As with many areas of public interest, the common wisdom surrounding energy conservation consists of myths and legends, rules of thumb and superstitions. We're given guidelines as soundbites, catchy but insubstantial. We trust them blindly, not knowing whether our actions make any significant impact.
Oil and Gas=Peril and Poverty/ Solar and Wind=Prosperity and Protection
2026 has changed the psychological meaning of energy forever
Breakthrough Energy | Home
Empowering innovators to build the future of energy
Ditