take pictures of the same building several times.) … Or the energy used to upload said pictures through the carriers “Cell Towers” to EcoScoops “Server Farm” where these billions of pictures will be stored and served in an “Air Conditioned” room for a website running 24/7.
Hopefully someone will take a picture of EcoScoops building.
“…and snap a picture of the offense”
I am getting scared now, hopefully, such an eco-law will never pass
I think those who band together to rat out their neighbors for such a worthy cause deserve uniforms. I suggest “brown shirts” with maybe little crooked cross thingies on the sleeve. Might even want to come up with some sort of snappy salute to demonstrate fealty to the cause when they greet one another!
I wonder if they’ve featured photos of the mother-load over at The Goracle’s home in Tennessee?
CH
Kids, turn in your parents to the Eco Authorities! Do it today! Have your folks hauled off to climate re-education camps!
(btw, Stephan, the MP sketch was “Liver Donors”, not kidneys.)
Yes, who runs the EcoSnoop.com website? And what are their associations? How much editing of the submission stream will take place?
Ah, the Eco-Stasi. Well if they want someone to try out their new app on, come on by my crib. Now I am not just going to tell you where I live, down Toto, for the fun should be in the hunt, so get to it. Just don’t try during the spring months as I tend to spend more time in the basement. Anyway, until then I will help the economy by buying lamps needing 100W incandescent light bulbs and flood lights for the exterior, also I’ll leave all the lights on 24/7, that should be easy make the hunt easy enough. Oh, and if you look carefully, you might even see me with a “one-finger salute.”
The irony of this app is just too juicy. I seem to recall that the iPhone has a wee bit of a battery issue and since Apple has yet to come out with the iSolar charger or the iWind charger, the users of said app should be reporting on themselves.
This is so sad. Privacy, good manners, community spirit, all gone.
How did this behavior become the norm????
During the Stalin era, whenever targets were not met, those “responsible” were denounced as “wreckers of the struggle of the proletariat” and shot.
I don’t see any difference (other than not being shot) between being denounced as a wrecker of the revolution by a Bolshevik party member, and being denounced as a “wrecker of the glorious struggle against climate change,” by a Green Pary member. They are both a form of fascism despite having different labels.
By the way, Hans von Storch is just now warning that many of the greens is dreaming of such a career just now;
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,669398,00.html
If you want to translate… just start google, click translate and enter this Der Spiegel address…. it is interesting reading. It is not only Monckton that is warning about a world wide dictator-ship . So is von Storch.
Who is the upcoming Dictator ? Al Gore ?
Back in the USSR….
The ecosnoops propose large numbers of sneaks creeping around with iPhones, snapping “eco-incriminating” photographs. Each iPhone uses small amounts of rare earths, a lot of which comes from China. Other “really, really greeeen” machines also use rare earths. The “Green Movement” is encouraging major consumption of rare earths. Read how China mines their rare earths.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/business/global/01minerals.html?pagewanted=all
I don’t care, I’m already on the list.
My PC is on 24/7, how wasteful is that?
What is the problem anyway? Lighting is a minor cost and energy drain.
What about cleaning staff after office hours?
Security?
What next? IR cameras to detect excess heating after hours?
DaveE.
Let’s get a group together, take pictures of Apple HQ in Cupertino and TURN ‘EM IN!
Changed my mind.
It’s a great idea!
I’d like to report the first offenses i’ve seen today:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/miloyiannopoulos/9320781/Is_this_Al_Gores_mansion_during_Earth_Hour_2009/
http://www.hollywoodgrind.com/john-travolta-sues-florida-airport-owners/
http://www.glamorati.com/celebrity/2008/10-celebrity-houses/
But I couldnt get close enough to see if the lights were on.
And I didn’t notice any solar panels on the roofs either.
“Pat Moffitt
Does anyone know who funds this site- or other relationships?”
presumably, once we find out who runs it, we camp outside their office door, taking pictures every time they get in their car or leave the room with the light turned on…
“…Now before the usual suspects get up in arms about my satire, let me say that I’m a fan of energy conservation. As many readers know, I walk the walk with my own energy saving measures….”
I too try to save on what I’m spending on energy, but for financial reasons, not because of the environment. Can’t abide these new mercury enriched fluorescents so before the EU ban I stockpiled enough good old incandescent bulbs to last for the next 50years.
You can find a good selection of Copenhagen COP15 celebs and politicos using Google image search, so will be posting them on the site for the next few days.
Fight this with their own methods. As stated above.Take lots of pictures.RFKJr’s
family jet on the ramp-the 12cyl. Bentley,John Kerry’s Wife’s “Flying Squirrel”
Gulfstream jetting beck and forth to wherever the Skiing’s good.The possibilities
are endless. Go ahead,light that petard fuse greenies…
Corporate & Commercial lights have been dimmed before, they can do it, and it won’t hurt them. They’re just too busy to notice, not that they are against saving a few bucks and Gigawatts.
It’s far more energy efficient to employ a night watchman than to scorch the night with a million candlewatts.
How about all that wasted energy after everyone has gone to bed that we all pay for? All that auto-oversubscribed ‘in the name of safety’ outdated external lighting.
Is there an app for that?
No, and when a blackout hits, they darn things are either on or nothing is on.
Forget about saving the planet. Let’s save our economy and lighten the load on our trade defecit and pocketbooks.
Update:
_Jim
.
.
Eco-snoop : turn in a neighbour – prizes to be won!
Creepier and creepier. Trouble is that here in the UK it has probably been discussed at a cabinet meeting or two.
Here’s another article about rare earths mined in China which are needed for cell phones, wind turbines, “efficient” light bulbs and other green dreams.
http://www.windaction.org/news/24795
Not so “green”, after all.
Lights on really late?
Thse days most companies that have a business bg enough to have it’s own office building also have a horde of ommpa loompas beavering well into the wee hours so they can get their work done before their middle management come in and mess everything up while sipping their lattes!
Seriously though, it seems more and more like were living life under the Green Commissars
I resent these people telling me what to do. I have no wish to waste energy, but I’m not going about my day-today activities asking whether there is a way that it could be done without using so much energy. When we were first married, we had to watch every penny, lights were switched off, thick jumpers were worn so that the heating could be turned down and we walked rather than using the car whenever we could. Now retired, I have a pension that enables me to pay my electricity bill, have a well lit, perhaps too warm home and I am enjoying it. Nothing these people say will make me change my mind, indeed they are more likely to make me do the opposite. And as for posting my picture, my friends would laugh, the sane would take no notice, and the rest are people of no importance.
I love geothermal, wind and solar energy ideas. I think electric cars are cool. But primarily because I’d like to have independence from the grid.
I recycle because landfills are an infrastructure expense, and the refined materials SHOULD provide a net benefit in new manufacture (well, for someone). I can understand water conservation for the same infrastructure reasoning.
But I’m acquiring an entirely new vision about pollution and availability of energy and water. Given all the possible sources of energy, notions of peak oil and “precious, non-renewable” resources (which strangely, the greens claim to worship, but want to abandon COMPLETELY) are purely tenets of a paranoid philosophy of scarcity. Exhibit A is the Eco Porn of Copenhagen (with the little girl awaking to a wasteland)
I see no point in wasting energy, but consumption should be strictly a function of cost…. and every effort should be made to reduce that cost. We should plan and use judiciously, but economic growth will come with INCREASED consumption…. and economic decline will result from throttling consumption.
This is a battle for the sanity of the western world.
I just can’t wait to “save the world” by ratting on my friends, family, and neighbors’ criminal excessive overuse of energy. Especially all of the criminal acts i’ve witnessed regarding iphones….I’ve seen them leave the devices plugged in and charging when they were already fully charged! Think of all the Co2 they are needlessly releasing that is killing the planet!!!
-yes that is sarcasm
Further proof that the world is ruled by the unemployed…
P Gosselin (09:39:29) :
“It’s the G word…isn’t it?”
Gauleiter?
30% of energy in office buildings is wasted? Office buildings period are becoming a waste of power. With the concentration of heat-producing people and heat-producing electrical devices, central air conditioning is a requirement, and it seems certain it is run for a far longer period of time, both daily and yearly, than it would be at someone’s house. Indeed, I wonder if some of those massive structures ever turn off the A/C and have to use the heating, if they have a heating system. They also have to keep air circulating regardless.
The lighting for an entire room is turned on for one guy at his cubicle. All the bathroom lights come on for one person, if they are not just left on always. There are also large amounts of lighting that must be left on for safety reasons, from hallways to stairwells to exit signs.
And for NYC for the example, which has such low city water pressure that many buildings have rooftop water tanks, you just know there must be pumps to boost the water up to the top floors.
Maybe someday managers will be less obsessive. They will accept that much office work can be done batch-mode, employees can work from home, download work-to-be-done once or twice a day and upload to the office. Add in teleconferencing as needed, which isn’t near as much as imagined as so many meetings really are a waste of time and resources.
Large offices will be decided to be unneeded, which alone will yield energy savings, besides that saved by ditching the daily commute. Which may also increase the expected lifespan of an office worker, given the small but real dangers of commuting.
Then snoopy neighbors can complain about why your lights are on during the day.
DC (09:30:47) : I’m sure he is a convinced green and compensates all that energy comsumption by drinking eco-fuels like champagne, armagnac, 3K a bottle wines, etc.
George must be spinning wildy in his grave.
I thought this video was an Iowahawk spinoff. Dear G*d, you can satarize thesee people!
Domain Name: ECOSNOOP.COM
Registrar: EASYDNS TECHNOLOGIES, INC.
Whois Server: whois.easydns.com
Referral URL: http://www.easydns.com
Name Server: NS1.EASYDNS.COM
Name Server: NS2.EASYDNS.COM
Name Server: NS3.EASYDNS.ORG
Name Server: NS6.EASYDNS.NET
Name Server: REMOTE1.EASYDNS.COM
Name Server: REMOTE2.EASYDNS.COM
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 11-jun-2009
Creation Date: 15-mar-2009
Expiration Date: 15-mar-2011
Last update of whois database: Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:02:56 UTC
Hmmm looks like they decided to change their listing info today.
Larry
Nice young lady.
With that flower in her hair she reminds me of those Danish and Swedish film stars from the 70’s.
Correction – I guess that is just the last update time for the whois database not the listing.
Never mind.
Larry
This is not intended to be, nor is it, legal advice. However, persons probably should be careful about following anyone home, taking pictures of them and their kids if not invited to do so. This gets perilously close to violating various stalking laws, and invasion of privacy laws. If anyone requires legal advice they should contact an attorney.
A portion of the California stalking law is shown below; other jurisdictions have similar laws.
From California Penal Code:
“646.9. (a) Any person who willfully, maliciously, and repeatedly
follows or willfully and maliciously harasses another person and who
makes a credible threat with the intent to place that person in
reasonable fear for his or her safety, or the safety of his or her
immediate family is guilty of the crime of stalking, punishable by
imprisonment in a county jail for not more than one year, or by a
fine of not more than one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both that
fine and imprisonment, or by imprisonment in the state prison.”
There is much more to this statute.
Yes, who runs the EcoSnoop.com website? And what are their associations? How much editing of the submission stream will take place?
Pretty easy to run down (took me about 2 minutes), and there’s a bit of a clue in my earlier post. He has a nice front yard and what looks like a nice home/office, btw, although the trees and bush out front could stand some trimming.
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
From 1984 by George Orwell
ADMIN/MODERATOR NOTE: If you trim this, I understand.
[snip]
REPLY: This is publicly available info available from WHOIS.NET (or Network Solutions) and Google Earth/Maps. However, I think it is in bad taste to post this, so I’m removing it. – A
Thanks for posting this. A few of my friends have gotten a kick out of this website.
I’d like to promote the word “Eco-McCarthyism.” This phrase is what came to mind for me when I read the article on your blog.
I thought I was creative and coined a new phrase, but Google returned 4 hits. With so many people in the world and a maturing internet, it’s hard to be truly original.
What would be even better is capturing one of the alarmist luminaries receiving an escort who drove out to see them.
Shame! He could have insisted s/he take the bus.
Hopefully after the “young lady” informs the business that she’s turned them in for a dripping faucet they will throw her a__ out in the street and tell her she is not welcome anymore. But I guess that would be too good to hope for.
Nice, citizen eco-police .. just what we need .. like we don’t have enough problems already.
Phil M. (10:51:10) :
Anthony.
In fact just last week I upgraded part of my office to LED lighting, and I’m so impressed with it I’m going to showcase the product here.
Question.
What is the difference between a halogen light bulb and an electric heater.
Answer.
Not much.
Ideally lighting should be dual source, halogen and incandescent for when you would be running the heating, fluorescent and LED when you need cooling.
But people would balk at the installation cost and appearance of dual sets of light fixtures, and can’t be bothered to change bulbs twice a year.
If you wanted to be more ecologically sound, more independent, then the low-heat lighting makes a better choice. Needing less amps is more compatible with what one can expect from a home photovoltaic (PV) system. Heating can be done by various sources. I have noticed the use of outdoor furnaces, insulated and set not-too-close to the house, the heat being piped inside. The type I know of uses wood, and one fellow I knew used to gather old shipping crates and pallets for fuel. There is less worry about creosote fires, no worries about carbon monoxide buildup in the home, and other advantages. Heck, maybe you can even toss your burnable trash and dry leaves as well.
ROFLMAO … just what I was thinking … hahahahaha…
Dave Collings (12:29:07) :
Don’t feel bad, I thought I had penned “Yelling Fire of a crowded Planet”, but was beat to it by a warming advocate 3 years earlier.
Prince Charles? – always ready with an eco lecture for the rest of us, always travelling by helicopter and Range Rover. Al Gore? those private jet moments, Obama? – check out that 747. Here in freezing Richmond upon Thames we have a particularly eco-fascist lib-dem council – this is a great opportunity, get those photos, you know what to do, the Stasi expects every man to do his duty and nark on the eco-narks.
Happy New Year!
You’ve got to be kidding!
Some people have WAY too much time on their hands. I use energy and resources the way I need to and I don’t like people prying into how I do use them. What ever happened to the right of privacy?
I also have a whole bunch of trees storing up carbon, which of course these nuts can’t see. I should sell them credits…hmm, $2000/tree would be nice. 🙂
Save the planet – [snip]
Now if you don’t mind, i’ll go start up my dirty diesel bulldozer & leave it idling to warm up. But it’s ok, I display the greenpeace sticker on the back of it.
I read an article somewhere recently, talking about how the iPhone is perhaps currently one of the least “green” products made. Massive amounts of energy to produce, massive quantities of toxic substances.
While watching this I could only think more about what I’ve begun to realize: We have a generation growing up unaware of the dangers of Communism. They wear their brightly colored murderous thug (Che) t-shirts, sip Mojitos and watch Michael Moore movies – that’s about what they “know” about Communism. It’s hip and trendy. Oh, they’re so ignorant. Seriously, I met a guy in his 30s (a college grad going for his masters) the other day who wondered “What’s so wrong with Communism? Isn’t it like the Kibbutz in Israel?”
I think there’s a large portion of our country who buys into Michael Moore’s idea of Communist Cuba – it’s a Nirvana of free health care and literacy (Uh, have you seen photos of their filthy and decrepit hospitals and, sure, they can read but have to read Castro approved material). I have an older friend who fled Cuba just post-revolution. He had everything (his business, home and all belongings) taken by force, was imprisoned, escaped to the US… I know that Communism can only be done by force. People aren’t risking their lives to leave that island for nothing.
Which brings me to this nauseating Eco-snoop… neighbors spying on neighbors is what they do in communist countries. Creepy and ignorant.
I just went back to the WUWT home page, and the “EcoSpy -vs- EcoSpy” story is gone!?
Is this some kind of green sabotage? Or, has the app been recalled already?
REPLY: [ It’s there for me. -mod.]
These kind of people are just doing what parasites usually do. Suck the life out of the host and try to get the host to change their behavior to benefit the parasite. Only lasts as long as it takes the dog to scratch them off.
*WRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR*** I’M SORRY *WRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR* I CAN’T *WRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR* HERE YOU OVER *WRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR* ALL THESE *WRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR* BLENDERS AND *WRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR* HAIR DRYERS *WRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR*
*WRRRRRRRRRRRRR* OR “HEAR” YOU EITHER *WRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR* HOW *WRRRRRRRRRRRRRR* EMBARRASSING *WRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR*
To the ecoSS:
I conserve only because I can no longer afford the resources!Live and let live, get a life, get out of mine!
1. I really dont think that this app is intended to report on individuals… I think the design is really intended to have people report on businesses so that people can make choices to support greener business and those businesses can see what they need to do in order to become greener. In many ways, its no different then a site like Yelp, just with an environmental focus.
2. Just because you register a domain name, does not mean you are the “person behind..” – QSA Access is a development company, presumably hired by someone to create the app or website for them. Posting the poor guys name and phone number on your site is shameful.
“Additionally, by going yourself and encouraging friends to utilize the website to add as much information as possible about the picture (address information, responsible party information, etc.) you are giving the EcoSnoop community the tools to encourage positive change!”
Didn’t you guys get the memo? This is eco-justice. All previous norms of decency are hereby suspended in the name of saving the planet. C’mon, get with the program!
Lol…of course this whole thing hinges on people being stupid enough to buy an iPhone…
Anybody ever read “Earth” by David Brin? Sounds like old geezers using Tru-Vue googles to rat out the “Ra Boys”.
Our idiocracy at work.
I was looking at this article and am dumbfounded by the sheer idiocy that makes itself apparent when one thinks it through a bit:
While this is true initially when you first plant trees, as time goes by they become less and less of a carbon sink and when the forest is fully mature, it becomes carbon neutral. At full maturity, the amount of carbon taken out of the atmosphere to produce new biomass is balanced by decaying biomass that is releasing CO2. In fact, a fully mature forest will create a zone of CO2 enriched air which helps the forest grow.
This idiotic scheme would reduce food production, increase food costs, and in the end result in no decrease in atmospheric CO2 unless those trees are cut for lumber or paper.
Imagine what happens in a deciduous forest in a temperate climate zone. In the fall, the leaves fall to the ground. The temperature falls and the leaves are possibly covered with snow but generally have a cold environment with possible direct sun exposure as the leave canopy provides no shade. Decreased temperatures and increased UV would act to greatly reduce the decay process by microbes. So basically this leaf litter stays on the ground until spring.
In the spring, the temperatures warm, the leaf litter thaws, decay increases, and more CO2 is being released just as the trees above need it for providing biomass in the form of new leaf growth. As the leaves grow, they offer shade which reduces UV exposure on the ground and allows various microbe populations to increase even more which releases even more CO2. Branches and twigs that have broken off in winter ice, wind, and snow storms also begin to decay. The forest is now generating an environment that helps itself grow.
Now what do we get for that in return? Higher food prices is what we get. Remember that foods are global commodities. Increasing the price of corn or wheat in the US increases the cost globally. Foods that might have been within reach of some of the poorest people on the planet might now be out of the range of affordability and the scarcity goes up. In reaction to the increase in prices, forest is cleared and farmland is placed in production in areas outside of the US. So at some point there has been no reduction in farming, no increase in forest globally, no reduction in atmospheric CO2 and if the new farms are less efficient in production than US farms, you are likely to see a net increase in CO2 production through the activities associated with less efficient farming practices.
The only likely outcome I can see from such a policy is reducing populations through increases in malnutrition and making having additional mouths to feed too expensive, but even that is eventually compensated for when market forces cause more food to be grown outside the jurisdiction of the US government.
Once again, and irrational fear of CO2 is being used as a “hook” in order to get people to accept regulations that amount to nothing more than “redistribution of wealth” on a global scale and whose impact on CO2 may actually be the opposite of what is “sold” to the people in the rhetoric used to get them to go along with it.
Idiocy. Pure and simple.
Aaron,
No the app will never be used on individuals. These [snip] will never resort to such tactics, they will never want to push their agenda on anybody else. Sheesh.
Stalin would be so pleased. What bugs me is the young woman probably knows nothing of the big brother state that was Stalinist Russia. How many “snoops” sent people to their deaths in the Gulag I wonder? Will their be a Gulag for us enviro-offenders?
OT, but important news : the french “taxe carbone”, which was to come into force on january 1st, has just been cancelled by the Conseil Constitutionnel. For French readers, see here : http://skyfal.free.fr/?p=468
@Jabba
You mean the kind of person dumb enough to walk around snapping pictures of smoke stacks to alleviate their eco-guilt?
Would someone turn in EcoSnoop.com on EcoSnoop.com for all of the offices, servers, routers and monitors left on 24/7 for a worthless cause please. Waste, waste, waste!
iStasi?
iNformant?
As for Stacy The Newsreader, I don’t get the vibes from her that she thought this was good, rather that this was a particularly distasteful part of her job. It would be interesting to compare her talking about other apps.
ahhhh there’s no fascist like a progressive econut greenie fascist.
They are so much smarter, so much better, so much right . . . we should all just bow down to their superior wisdom.
When the great book is written about the global warming hysteria of this era, they’ll be the pigs in the eco farmyard.
Just talking to my 27 year old son about this and we have come up with a plan. Every time one of us releases methane into our immediate atmosphere we are using his iphone to record the offense and offender, mostly him. Incidentally we live right across from a dairy farm. Should we report every time a cow farts!
It has been estimated that as much as 99% of all factoids stated on environmental websites are made up.
rbateman: Clever. . .
but eco-warriors do not use gadgets like ipods anyway, do they?
it surely must be against their religion?
but if they did they would be commiting a sin, no?
if they use a gadget like an ipod they then must report them selves right?
self regulatory in the end I think
Ah, when do the public denunciations begin? Oh, already.
How about the public confessions?
I appreciate the Stasi references, which are perfectly appropriate, but this reminds me more of the Chinese Cultural Referendum. I had a friend who lived through that — she told me that you had to have very few friends, but you trusted them absolutely, literally with your life. Anyone outside that circle, you didn’t trust at all. She was shocked that in North America our friendships are so casual. How could that be, when choosing in whom to confide is a matter of life and death?
I was expecting Stacy to ask me if she could take my order. Instead, she went on talking about some foolish iPhone application. I’m hungry and disappointed.
SSam (12:26:08)
Google maps satellite view excellent, even has a Hansen ‘death train’ in the bottom left corner.
[snip]
Well,
You guys have a lot of energy and anger. You make many relevant points that we can use to make the site serve its purpose.
Though we have seemingly failed in the message, EcoSnoop is focusing on helping people eliminate waste that they are not aware of. Folks like Al Gore want us to waste Trillions to change our economy to eliminate CO2 emissions. Would you like a constructive alternative?
We could get a quick payback and save money if we simply knew when we were wasting energy. The 30% in energy savings for buildings quoted in our material and questioned in this message trail is a well documented and proven fact (See research by Texas A&M). EcoSnoop is intended as a business application, but as you point out we seem to have missed the mark.
I personally am keen to help people save money through energy efficiency, and as a second benefit reduce emissions as a hedge. No one should be using EcoSnoop for personal attacks, stalking or any other invasive purpose.
You can direct your thoughts to snoop@ecosnoop.com. We are happy to listen to rational suggestions.
doing a little snooping of the MSM and found this fascinating:
28 Dec: Wash Times: EDITORIAL: Biased reporting on Climategate
Associated Press coverage raises eyebrows
To judge by recent coverage from Associated Press, the Fourth Estate watchdog has acted like a third-rate pocket pet. Case in point is an 1,800-word AP missive that appeared in hundreds of publications, many carrying it on the front page of their Sunday, Dec. 13 issue with the headline, “Science not faked, but not pretty.” AP gave three scientists copies of the controversial e-mails and then asked them about their conclusions. The wire service portrayed the trio of scientists as dismissing or minimizing allegations of scientific fraud when, in fact, the scientists believe no such thing.
The first scientist quoted in the article, Mark Frankel, is director of scientific freedom, responsibility and law at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. AP quotes him as concluding that there is, “no evidence of falsification or fabrication of data, although concerns could be raised about some instances of very ‘generous interpretations.'” While the article mentions that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and some Republican lawmakers are calling for independent investigations, AP doesn’t note the views of the scientists they interviewed.
When The Washington Times talked to Mr. Frankel, the scientist gave a quite different impression. The e-mails, he said, are not sufficient to reach any judgment at all on whether the data or science was faked or misleading. “You can’t do that on the e-mails alone, you can’t do it on the e-mails or the program,” he concluded. For that reason, Mr. Frankel supports investigation of East Anglia and related allegations of fraud at Pennsylvania State University.
There’s a big difference between saying that there isn’t sufficient evidence to determine if falsification of data occurred – and that there should be an investigation – and saying, as AP did: “Science not faked.”
Mr. Frankel also believes outsiders to the two schools should be asked to take part. “You should be willing and open to going to outside people to be part of your inquiry,” he advised. “If I were Penn State, I would certainly be advising them to be very open to the possibility of bringing in one or two people who have impeccable credentials, well-respected, to join in ….”
Arizona State University professor Dan Sarewitz is quoted by AP as saying, “This is normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though still within bounds.” However, Mr. Sarewitz wasn’t speaking about the validity of the climate science; he was discussing his belief that politics infects how most scientific research is conducted. While AP used the quote to suggest that there was nothing terribly wrong that had been revealed in Climategate, Mr. Sarewitz was trying to issue a warning that politics infects too much science and that reporters, politicians and the public are naive about that reality.
As he told The Washington Times, “When the human underside (of science) gets revealed, then suddenly people are disillusioned and they say, ‘Oh, how shocking!’ But it’s not particularly shocking.” Indeed, Mr. Sarewitz suggests that reporters ask scientists about their political views. (For the record, he is a liberal Democrat.) He also is skeptical of the university investigations, particularly if they don’t include outsiders. “I think they should have external people [involved in the investigations]. Certainly. … The challenge here might be, can you find people who are independent but also understand the science well enough to really tell (if there was wrongdoing)?”
The third scientist interviewed by AP, professor Gerald North at Texas A&M University, joined Mr. Frankel and Mr. Sarewitz in hoping that climate data would be more readily shared in the future. He told us he also thinks it is important that investigations proceed at the two universities.
The Washington Times tried to raise these issues with the reporters and editors involved, but Jack Stokes, AP’s manager of media relations, said that none of the five reporters who worked on the article nor their editors had time to answer questions.
If AP refuses to explain how it could have given readers across the planet such a distorted view of Climategate, maybe an explanation can be found buried in the article itself. One of the reporters, Seth Borenstein, the AP science reporter who writes on global warming and who is the lead author on the piece, is part of the Climategate story himself. In the last sentence of the article, the authors note that the archive of disputed Climategate e-mails “includes a request from an AP reporter, one of the writers of this story, for reaction to a study, a standard step for journalists seeking quotes for their stories.”
But Mr. Borenstein’s e-mail was hardly standard and far from neutral. In it, the reporter disparages Marc Morano, a critic of man-made global-warming claims, as “hyping wildly” the study that Mr. Borenstein asked scientists to comment on. The e-mail almost makes it appear as if Mr. Borenstein were asking those involved in Climategate to help him discredit critics of man-made global warming.
East Anglia and Penn State are not the only two institutions that need to answer questions about what is going on behind the scenes.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/28/biased-reporting-on-climategate/?feat=article_top10_read
At my end of the wood, the hysteria concerning the next “Millenium bug” has started to show it’s ugly head (the “Year 2038 bug” will cause all seconds in computers to “run out” in 2038 at 03:14:07 ).
oh, save us all from journalists…
I can’t wait for the first trials. A smart lawyer would be able to turn them around and have the eco-idiots put in jail for harassment.
Flood the site with pictures of hypocritical greenies like John Travolta with his fleet of jets, and Al Gore with his mansion. Shove the truth down their throats!
I’ve already tried the app to take a photo of this horrendous waste of fossil fuel
As people cut their utilization of electricity, water, gas, etc., just watch the utilities and other energy providers boost the rates to pay for the infrastructure. Increasing utilization is the only way to keep it cheap. Besides, do these people really think Brazil, India and China haven’t already evaluated every bit of the CRU whistleblown data?
In one uber green analysis over at one of the lefty blogs, the author *seriously* stated he thought China was just using Cop-15 as a ruse so they could leapfrog the rest of the world in installing super clean energy technology. I’m betting China is realizing how beneficial their own CO2 has been to their agricultural efforts and will be laughing all their way to the bank (especially if they can get the industrialized nations to fall on their eco-swords). TaDa! Enter…. EcoSpy! The first step in self destruction.
“We are happy to listen to rational suggestions.”
How about changing your basic premise that somehow CO2 is harmful or the cause of any problem at all? And if it is, why not advocate the replacement of CO2 generating power production with power production from sources such as nuclear power with recycled fuel that would generate practically no CO2 and would result in such abundant energy supplies that “conservation” would no longer be an issue. In fact, rates would plummet and incentives would be given by producers for users to increase their consumption, not decrease it.
It is in our power with technology available right now to create that reality. It isn’t some technology that relies on unicorns, rainbows, fluffy bunnies and butterflies.
@ crosspatch (13:21:05) :
So here in the USA we plant more trees which makes us feel better, and in the dirt-poor countries they end up deforesting with slash-and-burn agriculture to get enough food to survive, which makes us feel better since we are greener than they are. “Being green” is all about doing what makes us feel good. So what’s the downside?
SSam (12:26:08)
Is that Highway 61 to the west?
Now the rovin’ gambler he was very bored
He was tryin’ to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done
We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61.
“Eco Snoop (13:48:04) :
Well,
You guys have a lot of energy and anger.”
I noticed most people laughing at you and your app. Regardless of your intentions you have set about to create an atmosphere of surveillance and harassment against many people who actually do need their lights on.
I went to the ecosnoop site and I must say that I am not impressed. Some of the “cases” seems very personal indeed, not all though. Most are concerned with public and corporate cases. The personal ones are the ones that I worry about.
“Waters when it rains”, not as straight forward as one might think. I use irrigation in my garden and some systems are set to a certain amount of water in the ground. Below a set amount, irrigation will take place.
Well…it doesn’t seem to be getting much action….last I checked, only 32 total submissions….and when did it come out? In March 09? Or possibly not till their update in June. Either way, i don’t think we need to worry too much about this one.
Domain Name: ECOSNOOP.COM
Registrar: EASYDNS TECHNOLOGIES, INC.
Whois Server: whois.easydns.com
Referral URL: http://www.easydns.com
Name Server: NS1.EASYDNS.COM
Name Server: NS2.EASYDNS.COM
Name Server: NS3.EASYDNS.ORG
Name Server: NS6.EASYDNS.NET
Name Server: REMOTE1.EASYDNS.COM
Name Server: REMOTE2.EASYDNS.COM
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 11-jun-2009
Creation Date: 15-mar-2009
Expiration Date: 15-mar-2011
I’d question the premise of the app and the name “snoop”:
“to pry into the private business of others”
If it is to be used as you describe, in open public spaces, then there is no need for the word “snoop”.
I’d also question… gosh there are so many… the notion of using photographs. You can’t tell what is going on in a building, so what meaning is there in whether the lights are on?
You should perhaps also include some very clear instructions about what people can and can’t do. In the UK we have ASBO laws which are capable of turning any behaviour into a criminal act. All it takes is for the individual to be perceived to be doing something which causes alarm, harassment, or distress. If the sight of you wondering around in your underpants distresses the neighbours, you can be told by law not to do it. Recently a woman was ASBO’d for making too much noise during sex. She ignored the ASBO order, “persisted”, and is facing jail.
I get the feeling you are very principled and well meaning, but how on earth is this app supposed to help in reality?
@ecosnoop
OK, if you are truly the person(s) who invented this app, then you should be applauded for your effort to come here and explain it.
Yes there is a lot of anger here. Climategate did nothing but prove that all the anger has been well deserved. And the State Run Media with their masters in the White House continue attempting to push us toward some kind of strange world ecocracy.
I for one have taken a quick look at your site and will make the effort now to read through it and attempt to comment here soon.
Eco Snoop (13:48:04) :
(bold mine) and
Wonder why?
No matter how noble your cause, there is still something insidious in creating an application whose purpose is to inform on other people. Perhaps not now, but there is a potential for abuse, too.
Mark
@ecoSnoop
So…
1) you didn’t intend for it to be used for personal use yet you release it to the general public for personal use….
2) You don’t mean for it to get people snooping about so you called it “Eco Snoop”…
Do you have any openings in your marketing department? If not then you should consider it.
@ecosnoop –
one more point – if you guys do nothing else other than get people to turn some of their lights off at night, more power to you – this coming from an amateur astronomer. 🙂
{Anthony, for a posting to all users}
All,
Thank you for very much for the spirited conversation. We clearly have a lot of work to do to get EcoSnoop tuned into a constructive tool.
EcoSnoop is aimed at helping Government building owners understand when they are wasting energy. Energy efficiency hopefully is a non controversial solution in that it saves money, emissions and enhances national security. Our current policy is to prevent the posting of any information about ones residence. Unfortunately some old demo pictures are on the site, and they will be removed.
Our objective is to educate people on energy waste, not call them out. Our newer version which is still in work masks the location to all but the person who submits and the person who owns the building.
EcoSnoop is an evolving social community. As community, we need to maintain a certain decorum to assure everyone benefits from the “networks” observations to eliminate waste. As such, we ask that everyone follow some basic rules:
•Respect the Views of Others – EcoSnoop is not a political platform. EcoSnoop is about using technology and social networking to help people, companies and communities understand how awareness can eliminate waste, reduced CO2 output, and save money.
•No Personal Attacks – Do not use EcoSnoop to single out and attack people or companies. The best way to help people understand is through better information and cooperation. In taking pictures and making notes on the EcoSnoop site, think about what information will help a person or company understand how energy efficiency and waste reduction can help them improve profitability and community appeal.
•Avoid Mentioning Company Names – It is helpful to identify opportunities and describe ways to improve, but EcoSnoop finds the property owners take action quicker if they are not threatened or attacked. Sometimes when lights are left on at night it might be a simple instance of light night maintenance rather than persistent waste. The EcoSnoop community assumes everyone is well meaning, so given them a chance to take action. If they take no action, assume there is a good reason or work to better educate.
Since we are evolving, we are open to your ideas and suggestions. Please feel free to send your comments to us at snoop@ecosnoop.com.
Can we have eco swoop on CRU, NASA etc in terms of how much of the money they have been given has actually achieved environmental outcomes!
http://twawki.com/2009/12/28/how-much-for-the-real-cause/
And dont forget the met offices carbon spewing mega computer!
Eco-snoop,
Spare me the victim act.
Eco Snoop (13:48:04) :
Folks like Al Gore want us to waste Trillions to change our economy to eliminate CO2 emissions. Would you like a constructive alternative?
Just get Al Gore’s fingers out of our wallets. That would be great. Thanks.
‘Snoop’ is a word with bad connotations. Maybe a rebrand would be a good plan.
Gulags? Spying on neighbors? Reporting actions against Gaia? There’s an app for that! LOL
Seriously, I’m going to keep using my iPhone to scan UPC codes and find out where I can get the item cheaper, I’m going to use my iPhone to listen to music and tell me all about the song, where I can buy it, listen to it for free, etc., and I am definitely going to use my iPhone to show the word, “JUNK” whenever a junk call comes in for the umpteenth time to sell me crap I don’t need….
Eco Snoop (13:48:04) :
Well,
You guys have a lot of energy and anger. You make many relevant points that we can use to make the site serve its purpose. unquote.
Eco Snoop – I am not a guy in any of the word’s meanings.
If you genuinely wanted to be positive, perhaps you should have thought more about your choice of name. What did you expect with a name like that for your business? Eco has become a red rag for many ordinary people, as personal freedom is being taken away under its banner.
Eco-fascism is a real threat in the world today. People are losing their farms, their businesses and are threatened with jail and being killed by the eco/environmentalist groups if we don’t toe their line.
Snoop – well the word conjures up nasty connotations immediately.
So you chose a provocative, nasty name, then you comment that there is a lot of energy and anger! Da – go figure.
Hey I need a sticker. I just had central air installed in my sailboat. Don’t we get carbon indulgences for sailing? The toilet is thru hull discharge. The grill is natural gas which Pelosi says is not a fossil fuel.
The first new office building I had that was computor controlled HVAC. Lighting was on a timer but the cleaning crew turned lights on to clean at night. Our measurements show the computors and monitors give off a lot of heat.
Reminds me of an “almost an app” that circulated (briefly) inside Apple about 20 years ago… It was called “Rumor Monger”. ANYONE could put up an anonymous ‘rumor’ that would be circulated to any other Mac running “rumor monger”. An early experiment in peer-to-peer serverless distributed apps/communication.
It was great fun for about 2 weeks. Then “unacceptable rumors” started floating around…
I won’t mention how it was eventually eliminated (it was hard to kill a distributed app that had no central server…) but it WAS eliminated.
Aside from the legal risks from such rumors on a corporate network, “The Powers That Be” did not like when it was aimed at them…
So I’d suggest taking any such “rumor monger” application you run into and finding just how it can best be used to demonstrate to the perveyors that “It is a Bad Idea.”
But be careful. While it is possible to do things like, oh, post a picture of a CIA U2 taking off burning lots of fuel, or of a police car idling on a stake out: it is very hard to do it in such a way that you can not eventually be ‘found’ (especially if your iPhone ‘leaves fingerprints’ that you can not control…) So be safe, and be playful, but only do things that are things you would be willing to have “explained” in the local newspaper (or courthouse…)
Except, perhaps, for those of you in the UK where the courts have decided you can break the law “for a greater good”… You would be playing “double or nothing”, but it would be an interesting test case. (“Your Honor, defense of the planet for all of us outweighs the minor infringement of this public person driving a saloon car all alone!! ” … ) But have a lawyer on retainer first. And get AlGore lined up as expert witness. Unless he’s the target. No, wait, it would be sooo cool to have him be target AND witness for the defense. 😉
China is a massive producer of CO2 from rice paddies. Massive. They also still have heating and cooking for 75% of their people from wood, charcoal, trash and coal fires. No where will china allow a real audit. They are adding a lot of coal fired electric and are doing excellent PR. In reality, they are putting on a show.
@ Ecosnoop
This sounds like every other consulting firm advertisement I’ve ever seen. I have some considerable experience in that regard, and have yet to employ a consulting firm that did anything other than suck money out of my company. Go away.
The advertisers on EcoSnoop’s site are alternative lighting companies using a business model that seems to say- buy our product or else! I would personally boycott any company using threats to force people to buy their product. I can’t find the money behind the site other than the “advertisers.” Perhaps extortionists is a more proper term than advertisers. Talk about your unethical business practices!
EM Smith,
On killing a runaway app. I was in a call center farm in the 90’s with 500+ people in one room, when we had a runaway network install go bad.
Every computer locked up and crashed as the forced install ranamuck. They had to have every employee turn off their computer and wait until every machine was confirmed off for the floor before we were allowed to start the reboot process on any of them.
Did you guys have to shut down the whole “network” to kill the app?
E.M.Smith (14:45:29) :
…
But be careful. While it is possible to do things like, oh, post a picture of a CIA U2 taking off burning lots of fuel, or of a police car idling on a stake out: it is very hard to do it in such a way that you can not eventually be ‘found’ (especially if your iPhone ‘leaves fingerprints’ that you can not control…) So be safe, and be playful, but only do things that are things you would be willing to have “explained” in the local newspaper (or courthouse…)…
For General Info… even if it’s not a data tagged iPhone (or other phone camera), digital imagery files tend to have a lot of info stuffed into them.
Here is an example from a picture of my dog.
EXIF Info:
Make – Canon
Model – Canon PowerShot S3 IS
Orientation – Right top
XResolution – 180
YResolution – 180
ResolutionUnit – Inch
DateTime – 2009:12:19 01:14:49
YCbCrPositioning – Centered
ExifOffset – 196
ExposureTime – 1/10 seconds
FNumber – 3.50
ExifVersion – 0220
DateTimeOriginal – 2009:12:19 01:14:49
DateTimeDigitized – 2009:12:19 01:14:49
ComponentsConfiguration – YCbCr
CompressedBitsPerPixel – 5 (bits/pixel)
ShutterSpeedValue – 1/10 seconds
ApertureValue – F 3.51
ExposureBiasValue – 0.00
MaxApertureValue – F 3.51
MeteringMode – Multi-segment
Flash – Not fired, compulsory flash mode
FocalLength – 26.00 mm
UserComment –
FlashPixVersion – 0100
ColorSpace – sRGB
ExifImageWidth – 2816
ExifImageHeight – 2112
InteroperabilityOffset – 2772
FocalPlaneXResolution – 12515.56
FocalPlaneYResolution – 12497.04
FocalPlaneResolutionUnit – Inch
SensingMethod – One-chip color area sensor
FileSource – DSC – Digital still camera
CustomRendered – Normal process
ExposureMode – Auto
White Balance – Manual
DigitalZoomRatio – 1.00 x
SceneCaptureType – Standard
Maker Note (Vendor): –
Macro mode – Normal
Self timer – Off
Quality – Superfine
Flash mode – Not fired
Sequence mode – Single or Timer
Focus mode – Single
Image size – Large
Easy shooting mode – Manual
Digital zoom – None
Contrast – Normal
Saturation – Normal
Sharpness – Normal
ISO Value – Auto
Metering mode – Evaluative
Focus type – Auto
AF point selected – Manual AF point selection
Exposure mode – Program
Focal length – 600 – 7200 mm (100 mm)
Flash activity –
Flash details –
Focus mode 2 – Continuous
White Balance – Cloudy
Sequence number – 0
Flash bias – 0.00 EV
Subject Distance – 118
Image Type – IMG:PowerShot S3 IS JPEG
Firmware Version – Firmware Version 1.00
Image Number – 1005492
Owner Name –
Maybe they should have avoided the word “activism”. I’m so tored of all the activists, hacktivists, artivists and jiggymahooeyvists you don’t know. Maoists.
DirkH (15:01:54) :
Make that a “tired”.
Their response in the update was certainly encouraging.
I would recommend they hook up with these guys.
http://www.darksky.org/
As an amateur astronomer, I joined. I was impressed with their low key efforts to make intelligent “win-win” arguments.
I’m very sensitive to “mission creep” within non-profit organizations (they often get taken over by activists, who frankly, haven’t had much practical experience in life), but I never saw any evidence with darksky that they lost track of the need to work with people.
EcoSnoop would do well to emulate their model. The name might need some work, though.
Please; you know not why ‘lights are on in a building’ after so-called work hours!
Usually, it is going to be one of us working (unpaid!) overtime on an engineering project and involving persons and groups on other far-reaching continents and time zones (e.g India and China for instance).
Not EVERYONE works a straight 9-5 you know … and then property management receives a “phone call” … from who? And we are called up by our management to ‘answer’ questions (site management and project/company management are *two* different entities don’t you know on account of tax laws/business reasons: someone else owns the actual building which we lease space in).
Yes, please, we need more meddlers and busy-bodies sticking their noses into other’s business (my parents used to call them ‘social workers’ … akin to ‘community organizers’ come to think of it).
BTW, I have off this week on account of a “utility shutdown” to save energy over this week and a half period. So there and as my little sister would say “MYOB”.
usJim
.
.
EcoSnoop, now getting more hits than in the last few years, maybe that was the plan?
New name, EcoDetective or EcoDick for short?
Bad news, ecopoop.com is taken.
Anthony.
In fact just last week I upgraded part of my office to LED lighting, and I’m so impressed with it I’m going to showcase the product here.
Question.
What is the difference between a halogen light bulb and an electric heater.
Answer.
Not much.
So you use low energy lighting and if you save 500w of power, you lose 500w of heating. Result is, the heating stays on longer to make up the 500w of lost heat input. Therefore you only save money when the lighting is on but the heating is off. But of course the time you need the lighting is when the sun has gone to bed and it’s getting cold. Of course if you live in a really hot country you will save the most but most do not.
How about a simple experiment comparing a halogen bulb and an LED bulb in a glass dome with an electric heater to maintain the temperature for the led. Most of the savings are illusary with the saved electricity cost going onto the gas bill.
Unless you spend most of the year keeping the house cool.
I’ve started using LED bulbs in my office. They are Philips bulbs (AmbientLED Indoor Flood MR16 model number 4GU5.3MR16. They are 12V, 3LED Warm White Light) available from Home Depot. Up to this point, I’ve been unimpressed with LED technology, but these are spectacular in comparison.
The light output is comparable to the halogen replacement, about 50% down on the light output but hardly noticeable. Heat output is way down, plus the fixtures themselves stay a lot cooler and the friction direction gimbal doesn’t need frequent tightening.
I think 2010 will be the year of the LED if these bulbs are anything to go by. The cheap LED flashlight light is satisfactory in an emergency (I still prefer the Surefire Halogen) but space lighting LED lights are improving dramatically.
(Which means I can leave all the lights on 24/7 and still not consume as much evil electricity…)
Henry chance (14:47:19) :
Galen Haugh (13:56:32) :
(repeat)
China is a massive producer of CO2 from rice paddies. Massive. They also still have heating and cooking for 75% of their people from wood, charcoal, trash and coal fires. No where will china allow a real audit. They are adding a lot of coal fired electric and are doing excellent PR. In reality, they are putting on a show
——————
Exactly! And more power to them, since CO2 has little or nothing to do with the slight warming trend we’ve seen since the Little Ice Age.
Now, if we can just help them clean up their real mess by installing smoke scrubbers and the like. But CO2? It makes the desert blossom as the rose.
Here’s my email to the snoops at ecosnoop:
Should rename it [snip – just a bit harsh language, sorry]
Willis,
Great sentiments and reason. Alas I fear they will fall on deaf ears.
A thing that most people forget is that nuclear power stations cannot be switched on & off like a light and nor can coal power stations. Only gas power stations (basically a jet engine) and hydro-electric power can come online in about 30 seconds. So the nuclear and coal power stations need to be kept running on the equivalent of “tick over” (idle?) on a car. This is what happens a lot at night and sometimes in the day at holiday times when they coincide with clement weather i.e. no air conditioning or heating being used. This “tick over” supplies the “baseload” which is an amount of electricity produced that it is unsafe to go below or the electricity system would fail when unexpected demands were placed on it. It is easier to cut off comsumers temporarily sometimes than it is to bring a power station up to speed to satisfy demand.
This “baseload” is what powers street lighting.
Maybe the question to ask of your local power supplier, before condemming businesses with security lights on, is how much they are above baseload on the average summer and winter night? That would give an idea as to how much energy is being used that could possibly be decreased.
I look forward to pictures of Gore et al and their excessive energy use.
Enjoy.
Stacey/Stasi and the Brownshirt look are far too obvious to be a coincidence. Either somebody is deliberately yanking somebody’s chain … or they are unconsciously flying their true colors.
I couldn’t watch the video. The Soviet National Anthem just kept erupting into my head.
Just turned on our Christmas lights. I suppose I’ll have to check ecosnoop in a few hours to see if I got turned in…
Maybe someone said this already.
This concept is really distasteful, but it can work in reverse as well.
We need to report eco fraud. I am sick and tied of “green” promises from companies telling us their wrenches, electric lawn mowers and fences are “green.” Bloody nonsense.
There is a local restaurant here in town that claims to be the FIRST “certified green” restaurant in Canada. I mean really WHAT is that anyway? They still heat and cook with gas and wash dishes (one hopes), have a paved parking lot and their customers ALL drive there. Nonsense.
So anyway, we need to report false claims about green. We can only hope the marketplace will soon tire if the green BS as it did the low-carb diet.
Bah humbug. ☺
Why stop with reporting energy wasting???
Just report everything that you see anyone doing that you disagree with.
Everyone can watch everyone else. We can create a great all seeing, networked, global eye, to watch all, to see all, to report all.
Exciting isn’t it!
I must get some shares in Apple.
OMG, I got soooo fascinated by this entry I let the tea I made for the family stew. I have to chuck it, make new tea and report myself.
The wife left the lights on in the laundry too. I guess I’ll have to report her.
Where can I buy an iPhone then…..?
Jim Snoop (14:26:41) : EcoSnoop is aimed at helping Government building owners understand when they are wasting energy.
Kidding aside, there may be some utility to this thinking. The dirtiest building in the Willamette Valley is the EPA building on the OSU campus. The sewer system is cross-connected to the storm drain system, and when it rains the sewage goes directly into Oak Creek on the west side of campus. All manner of chems get flushed down the drains in the EPA building, not to mention the human waste.
So if you really have a bug to bust a polluting perp, the EPA is a prime target. Imagine 1,000 lawsuits directed against the EPA for in-house fouling of air and water. Why, their budget would be eaten up in attorney fees and super fines. Their vulnerability in that fashion is huge.
So be nice to Eco-Snoop. Maybe we can use them to mount a legal blitzkrieg against the EPA. Hit ’em where it hurts.
Awesome “manbearpig app”
If the iPhone could take infra-red pictures, I suppose it would be more useful at finding inefficiencies, as most wasted energy is not readily detectable at visible wavelengths. However, as this (http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20091229/NEWS01/912290322/Upset-sister-put-Montgomery-woman-in-mental-institution) link shows, the potential for abuse is uncontrollable. I also remember a program on the Ge sta po (a German acronym for Secret State Police) where someone was supposed to be on a midnight curfew and was 15 minutes late one night. A neighbor reported him and he was subsequently sent to a concentration camp and then to the gas chamber. Until it happens personally, one has no idea what the consequences of false or misunderstood accusations can be. I would suggest you take whatever money you are investing in this idea, cancel it and offer to sell businesses and individuals an energy audit using an infrared camera. Not only will it be useful in reducing the risk of (mostly electrical) fires and finding hotspots that the consumer can remedy, but the customer will be very happy with the service as it serves to reduce risk and save the customer money.
Jim (15:04:28) :
Please; you know not why ‘lights are on in a building’ after so-called work hours!
“Your” reasons may be legitimate – I know about that from personal experience. But have you ever wandered through a city (ANY major city) after midnite? Or ANY government installation?
Building after building with lights blaring on many, if not most, floors. And the most egregious of these is Washington, DC, where the government (“our” government) pays lip service to environmentalism while ignoring it in practice. And they want “us” to produce less CO2 and use less energy.
Somehow I find it hard to take da gubmint seriously.
I do, however, take ecosnoop seriously – but not in the way they’d like. I agree with Willis, that this is a “technique” – a “tactic” – that has many more negative aspects than the originators imagine. It is, specifically, a tactic used by the worlds most despicable governments. And Willis has only barely scratched the surface of the downsides to it.
OceanTwo (15:14:05) :
You’re right, the cheap LED flashlights are not very impressive. Much more expensive, but worth every dollar, is the Brinkman 3 Watt LED. Mine uses 3 bundled (rather than end-to-end) AAA batteries and is very compact and convenient. It only has one high output bulb rather than a cluster, but will easily outdo any of the halogen flashlights that I’ve ever tried. The 2-D variety however, has had mixed reviews.
Getting a bit OT …
Galen Haugh (15:14:35) : “They also still have heating and cooking for 75% of their people from wood, charcoal, trash and coal fires. ”
I’ve traveled extensively in northern China and IMAR where it gets bitterly cold in winter. Most of the heat/cooking on the north is derived from corn stalks and soy straw, with coal prevalent as well. In IMAR, villagers use a lot of dried cattle manure as well. The worst part is the majority of rural farm people (some 700 million in China in all) live in single-family brick houses that are not insulated. The use of dirty C02-emitting fuels is unreal.
I just gave a one-hour talk to my university’s local alum association on life in northern rural China. Surprised a lot of folks.
If you want a closer look at the villages, open Google Earth and go to (for example) 45°50′ N and 127°0″ E (just east of Harbin) and zoom in on villages. This is a hi-rez area. Then go east into the greener, low-rez area and look at all of those villages!! These farm folks ALL live in villages and travel to their small farm fields to work.
I have pictures from these villages on cool mornings..the smoke is unreal. I can’t imagine them when it is -30°C. If anyone wants to see pictures of these villages and house, just let me know.
Clive
Future Nova; Removing The Lens Cap
http://www.accuweather.com/mt-news-blogs.asp?partner=accuweather&blog=Astronomy&pgurl=/mtweb/content/Astronomy/archives/2009/12/future_nova_removing_the_lens_cap_1.asp
I may be wrong but I’ve always understood a `1500MW coal fired power station is just that, it produces `1500MW come what may – at times at night the load becomes so low they need to shunt the excess power to ground because you can’t turn them down.
Same thing with Anthony’s solar panels – it has no effect on the power output of the power plant so nothing is actually saved.
I kept waiting for The Onion’s logo to pop up during the YouTube clip. Alas . . . life imitates satire.
EcoSnoopers, your naive expectation of a community consensus about etiquette and ethical use of this app shows that you have a VERY long way to evolve.
crosspatch (13:21:05) :
Our idiocracy at work.
…
Trees clean the air of heat-trapping gases better than farming does.
While this is true initially when you first plant trees, as time goes by they become less and less of a carbon sink and when the forest is fully mature, it becomes carbon neutral. At full maturity, the amount of carbon taken out of the atmosphere to produce new biomass is balanced by decaying biomass that is releasing CO2.
I cannot agree more. I have often postulated that wood-chip production is very eco-friendly if CO2 is supposedly bad. You get that a lot here in Oz where entire forests seem to be grown to chip and lay on flowerbeds to prevent weeds growing (as they do so well, it being warmer here). So the most eco-friendly occupation is growing trees fast and chopping them down as soon as possible.
And you have greenies trying to prevent this to preserve forests! There is no logic, it is all made up to promote either an ideal view of nature or a political agenda.
Now this is a useful idiot creating a program for other useful idiots to keep the cattle in line. 1984 indeed
Next time I fly over China, I will take a picture !
Willis Eschenbach (15:15:42) :
“I am a dedicated environmentalist, and have been one since I first read Silent Spring…”
Please define environmentalist.
http://www.achanceforeverychild.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/malaria1.jpg
Scientist Predicts 50 Years of Cooling
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977966482&grpId=3659174697244816&nav=Groupspace
Sorry if someone already mentioned this but …
One thing they could do is change their name. “Snoop” does not instill confidence about impartiality and lack of political platform. It is a pejorative term about those who are about invading and minding other people’s business, and rightly so.
Eco Snoop (13:48:04) :
Well,
You guys have a lot of energy and anger. You make many relevant points that we can use to make the site serve its purpose.
I can’t see much anger here, a lot of sarcasm, though. Just try an open AGW site or discussion of a news article, you’ll see a lot more anger there (mostly from AGW believers, mind you). This is mild in comparison.
Though we have seemingly failed in the message, EcoSnoop is focusing on helping people eliminate waste that they are not aware of. Folks like Al Gore want us to waste Trillions to change our economy to eliminate CO2 emissions. Would you like a constructive alternative?
Very good point. It is an alternative, and a good one. The danger is in the approach which is so badly open to abuse by the wrong people. Unfortunately, as we have seen so many times, AGW believers are very often the wrong people, mainly because of their obsession with enforcing their views on everybody else.
You can direct your thoughts to snoop@ecosnoop.com. We are happy to listen to rational suggestions.
Thank you for that. It helps a lot.
crosspatch (13:21:05) :
Our idiocracy at work.
…
Once again, and irrational fear of CO2 is being used as a “hook” in order to get people to accept regulations that amount to nothing more than “redistribution of wealth” on a global scale and whose impact on CO2 may actually be the opposite of what is “sold” to the people in the rhetoric used to get them to go along with it.
Idiocy. Pure and simple.
It’s only idiocy if the purveyors of the regulations do not understand the consequences. It is possible that the consequences that you describe are in fact intended, and the descriptor of the behaviour would be something other than idiocy.
What would be idiocy would be complacent acceptance of such laws.
Do it yourself police state? There’s an app for that!
This app is a piece of junk.
Like Facebook but about reporting ‘lights’ to each other and only…
They might make a few bucks since there’re many retards out there.
EcoStacy is a man disguised as a woman.
While we laugh and make light of the idea we should also remember that humans are capable of anything. Absolutely anything! And it is entirely within the rhelm of possibility that another Third Reich (or worse) could pop up in the good old USSA. Never assume!
Hi Stacey the presenter,
[snip]
I hope that Ecosnoop carries massive insurance for the false claims and disputes that it will engender if it takes off. But it won’t. People avoid getting involved – witness the unwillingness to move a person injured in a public attack, lest the good intention causes further medical damage. Think it through before being too clever by half.
Have you done a benefit:cost analysis of the time and money spent to create and operate the devices, as against the $ benefit they will bring? It’s a bit disingenuous like all those private jets winging it to Copenhagen, is it not?
What an anti-social mob of sneaks you are. Get a life.
So I guess those of us who work a night shift will have to work in the dark now or face reprehension for having lights on at “unusual” hours.
This is scary.
What’s next? Eco-judges walking the streets handing out green “judgement”?
I’m off to start a colony on Mars and no-one is invited. The world has truly gone mad.
Using organised social networking to report on anyone or on any business is a bad idea. It’s a version of cyber-bullying, to be resisted wherever it appears. The justification ‘reducing energy waste’ in no way justifies this version of cyber-bullying.
Clive (15:58:09) :
Getting a bit OT …
Galen Haugh (15:14:35) : “They also still have heating and cooking for 75% of their people from wood, charcoal, trash and coal fires. ”
——————
That was actually something from a comment made earlier by Henry chance (14:47:19) : , but your input is excellent and many more reasons for there to be a concerted effort to help the Chinese farmers, for whom life is a dreary one with way too much work and hardship, benefit from more modern conveniencies.
I served a 2-year mission to Hong Kong back in ’69-’71 and in that town, although it was back several decades, most heat was provided by propane heaters, although the New Territories had many villages that were equivalent to what you describe.
Again, I’m not against CO2 buildup in the atmosphere. As a geologist I firmly believe it has been way higher in the past than current levels with no significant deleterious impact. Indeed, I’m all for this buildup, even if a few sea urchins don’t grow as rapidly as in times past.
And to see how much our current boost in anthropogenic CO2 has benefited China, check out the video on this site:
http://www.plantsneedco2.org/default.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1
(If that link doesn’t work, Bing “Plants Need CO2”, an excellent Web site that extolls the virtues of that life-giving gas.)
The greening of China is not an isolated case–it is happening across the globe. They’re even finding that the Sahara is starting to green up. Why? Plants do so much better with additional CO2 that they don’t need as much water! Sounds like sufficient reason to keep burning coal and anything else, especially if the particulates and aerosols can be sequestered properly.
realitycheck (16:22:54) :
I’m off to start a colony on Mars and no-one is invited.
realitycheck….funny!
Delation for a few more minutes of electricity and heating is next…
Despite all his denegation, this is pure totalitarism at work: shame on these guys.
“This website documents my latest research on the history of carbon dioxide gas analysis. My work had been published by several journals and had been presented at national and international meetings. In literature we can find more than 200 000 directly measured CO2 data since 1800 from which I have estimated the annual CO2 background averages since 1826 to 1960, the end of the measurements by chemical methods. IPCC prefers ice core reconstructions. This new data set reveals remarkable coherence with other geophysical timeseries. Please feel free to check data, methods, stations and historical literature. Comments are welcome.”
Real CO2
http://www.biomind.de/realCO2/
EricH (15:22:48) :
“A thing that most people forget is that nuclear power stations cannot be switched on & off like a light and nor can coal power stations. Only gas power stations (basically a jet engine) and hydro-electric power can come online in about 30 seconds.”
Thats very optimistic, to say the least, whatever your power source is you need to get it up and running at the same pace as the electric grid, but then you have the problem to syncronize it with the grid, which might show to be a much bigger problem, especially with a lot of not so reliable power providers such as wind turbins, the more you have of those the more unstable will the power grid be.
“Michael (16:34:08) :
“This website documents my latest research on the history of carbon dioxide gas analysis. My work had been published by several journals and had been presented at national and international meetings. In literature we can find more than 200 000 directly measured CO2 data since 1800 from which I have estimated the annual CO2 background averages since 1826 to 1960, the end of the measurements by chemical methods. IPCC prefers ice core reconstructions. This new data set reveals remarkable coherence with other geophysical timeseries. Please feel free to check data, methods, stations and historical literature. Comments are welcome.”
Real CO2
http://www.biomind.de/realCO2/”
Great link. It’s by a German from the Stuttgart region, Ernst-Georg Beck.
Here’s a small blog item about him in German:
http://www.pi-news.net/2007/12/darf-so-einer-unsere-kinder-unterrichten/
He’s a biology teacher. The blog article reports about threats against him because his opinion violates the dogma. Take that Hansen you bloody crook. This is really sad. They threatened to arson his house.
Yet another viral wannabee “real” video associated with an upcoming movie about sewer-dwelling techno saviors having to go back in time to avoid Econet from forming in the first place. In the sixth sequel plot twist the enemy who had turned into a Humvee-driving hero who is also Mr. Universe turns back into an enemy and becomes governor of California who conspires with the Vice President of the United States to release a movie that cost as much as the Space Station that requires x-ray glasses which reprogram all children to believe that tall thin blue people Tantrically copulated with Nature every moment of their lives until a source of energy was discovered in their fine country. This forced the tall thin blue people to blow up their underwear whenever they were allowed on hoverjets with their underwear still on. Tall thin blue people have exposed genitalia on their heads, so do not really need underwear. Avoid this movie at all costs.
DirkH (17:00:38),
Dr Beck has been discussed a number of times on WUWT. Here’s one of his articles: click
Beck’s interactive website is excellent. Click around on it and you’ll find some fascinating information.
Oh and this is so good i gotta get even more off topic and translate it for you.
It’s on this blog that reports about Herrn Beck , a comment there:
http://www.pi-news.net/2007/12/darf-so-einer-unsere-kinder-unterrichten/
The german version
———————————-
Auf ein Neues:
Prof. Dr. Gerhard Gerlich
Institut für Mathematische Physik der Technischen Universität Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig
Zur Mathematik und Physik globaler Klimamodelle: Kritik der mathematischen und physikalischen Grundlagen, Öffentliches GDCh Kolloquium: 21. 5. 2007, Münster.
9) Zusammenfassung
(1) Die üblichen Erklärungen der atmosphärischen Kohlendioxid-Treibhauseffekte widersprechen physikalischen Experimenten und sind deshalb physikalisch falsch.
(2) Mittelwerte der Temperatur kann man nicht zur vierten Wurzel vom Mittelwerten der vierten Potenz der absoluten Temperatur gleichsetzen. Die Beziehung ist eine mathematische Ungleichung.
(3) Die Absorption der Ultrarotstrahlung in der Erdatmosphäre geschieht überwiegend durch Wasserdampf. Der Wellenlängen- bzw. Frequenzanteil, den CO2 absorbiert, ist nur ein kleiner Teil des ultraroten Spektrums und wird nicht wesentlich durch Erhöhen des Partialdruckes des CO2 verändert
(Prof. A. Schack).
(4) Die Computersimulationen haben keine physikalischen Grundlagen, sondern sind künstliche Konstrukte,die die gewünschten Ergebnisse ohne die Berücksichtigung physikalischer Gesetze produzieren.
(5) Wegen der willkürlich gewählten, genäherten, praktisch unbekannten Randbedingungen, die wesentlich die Lösungen von partiellen Differentialgleichungen bestimmen, sind die Prognosen der
Klimarechenzentren völlig wertlos.
(6) Die riesigen Wassermassen (nicht nur der Wasserdampf) und die Verteilung der Landmassen
zwischen den Meeren bestimmen die Klimate auf der Erde. Die Wasserverdunstung über den
Ozeanen ist vom Menschen nicht zu beeinflussen. Allein schon deshalb kann der Mensch nicht das Wetter und die Klimate auf der Erde beeinflussen.
——————
My translation: (And i’m very happy to bring this to you because it’s from the university where i studied computer science)
Prof. Dr. Gerhard Gerlich
Institute for mathematical physics of the technical University Carolo-Wilhelmina at Braunschweig
About the mathematics and Physics of global climate models: A Critique of the mathematical and physical foundations
Public GDCh Kolloquium: May the 21st 2007, Münster.
9) Conclusion
(1) The usual explanations of the athmospheric greenhouse effect contradict physical experiments and are therefore physically wrong.
(2) You cannot equate Averages of temperature with the fourth root of averages of the fourth power of the absolute temperate. This is an inequation.
(3) Absorption of LIR radiation in the atmosphere is largely accomplished by water vapour. The frequency band absorbed by CO2 is only a small part of the LIR spectrum and is not changed significantly by an increase in the partial pressure of CO2. (Prof. A. Schack).
(4) The Computer simulations have no basis in physics, but are artificial constructs which produce the desired results without taking physical laws into consideration.
(5) Because of the arbitrary, approximated, practically unknown constraints which influence the solution of partial differential equations significantly, the prognostic value of the results from the Climate Datacenters is null.
(6) The huge masses of water (not only water vapour) and the distribution of the continents define the climates of earth. The evaporation above the oceans is not controllable by men. This alone suffices to say that man cannot influence weather or climates of the earth.
—————-
The words of one Prof. Dr. Gerhard Gerlich, translation by me.
Happy new year everybody 🙂
How ironic (or should that be “iconic” ?) that the vacuous Fräulein drone doing the advertising is wearing a Brown Shirt … and her hairstyle is somewhat reflective of that era, too. In fact, she looks alot like one of the lasses kicked out of the bunker in this tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTGLpqFGyYM 🙂
regarDS
Håkan B (16:39:56) :
EricH (15:22:48) :
There is another issue with gas turbine back-up for wind and other intermittant renwables: CO2 savings may be overestated for wind and renewables because of underestimating of GHG and other pollutant emissions during start-up of the gas back-up. While gas may be virtually “instant on” from a power generating standpoint, emissions are high during start-up.
See this analysis, based in part on an article in Environmental Science & Technology.
http://www.masterresource.org/2009/11/wind-integration-incremental-emissions-from-back-up-generation-cycling-part-i-a-framework-and-calculator/
So let me get this straight. To encourage people to make energy savings, we must expend energy on otherwise unnecessary gadgets and computer processing time?
JUST got back from a long walk ‘around the block’ in here the northern D/FW area … we’re experiencing SNOW again but I digress …
I nearly choked a few times from the smokey fires/fireplaces from some of the homes around here which ALL sport “clean electric heat” in “all electric homes”.
Some (home-owners/renters) are driven to this insanity (and face it, air pollution!) PARTLY because the eco-weenies and the policies they drive/impose which drive utility prices (like electricity) UP.
At this rate I expect coal/coal deliveries to start showing up again (see a circle starting here yet?)
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I have no financial interest in them and do not even know the guy who runs it, but http://www.ledwholesalers.com/store/ has been a good source of leds for this guy. I run my kitchen lighting with 4 surface mount led arrays. Total power consumption 30 watts. (7.5 pier “bulb”). I had ordered some of the smaller units with the multiple small leds on them, and the guy told me I was crazy and would ship the ones with the SMB leds on them for the same cost (they are normally 20 bucks extra) When one had an infant mortality, he shipped me another next day. In fiarness I had him do a paypal bill for the split in the cost.
Made in China but are more dependable than others I have seen. Never, ever, ever buy the capsules with small lets in them The 12 led spotlights etc, are ok, but the larger ones with several pc boards of small leds have thermal problems. The heating/cooling or whatever breaks the wiring to the boards. You will get boards dropping out on you at a fast rate.
The spotllight he has on sale now for $32 is fine for indoor use, Outrdoors, is still an open question, Since it is now 11 F in Boston, I am not going to trouble shoot stuff at the moment.
I thought Jimmah Carter (you know, the one for which the ‘misery index’ was created?) had set the precedent for all that? (Besides, for what purpose did Carter create the DOE for? Only for the monitoring and auditing of civilian energy production?)
Seriously, you must be young enough not to have lived through that era (77-81).
At the time, the large company I worked for (an NYSE listed firm and large semiconductor manufactrer and def. contractor) installed “Timed Lighting” devices as one of the ‘best practices’ to save energy during the Carter reign. We also labelled all our test equipment (scope, DMMs, calorimeters, etc) with silly little tags citing “30 minutes to warm up” or “no warm-up required”. Silly. We KNEW the specifications of our gear and the limitiations and the requirements to MEET SPEC (as to warm up). Years later that gear still carried those tags (bought a few pieces from Wally Wallace at the ‘Country surplus equip store’ run in the pipespace of the North Bldg, courtesy of J. Fred Bucy who was TI CEO back then), a remnant of the Carter admin, but I digress ..
As to the lighting, in the mornings, you pushed a button on a small control box that replaced the light switch and ‘rang up’ x.y number of hours … 9.9 being the highest. Cute little box. One button, Two RED 7-segment LED displays.
About 5 or 10 mins before expiration of those hours, the lights would flash twice … next warning came at 1 min (one flash) after which the lights (on that floor) would go OUT.
THIS was during the Carter Administration; and nothing has been developed since? Is his (Carter’s) DOE still around?
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“_Jim (18:22:09) :
[…]
THIS was during the Carter Administration; and nothing has been developed since? Is his (Carter’s) DOE still around?”
You can tell your Laptop to switch the HD off after 15min.
Thanks guys for the link to the Beck discussion on WUWT. What i liked
best is the CO2 enrichment facility at Uni Giessen. Gotta re-post the link because it’s so good:
http://www.uni-giessen.de/cms/fbz/fb08/biologie/pflanzenoek/forschung/Foeinr/ukl-en/projects/giface/giessen-free-air-co2-enrichment-facility/view?set_language=en
If you see a picture of an aging denim-clad long-haired bespectacled hippie type, please alert me; I’d like to sue the bastards for defamation of character (false light). If one holds another up to ridicule, one best hope a majority of the venire laughs at the other.
I’d have to agree with other people who have already pointed out that EcoSnoop is an absolutely terrible name. The word ‘snoop’ has such negative connotations. Some possible alternatives:
EcoNarc
EcoSnitch
EcoRat
EcoNazi
EcoStasi
EcoBusyBody
Hmmm, on second thought, maybe EcoSnoop isn’t such a bad name afterall.
Only environmental nutjobs could turn spying on people who are not violating any law into a virtue while suggesting that people should violate the law by taking photos in rest rooms for example.
I would suggest taking pictures of inefficient air conditioners. They would be found…let me think now…..I know this……ah ha! On the roof spewing wasted heat next to the global temperature gauge!!!
Let’s all send in pictures of local methane generating cow pats.
EcoSnoop would never advocate anyone invading your privacy, telling you what to do, assuming how you manage your life, or in any way infringing on your privacy. Folks are assuming things about EcoSnoop which may be implied but are not true.
A bad application name, people inappropriately putting residential pictures on the site, or a user invading ones privacy are all serious issues we will address. But lets focus on what is happening rather than what is not.
Originally we wanted to name the product energydective, the notion being to help resolve energy problems, not tattle on ones neighbor. We went through 100s of names, most taken by domain aggregators. I am glad to change the name. Do you have a constructive suggestion?
The next release of EcoSnoop focuses more on energy solutions, using location to help find vendors that can help save energy. The app is filled with 100s of energy tips. Location will be restricted from the general population except perhaps to suggest that certain cities have a bigger problem with a particular thing like incandescent lights. The photo part will be turned to home owners only In the context of saying “I want a solar panel”, click picture of roof, send to local solar installer for a quote. The capability to report waste or problems in public or corporate spaces will remain in a fashion similar to the current version, the extent is evolving though based on conversations we are having with companies and communities.
And to the bigger mission, there is an effort afoot to spend trillions of dollars to address climate change. Few of these solutions of engineering foundation. I find it an invasion of my privacy to fund that when there are better answers.
Large buildings consume 25% of the energy in this country. They waste on average 20-30% of their energy usage because of poor maintenance and operation. 25% of LEED buildings use more energy than a conventional building. Government wastes money and energy in a myriad of ways. There are numerous public missives by government that are left unattended, easy to fix is someone knew about them. These are the things EcoSnoop is after.
If you saw a child wondering the street without a parent, would you not take the child to the authorities?
The mission we are on remains, and that is helping people identify how to be more energy efficient.
And to the larger discourse, my team has no agenda here other than to design a solution that increases understanding about how to use energy efficiency to reduce cost, assure energy security and reduce emissions. I say emissions not because I believe CO2 is or is not a threat, only that as an engineer if I can design a way that reduces emissions and saves money, it seems like a lot of people might be happy. I take seriously the ethical issues of our design and its impact on privacy. We will do more to deal with it. But, as a community I think more could get done if we worked on “What needs to be true” for folks pro and against an issue to align with common purpose. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, but polarization is no virtue.
To Ecosnoop
Cold comfort as far as I am concerned. You are complicit in an effort to monitor our activities. My name and/or pic shows up on your site. I sue!
This site needs to be SPAMMED out of existence.
This is disgusting.
Eco-Snoop [snip] I mean.
Thanks to you guys, EcoSnoop is now getting hits left and right. If this obscure little creation should now balloon into an international movement, give yourselves lots of credit.
CH
To the eco snoop folks. I do believe you are sincere in your interests. I have worked in building maintenance and facilities management for a long period of time and agree that more can be done to make larger facilities more energy efficient. Lighting is one of the biggest energy sucks, but in some regards facilites managers don’t have much choice in the matter. The parking lots have to be lit at night, as well as entries to the buildings. Lawyers are quite expensive when a person trips going down a set of stairs, even when lit, and blames it on the lighting not being sufficient. We do our best to use higher efficiency lighting, 277 volt systems are pretty efficient, and also try to the minimum interior lighting that codes allow.
Heating and cooling are sore spots as well when you have a few thousand people shoved in a building all with different ideas of what hot and cold mean. Most facilities guys just set it at 72 summer and 68 winter and tell people to deal with it. The mean ones set it at 74 summer and 66 winter. Let me tell ya, those guys have more problems with space heaters and fans than the other guys.
So in conclusion to the ecosnoop guys, go interview some facilities managers and ask them what’s going on and I’m sure they could give you some pointers about how things really work in those buildings.
P.S. How about something like WattWatch or WattWatchers. Kind of like the neighborhood watch program that makes it sound more community inclusive.
My suggestion would be to forget about the snooping part and simply offer localised suggestions relating to heating, cooling, appliances and electricity.
Awareness as your advocating makes zero difference in itself. One must want to make a difference, have the means to make a difference and afford the changes necessary.
I live in a moderately hot climate in an old house. I’ve been modifying the house more for my own comfort than for any saving. There are a huge number of products available for various situations.
I believe information is far more valuable than trying to force changes through social pressures. You will be appreciated rather than denigrated by those you’re trying to help.
Ecosnoop AKA Big Brother. What a horrible world these people live in. Nothing better to do?
The Queensland government recently imposed 140litres per person per day on Queenslanders when the water supply in the dams came close to 15% capacity. The State’s population was increasing by 1500 people per week we were informed by our Premier and yet no new dams or water catchment provisions have been made for over 10 years.
A man, in his 70’s was killed because he was watering his lawn with a hose by someone who thought he was not complying with water restrictions.
The biggest offender for wasting water was the local council which had many leaking pipes and the Queensland government themselves. The building housing Parliament House had single flush toilets and non water saving taps/faucets. The government said it was too expensive to replace it’s own single flush toilets and taps with water saving devices.
The State’s own schools’ plumbing had leaking taps and toilets all over the city.
There are many examples of improved efficiency in engineering without the need for Eco Snoop. Cars are far more fuel efficient now than ever before. Washing machines, dryers, ovens and refrigerators are also more energy efficient without the need for Eco Snoop.
Where was the smiley emoticon? Missing?
This is small solace if meant as encouragemant after having lived thru the Carter administration …
BTW, the top-notch security app(s) our company has running on our Lenovos takes care of such mundane ‘housekeeping’ as energy management (re: disk drives) AND logging off the present ‘user’ after a security-department predetermined period of time; you ‘home users’ of PCs and laptops are really left to your own devices, aided only by occasional updates from MS and ‘blind faith’ in McAffe or Norton.
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How about … an app to aid Code Enforcement reporting? Seriously, that could be useful (although not everyone might agree).
A couple years back a certain Popeye’s Chicken (local fast food chain) had a certain parking lot light pole that was _always_ on … one day I popped in asked to speak to the manager, and, she did not know how to get that particular pole turned off. Make a long story short, that situation persisted for – about another year! (Finally, the situation was straighted out … but it took literally several years.)
What would you have done to escalate this issue? I even took a couple photos (justs for my records).
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Whistleblowers have a legitimate right (perhaps even an obligation) to report instances of waste or malfeasance. Problem is, a dripping water faucet isn’t worth the effort. Grass-roots efforts of this type might be well-used to track the funds the Federal Government has been shovelling towards various pork barrel projects – and which have disappeared at upper levels of state government. Do those cell phones have an olfactory function?
They could call themselves the Stimulu-Sniffers.
Your claims: A lot like CAGW: Vaporous claims very wide in scope. Claims that are supposed to taken pretty much carte blanche. You are probably the _last_ ‘group’ a building manager/building engineer is going to believe on any subject, except maybe the ‘lightrs are on’ reports. Get real.
Lacking: Any sort of criteria for your untrained ‘hordes’ with which they will use in identifying actual ‘shortcomings’ (like restrictions in HVAC equipment due to say ductwork issues), let alone gaining access to a facility (getting into a building, allowed to do a floor by floor survey, getting a look at the chiller in the basement or the cooling tower within the compound next to the building).
Your goals: You think you will make a difference, you will certainly feel better for it, and that is probably about it. NO REAL CHANGES will be made. And beware the law of ‘unintended consequences’. Surely at some stage the negative, perhaps accumulated reults of some ‘change’ will come back to take its toll in some form or fashion, like substantial shortening of life of equipment, or worse: ‘code’ (building code) violations for illunination or air handling/exchanging or something … and ‘code’ violations can lead to issues that affect the actual health (and safety) of people.
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East Germany all over again. The red wall came down only to be replaced by a green one, the goings on behind the walls are very much the same.
History will judge this age very negatively. It’s a shame, since we have so much to be proud of this age.
Mankind has not wised up one iota. We are still scaremongerring each other, still preaching doom unless we repent our sins (carbon sin in this instance), still being asked to sacrifice to erase our sins. How different are we to the dark ages generations? No different at all.
What a sad indictment on this generation. Shame on the perpetrators, I hope history will deal with you.
Margaret wrote “no new dams or water catchment provisions have been made for over 10 years.”
Not sure about down under, but here it is greens that would block dam construction. Politicians are scared stiff of suggesting any sort of new developments such as new water storage (or hydro) dams and nuclear (although that seems to be easing). The green left has become dangerous to our future standard of living.
The radical (and ignorant) greens want us to use solar and wind instead of hydro, nuclear or coal. Right now it i s-17°C outside and we hit -39.5°C (a record) on December 8.
It is not clear what the green left wants. Makes no sense to me if we are expected to survive and have adequate standards of living. It seems they want use to go back to the caves.
I worry about my grandchildren.
Eco Snoop
Blatant moral equivalence and hyperbole. How about: Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
You don’t think building managers are already doing everything they can to save money on utilities?
Your feel-good holier-than-thou-fingerpointing-stoolie application has no practical benefits except possibly for the case of government buildings where there is no incentive to save money as the profit motive is nonexistent.
In these cases you also will also find your aspirations impotent for a myriad of other reasons known collectively as bureaucracy.
I have a better idea. Stop thinking you are better than others and only wish to point out their flaws and educate them to be better citizens. They are already better citizens than you because they go about their business making things which actually have benefits and enrich people’s lives.
Clive (21:56:26) :
“…The radical (and ignorant) greens want us to use solar and wind instead of hydro, nuclear or coal. Right now it i s-17°C outside and we hit -39.5°C (a record) on December 8…”
To adulterate Ron White “…It’s not that the wind is blowing… it’s what the wind is blowing…” …IF.
Remember this article from WUWT?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/22/the-guardian-appears-ready-to-power-glasgow-100-from-wind-part-2/
“The flaw in The Guardian’s logic is a failure to acknowledge that Glasgow needs a consistent power supply 24×7×365. The fact that Whitelee has a lot of windy days and a high annual energy potential, does no good on the cold, calm days.
…
It would be disastrous for Glasgow if they did not have the ability to obtain 100% of their energy from conventional sources on any given day of the year, when the wind isn’t blowing.”
I would like to report capitalist South Korea to Ecosnoop. Communist North Korea puts them to shame as shown in nighttime satellite imagery:
http://i46.tinypic.com/2ntvez8.jpg
Faithful citizens simply sleep when it’s dark, as is perfectly natural, after their daily ration of rat & roach stew purchased with carbon cash paid directly to their nurturing central government from the finally subdued United States of America, where thanks to Ecosnoop, private citizens and private associations of citizens known as corporations can no longer play at night.
Here in Australia, not sure how many states have it, but I live in Victoria, and they brought in a new privacy law not so long ago, Just tried to find the relevant website, but there is endles pages to choose from, basically all I want to say is, if someone took a photo of me leaving a light on or whatever, I’d be suing for breaching my privacy! to hell with them! Me leaving a light on is in no way the same as Al Gore and his massively oversized house that uses so much power! and am I supposed to turn my alarm clock off at the wall every morning, and then have to reset the time and alarm every night?? like #$@*!
Baa Humbug, have you noticed that the enviro-groups are basically advocating 21st Century sumptuary laws?
There are so many things wrong with this – it is an astonishment it was brought to market at all. And then defended by their mewling note to Mr. Watts.
Eco-SNOOP people – your first clue should be your friggin product name!! And second, (please try to grok this) – turning in your neighbors, businesses and community members for not turning off their lights, soon becomes over-watering their lawn, or air conditioning at night, or using non reflective paint, or playing music too loud, or speaking a foreign tongue, or posting a political message. Your mission is so inhuman as to be beyond pathetic.
I’m sorry, but you people should go BK. Your mission is utterly without socially redeeming value (legal def of porn.) Oh yeah, there is a way to confront waste – democratic legislation. Apparently a concept eco-snoop seeks to destroy.
“ECO-STOOP” to new lows in moral and ethical behavior. And NOT understand it.
Well it is a tough problem. Culture swings between emphasising the individual, and emphasising the group. There’s whole psychology fields about this. Very quick summary: tribes emphasise the group, warlords emphasise the individual, traditional religion (and nation states) emphasise the group, democracy and entrepreneurial progress emphasise the individual, and egalitarian PoMo culture emphasises the group, and so on. Note also the timeline; tribes came before nation states which came before individual entrepreneurial “self made men”, which came before PoMo feminism and diversity and sensitivity.
Part of the reason for the “anger” you see here, isn’t that you’re trying to promote energy efficiency, or that your app is about using the web and mobile computing to allow information to flow and facilitate networks of people to feedback information to those who would find it useful. For sure, your app does that by design, but that is not all that it does.
From an engineering point of view, each person is just a pair of eyes, and all you are doing is allowing everyone to exchange data on what they see. But people are not just data sticks. People have deeply felt values and convictions, and what your app has done is step hard on the toes of a key and deeply held value which, estimates go, is held by about 50% of the people.
From a purely engineering point of view, you’re likely overlooking this. But that’s OK, people tend to have values, they don’t tend to spend hours navel gazing at what their values might be, rather, that comes out in how people react to stuff. Your app has caused such a “reaction”.
Look again at that sequence of cultural stages. The individualistic entrepreneur (think Ayn Rand) was a whole cultural stage that built the industrialised world. There are a few hundred years of progress right in there, by men and women who held that value at their core.
Now more recently—estimates are about 50 years—you have the PoMo egalitarian diversity sensitivity stage of culture, which in philosophy appeared in Foucault, to some extend Derrida, and feminism. It is also pretty strong in what we see as mainstream environmentalism (not the quiet people who just like trees, but the energetic activist kind who turn up to marches and protests). Again, notice on the timeline, the entrepreneur valued individuality—the individual is a shining force of energy and independence of thought and action—but when you get to the next stage, the egalitarian, things have swung back to the group, the collective, back to human bonding, mutuality—the self sacrifices their individual impulses to some extent for the sake of harmonising with the group.
This is all part of theory that’s been used in practice. Actually the guy who is most prominent in this field is an adviser on many issues, from working in Palestine, to advising politicians on global development. He worked in South Africa with groups to try to bring Apartheid to an end by getting all the stakeholders to see eye to eye. I’m also pretty sure parts of the United Nations have this same model, because I notice it when reading between the lines of some of their stuff (talk of “stratified democracy”).
So anyway, your app does something that group minded egalitarian environmentalists will find very appealing, and that may be why you wrote it that way. See, it isn’t just an engineering problem, you may have built it around assumptions and intentions inherent in your own egalitarian values.
But by emphasising “group action”, you have directly contravened a core principle of about 50% of the people, namely all those who believe in personal action, responsibility, and thinking for oneself. If I choose to save energy, I will do it myself, and I don’t need no “witch hunt” coming after me to make me do it, even if that witch hunt is fifty pretty women all turning up to my door, smiling politely, holding signs saying “please turn your lights off”, and speaking very softly. The principle is abhorrent.
On the plus side, despite what many environmentalist commentators would have the public believe, most people do care about the environment, if only for the sake of taking a walk in the woods of having clean water to drink. This is actually entirely the point of making “global warming” a global issue—it affects everyone. But if you turn it into a “community action” thing, you end up sabotaging it. Because the moment you get on your “community action” wagon, all the individualists will spit at you.
So any serious engineering attempt to help distribute useful information about energy conservation, needs to avoid turning off (excuse the pun) both the group-centric-people and the individualistic-centric-people.
Unless you are aiming for just one type and even would enjoy the notoriety of controversy. But really, if you just want to help everyone to save energy, including the 50% who are not group-centric, then your app probably has to drop the whole concept of “snooping” or “surveillance” or “detective” in any sense. Other people are not going to tell me, an individual thinker, what I should be turning off, and using the quiet threat of a “crowd” (however friendly) to pressure me to do so. As you’ve seen from some comments here, you simply drive these people to direct defiance, because that’s the only way to reassert their core principle and value. On Earth Day, those people turn all their lights ON.
Of course, you might decide that the world can’t afford individualists any more—that they are selfish. But whether you like it or not, that cultural stage is a permanent feature of the landscape. See, psychology finds that that stage has to exist, and can’t be gotten rid of. So either you find a way to mutually respect the individualists, and work together for the sake of energy efficiency, or you go the way of extreme environmentalists and start using your app to organise protests at power stations and block coal trains. Because that’s the only people you will end up attracting if your app is successful (IMHO).
Energy efficiency should be something the app helps you to calculate for yourself, and then, if you like, you can hook that into a friends list and share with the friends you choose to show them what you are doing, and what new ideas you’ve discovered, which might inspire your friends. I think that would allow a social aspect without annoying those who would rather do it on their own.
That could also put the emphasis for you as the company on finding the very latest and greatest information to do with all aspects of energy use in the home and in the office. If your app genuinely helped someone to save energy (and bills), then word of mouth recommendations could make your app a success. It becomes more cloud like, in that your efforts are on building a database of useful data, and your app provides a nice interface.
However, that’s probably a mammoth task, so perhaps focus on one area of energy, be it lighting, or whatever, and make it best of class for that. A while ago I bought a green consumer app that was supposed to have reviews and stuff, but it was too varied and I didn’t look at it much, as it was spread too thinly. It needs to be obviously relevant and useful.
But if you choose to stay with the concept of “social activism against wasteful offices (corporations)”, then at least be clear that 50% of people will think you’re a naive idiot, essentially because you’re running against their deep convictions.
I took a quick look look at the ecosnoop.com site. Some of the photos look like the work of of an obsessive-compulsive personality. A photo of a garden that could use more water, a photo of foliage growing in front of an air intake, a photo of a single light left on during the day. Heck, the local lumber store where I live leaves over 50 lights burning, including their front signage even after they are closed. Now that would be something to take note of, and after I spotted that twice, I knew that was one of the reasons why their prices are so high, after all the “store” doesn’t pay the electric bill, the customers do.
When I was a college student, I had a summer job working night shift at a store, and was expected to complete a checklist of things to do after closing. The first item was “Shut off front signage and customer area lighting”. Intermediate on the list was to shut down all electrical equipment (there was a few exceptions). The last item on the list before locking the back door was “Shut off all remaining lights”.
Ecosnoop being used for such minutia as photographing a dry garden, as well as targeting residences is an excess, unless of course its Al Gore’s.
“EcoSnoop is Not Big Brother” that’s on their website, so it must be true. Or maybe it’s just a case of newspeak. I think this guys don’t realize what they are doing to society.
They can’t even give you an working email adress if you hit the mail button on their “About” page:
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.
:
Sorry, I couldn’t find any host named ecosnoo.com. (#5.1.2)
I lived under an opressive reigime of a little old lady and her twitching curtains. Every visitor parked outside the lines, every loud noise, every transgression of the letter of the appartment rules was noted and reported.
Imagine if she had an iPhone and Snoopware!
Isn’t there some irony that EcoWarriors use iPhones and other current technology? Or is that just more of “do what I say”? I could point out the problems of Coltan, bush meat and perpetuating civil wars but that would be just petty compared to snapping the neigbours porch light.
@Craigo “Isn’t there some irony that EcoWarriors use iPhones and other current technology? Or is that just more of “do what I say”? I could point out the problems of Coltan, bush meat and perpetuating civil wars”
Indeed. My own favorite is the Optimum Population Trust, which says that having more than 2 children is “irresponsible”. This means that Sir David Attenborough (2 children) and Jonathan Porritt CBE (2 children) are doing more to reduce the UK’s population down to a recommended 30 million, than I (no children) will ever do. Honestly guys, if it was so important to start an NGO over to save the UK and the planet, could you not also have skipped the kids?
Let’s see…. zero children… how many carbon credits should that be worth?
It is as if the hippies never learnt the lessons from all those gurus in the 70s, the ones that drove around in expensive cars and smoked fat cigars, whilst telling their followers to eat rice and quit their jobs.
Okay, here is my choice for a new name on EcoSnoop;
iDick
The Universe, the MilkyWay, the Solar System, the Earth, don’t have a problem with global warming or global cooling (or anything else for that matter). People do. The Gordian Knot is flesh and bone. Scientific facts, pure reason, good logic, only go so far –and not as far as people with degrees and Noble Prizes like to think– then its a crap game. When things on planet Earth really get dicey, people begin to boil and do all kinds of crazy self-destructive things or Mother Nature steps in and squashes everyone back to goo. Life’s a beach! Whenever you find them, stop and smell the roses.
[snip] Freaking do-gooder liberals really do want to control every aspect of everyone’s life! Why don’t liberal eco- do-gooders go harass Al Gore whose home in Tennessee uses more energy in a month than the average Tennessee house uses in a year? Or why don’t you harass all the idiots who flew to Hopenhagen on their private jets? Or why don’t you harass the Hollywood liberals who have homes the size of a small village with heated pools? But an even better idea would be for you eco-nut liberals to just go away and leave the rest of us alone and mind your own damn business!
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this, but there are potential law suites here. I saw Government buildings mentioned, you can’t just take a picture from inside a government building (or someone who works for the government) because that could violate confidential agreements and laws. You can get jail time and huge fines for violating some of these.
rabidfox (23:34:51) :
Yes indeed
Say, was that a tropical flower in her hair? Was it grown in an energy sucking greenhouse or flown here on a carbon blasting jet?
Hmmmmm…
O. Weinzierl (02:28:10)
ecosnoop is not Big Brother
War is Peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Minitrue (Ministry of truth) was concerned with propogating lies.
Black is white
2+2=5
Everything gets worse before it blows off.
Can’t you submit surfacestations.org results and pictures to ecosnoop?
These examples are eve worse than a lightbulb left on in the kitchen.
And like this EPA building idea a lot … aren’t there more gov buildings and Al Gore’s properties?
However, coming from where these brown shirts and stasi was home, we should not use the backfire approach. Willis E. got it right.
Anthony, congrats for 30 mio … outstanding achievement.
Happy New Year for all contributors and readers.
Another thought, pictures don’t always tell the whole story. Someone could take a picture of my mini van and say I’m driving too big of a car (with three kids under 4 there aren’t too many vehicles to choose from), but I have a 95 Honda Odyssey which has a 4 cylinder, plus is smaller than the newer mini vans, and I get around 22 to 24 mpg in the city (depending on air conditioning), which is a step up from the 18 mpg all the newer vans get. You could also take a picture of someone leaving the lights on in their office hallways, but they may be security lights, and they could be energy efficient bulbs.
Despite what the film says, this app won’t work on the iPod touch simply because even the latest ‘touch doesn’t have a camera.
Many — maybe most — large offices are cleaned after hours. Lights may be cleaning crews in action.
Also some might be interested in looking at “http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/28/government.web.apps/index.html”
to see a similar iPhone app that is being adopted by some large cities for citizen reporting things like pot-holes that the government needs to be fixed.
And by the way, the iPhone can attach locations to the pictures.
Wow, once again I’m flabbergasted. Any effort to make this insidious application more palatable is a huge step in the wrong direction. Obviously, this is a tool for the enemies of privacy and freedom. Tyranny, regardless of its wording or image is still tyranny.
EcoSnoop… I’m afraid that whatever you decide to name this steaming pile of app, it’s still gonna smell really, really bad. Sorry, but maybe the people that are involved in this sort of snoopy behavior should go out and get a job…
Stefan (02:01:23) :
A well considered assessment of the two mind sets: individual/group. What your analysis does not mention is the whole purpose of democratic legislation. If there is heaping waste in government/corporate energy use – why not get with your Congressmen/women and write a bill to contain it?? If lobbyists derail this process, write a ballot initiative and put it to a democratic vote.
Why must any group in a democratic system assume they should become finking Nancy Drews to protect the environment? This is what we pay boatloads of taxes to accomplish – government acting to protect the interests of the people.
Frankly, the notion of this (tip to Mike Bryant) “steaming pile of app” being for real, is doubtful. It has all the earmarks (including eco-stoop defense posts) of the devious divide and conquer mindset. “Let’s create a fictional Hitler Youth iPhone app! That’ll get em at each others’ throats!” Doh!
The depths some info-warriors sink to! Oh well… Happy New Year WUWT!
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
C.S. Lewis
Eco Snoop:
Yes. In the interest of honesty, I suggest the much more accurate label “Eco Snitch”. That name fits you perfectly.
It is only a matter of time before kids are encouraged to rat out their parents and neighbors. Heck, you’re already doing that.
The most decent and honest thing you could do is admit you’re being anti-American by encouraging people to snitch on other folks’ entirely law-abiding behavior, by copying the erstwhile Soviet Union and having your own political eco-commissar in most homes and in every neighborhood. If you believe in freedom and individual liberty, you need to immediately shut down your creepy site.
But you won’t, because you are truly evil busybodies who believe that by turning in family, friends and neighbors – who are doing nothing wrong – you will ‘save the planet’. You could simply talk about your concerns with them, but no: your plan is to encourage anonymous snitching.
Your proposal to rat out honest folks will be promptly abused by the same hate-America crowd you belong to, and eventually by federal, state and local governments. Truth be told, you think that would be just fine, and like James Hansen and his ilk, you’d love to conduct public show trials in your own eco-kangaroo courts. Really, could you be any more despicable?
There is a special place in hell reserved for people who encourage snitching on their law abiding family and friends. Honest folks just want to be left alone by you conniving do-gooder bullies who infest the enviro movement, and who try to control everyone they don’t agree with. How would you like it if we set up a website that encouraged people to take pictures of you and your fellow greenshirts, post them and condemned you on line?
Now ask me what I really think of you.
/rant
“I believe this to be a sincere and reasonable response”
Sorry, Anthony, but that statement causes me to drop my estimate of your IQ by about 70 points. There’s simply no way EcoSnoop’s response was sincere. They’re talking about eco-OFFENDERS on their website, for crying out loud! And this excuse about the homes being part of a “demonstration”, along with the claim that the actual target is government office buildings is patently absurd. If you’re going to “demonstrate” how to use something, then you don’t put up pictures showing exactly the wrong way to use it. They’re lying to you, Anthony. They WANT home residences to be reported. They WANT private citizens to be snitched on by their neighbors.
Also, the following statement in the “response”:
“Our newer version which is still in work masks the location to all but the person who submits and the person who owns the building.”
is DIRECTLY contradicted by the original statement on the website, which reads, in part:
“by going yourself and encouraging friends to utilize the website to add as much information as possible about the picture (address information, responsible party information, etc.) you are giving the EcoSnoop community the tools to encourage positive change!”
The latter passage, from the website, clearly shows that the plan was to make “as much information as possible”, including, specifically, “address information” and “responsible party information”, available to “the EcoSnoop community”, not to just the submitter and the owner of the building. Also, how could “friends” add any information to a picture if they could not see what information was already there? No way! That statement only makes sense if EVERYONE can see all of the information (including, even ESPECIALLY including, name and address) that was already posted.
Come on! If their original intentions were half as honorable as they are claiming now, they would have said some of this on the website. Their goal all along was to set up a snitch board. And you can bet your bottom dollar they would applaud any government action to punish those caught by the snitchers. Heck, the name of the website alone should be enough to convince any semi-intelligent person of their intentions.
You are correct, of course, that, irrespective of intentions, the system invites abuse. But you cannot seriously give these SOBs a pass on their intentions. Anthony, you are far too smart to be this stupid. Please tell your loyal readers that you only SAID you believed EcoSnoop’s response because you were being nice. If you can’t put that in black and white, for the same reason, just give us a wink or a nudge. Some hint that you haven’t drunk the koolaid. Personally, I would prefer that you come right out and call them liars, because that’s what they are. No doubt about it. They got caught, and their changing their story now. And who knows, they might even stick to the later statement of their intentions. But that later statement was not at all what their original intentions were, and you know it.
Regards,
Trevor
REPLY: You didn’t talk to the man on the telephone, I did. Thus you are arguing from a position of inferior data. Insult me with “70 points less” if you must, but it won’t change anything except my own and others perception of your manners. – A
In reply to crosspatch:
I agree with your statement about the idiocy of this plan 100%, with one exception. The last line of the newspaper article says, “The reason: Trees clean the air of heat-trapping gases better than farming does.”, to which your replied, “While this is true initially when you first plant trees,”.
My problem with your statement is that the idiotic statement from the newspaper isn’t even true initially. All plants absorb carbon dioxide, including agricultural crops. But young, fast-growing crops absorb more carbon dioxide than older crops. Now, if you planted a tree and a corn seed at the same time, the corn would grow more quickly (gain biomass faster) than the tree, which means the corn has to absorb more carbon dioxide. But also, on a per acre basis, there are a hell of a lot more individual corn plants (tens of thousands) on an acre of planted corn than there are individual trees (maybe a thousand, if you pack them in tight) on an acre of planted trees. So, even initially, crops absorb far more carbon dioxide per acre than trees.
Of course, when the crop is harvested, the carbon stored in its tissue will eventually (probably by next summer) make it back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, one way or another. But, if you KEEP the field planted, every year, that field, over whatever time span you want to consider, is a far better carbon storage device than an equally-sized plot of forest, even when the forest is young. Because 1) crops are ALWAYS young (they never spend more than 7-8 months in the field before harvest), 2) there are more plants per acre in a crop field, and 3) crops grow faster than trees, even when the trees are young too.
Regards,
Trevor
This is when a progressive agenda (like athnropogenic global warming) is essentially “forced” upon a society.
“EcoSnoop is not just an iPhone app. It’s a social networking and awareness tool wrapped into one,” said the overly made up talent beaming into the camera lens – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDs7gWO-ggU .
Not only is this web site’s mission identical to East Germany’s Stasi, but it’s also an extreme example being a hypocrite!
“Hey, kids! Be the best hypocrite you can be by using your electric-charged iPhone or iTouch to record your community’s energy waste! Just imagine, you can tell that construction firm that their crane light is a form of “light pollution” and emits ugly carbon into the atmosphere! Boldly tell them that the crane light MUST not stay on all night!
“Oh, and just ignore the firm’s lame excuse about FAA requirements for the lighting temporary obstructions that may present an aviation hazard – of course, they’re lying and YOU know it! Why? Because you’re an EcoSnooper!” – http://ecosnoop.com/index.php?option=com_ecosnoop&view=list&Itemid=66 .
What a load of unmitigated cow manure! Of course that crane light is an evil offender that must be shut down!
This is the precise “silliness” I discussed in my posts below regarding the cliché “taxation on exhalation”.
Here’s another example of the web site’s outright ignorance:
“Have you ever….. Complained about street lights left on all day?” If you have, then you’re an idiot. The solar sensors on street lights are designed to fail in the lighted position so that utility workers know which ones need to be replaced – http://ecosnoop.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=17&Itemid=69 .
Oh… and then there’s this dandy:
“Have you ever….. Noticed a door that never closes properly, wasting heat or air conditioning?” If you have, then why didn’t you close the &#$%@ door rather than walking through it day after day only to rat on the building owner or manager?
EcoSnoop.com is prima facie evidence that progressives are… whacked – totally and completely! So, who’s the Mensa graduate promoting this… social networking and awareness tool? Well, according to Whois.com, it’s James Niemann from QSAccess, LLC in Kirkwood, MO – http://www.opti-schedule.com/ .
Jim is 55 years old and lives in St. Loius, MO – http://www.ussearch.com/consumer/index.do?&adID=619100D460&adsource=9&TID=5&searchtab=home … He’s also a devoted member of the Apple cult, so that starts to explain some things – http://www.databeast.com/comments.html . Jim is social networking savvy – http://www.facebook.com/people/Jim-Niemann/626984919 . And he was married in 1976 – the year of the Nation’s bicentennial celebration – http://www.lopiccolofamily.org/bigpapa/aqwg05.htm#255 .
So, Jim… How does it feel to be snooped? Not what it’s cracked up to be, huh?
I vomit.. after seeing this video with that hidious woman promoting nazi type neighbourhood watching, recording and publishing.. It is part of a digital addicted world we live in.. But in the end it wont work.. Maybe a few fanatics might use this as a way of living, but the masses will not give their selfs in for snooping around others.. They have their own lives to live, make up their own mind, remember?
“You didn’t talk to the man on the telephoNe, I did. ThUs you are arguing from a position of inferior Data. Insult me with “70 points less” if you must, but it won’t chanGe anything excEpt my own and others perception of your manners. – A”
Whew! Thanks for the “NUDGE”, as hidden in the text of your reply, Anthony (there’s a “WINK” in there too, but not quite in order). I will, of course, understand if you have to deny that you intended that hidden message. I’ll even play along, with the following apology:
I’m sorry, Mr. Watts. It was not my intention to insult you. My post (or at least those parts regarding your intelligence) was intended as tongue-in-cheek. But perhaps, instead of implying (even jokingly) that you are unintelligent (which you clearly are not), I should have called you “naive”. But please keep in mind that I honestly believed that you were only putting on a show of believing the sincerity of EcoSnoop’s response, and that you would, in some way, deliver the punch line of your little joke when put on the spot. Apparently, that is not the case, and you honestly believe the sincerity of their reply.
Personally, I don’t see how hearing someone’s voice over a telephone could convince you of that person’s sincerity, no matter how sincere he SOUNDED, especially when their printed words are so blatantly in opposition to their verbal statements. Millions of people make a living making people THINK they are sincere in their verbal statements. Actors, politicians, car salesmen, and lawyers come to mind off the top of my head. And most of the time, the targets of this feigned sincerity can even SEE the pretenders, and all the possible nonverbal cues of insincerity, yet the pretenders still pull off the deception flawlessly.
So, no, I didn’t talk to the guy on the telephone – you got me there. But I’m sorry, I just can’t imagine anyone sounding sincere enough for me to buy this story and reject the hard evidence in front of my eyes. Tell me, Anthony, what did you hear in this guy’s voice that convinced you he was so much more sincere than every actor, politician, car salesman, lawyer, global warming alarmist, and every other professional liar who has ever lied to you?
Again, I apologize for insulting your intelligence. Clearly you are not stupid. Naive, perhaps, if you truly believe the “sincerity” of EcoSnoop’s response. But definitely not stupid. And I apologize for stating or implying anything of the sort.
Speaking of which, I did not read the words “apology”, “apologize”, or “sorry” in the response from EcoSnoop. Nor did I see any of those words in your description of the telephone conversation. Did this guy apologize to you or not? Clearly, he did not think that we, your loyal readers, were due an apology, or he would have included it in the response. The response comes really, really close (but not quite) to an admission of bad judgement in the language used in the original statement on the website, but it falls well short of any form of apology. I would think that a clear apology (as well as an unmistakable admission of error) would be a key part of any “sincere” response on the part of EcoSnoop. But that’s just me. Call me jaded if you will, but I need a little more than a sincere voice on the telephone to convince me.
Regards,
Trevor
Trevor,
“Of course, when the crop is harvested, the carbon stored in its tissue will eventually (probably by next summer) make it back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, one way or another.”
And there lies the rub. If all the CO2 ends up back in the atmosphere (it will) then you have gained precisely – nothing. Even if a tree fixes CO2 at only one tenth the rate, as long as it is not burnt or allowed to rot, the CO2 remains sequestered.
Once the activist has notified the offender about the unacceptable burning of energy, and the offender says: “Ah, but I have the necessary carbon offsets – official permission to pollute,” as someone like Al Gore will surely do, what is the poor activist to do?
Vo ist der papers!
Wikip on Useful Idiots:
“The term is commonly attributed to Vladimir Lenin, sometimes in the form “useful idiots of the West”, to describe those Western reporters and travelers who would endorse the Soviet Union and its policies in the West. In fact, the earlist known usage is a 1948 New York Times on Italian politics. In the spring of 1987, before the fall of the Soviet Union, Grant Harris, senior reference librarian at the Library of Congress, said “We have not been able to identify this phrase [useful idiots of the West] among [Lenin’s] published works.”
The central requirement for an idiot to be useful is that they should be sincere. That’s their whole point. The idiot part requires that they be completely oblivious of the consequences of the position they are promoting. The useful part is obvious enough, but is necessary to distinguish them from useless idiots, who are otherwise the same.
The unncessary extension of the quote saying that the phrase can’t be found in Lenin’s writing is an example of a useful idiot going about their work.
Smokey
Regarding your response to Eco Snoop; Your post is one of those rare ones that makes me want to stand up and cheer. I wish I could have the honor of shaking your hand.
The Eco Snoops are socialist busy bodies who would happily turn our once magnificent country into a police surveillance state. To hell with all of them!
Anthony – I work for a company making energy management systems for buildings. Selling this stuff is hard work, even when the savings pay for the system in 6 months!
In australia, and parts of the USA, it is soon to become law for buildings to have occupancy sensors and to turn lights off when there is nobody present. No harm in all this – waste for the sake of waste is just silly and costs money.
Simple measures like this, implemented fairly cost effectively, make a difference immediately in the pocket – reduced utility bills. ETS’s and carbon taxes are all indirect things that are supposed to have an effect, and don’t – it’s all TOO COMPLICATED.
This one IS fun… Eeko-Stooper is flailing wildly as are some posts here. Should anyone take pictures of private property without permission and display it publicly at a profit – they subject themselves to breach of privacy and property tort. In such a legal action the Stooper would need to explain to a jury why harassing private citizens who do little more than leave their lights on – for which they pay a fee – should be subject to mob rule.
One or two fat six figure damage awards against Stoopers will set the public straight. If there is no law breaking going on – or corruption of statute – get out of my home. I have a club called the Fourth Amendment and I will not hesitate to use it to put you out of business.
The parking lots have to be lit at night, as well as entries to the buildings. Lawyers are quite expensive when a person trips going down a set of stairs, even when lit, and blames it on the lighting not being sufficient.
Well , I’m way late to the party – been away from a computer for a few days and haven’t read the responses , but any suggestions I would have for Eco-Snoop would not get past the moderators .
great app, used it before, very handy
Vincent:
“If all the CO2 ends up back in the atmosphere (it will) then you have gained precisely – nothing.”
First of all, my point was about the very short term. The original post on the subject said that trees INITIALLY (can someone tell me how to bold stuff?) absorb more carbon dioxide than farming, then went on to show that, over the long term, net carbon absorption by trees is zero. I disagreed with the “initially”. And it is true that, initially, in the very short term, agricultural crops absorb more CO2 (and subscripts too?) than trees.
However, it is also true over the longer term. You see, as long as the crop land is planted again, year after year, with agricultural crops, the carbon will remain sequestered. Oh sure, it won’t be the SAME carbon atoms year after year. But every acre of actively growing crops absorbs carbon dioxide. When the crop is harvested, the carbon will be released (into the atmosphere as the non-edible tissue rots, or, if the residue is “plowed under”, into the soil). But the next crop will absorb it right back. So, while a given corn plant is not an effective long-term carbon-sequestration device, an acre of cropland, planted year after year, is quite effective at storing carbon for the long term. More so than an unharvested forest, at any rate.
But, the best really-long-term use of land for carbon sequestration is to plant fast-growing trees with economically profitable uses (like pine trees), and harvest and replant on a regular schedule. The carbon would be more-or-less permanently locked away in whatever product is made from the trees, as long as it was not allowed to rot. The problem with that, however, is that there’s just not nearly enough demand for lumber and paper for it to be economically profitable to harvest enough trees to put a serious dent in atmospheric carbon dioxide. I guess you could just BURY the trees miles underground (and in the really, really, REALLY long term, this is great, because after millions of years, our supply of fossil fuel would be replenished), but the expense involved in this would be gargantuan.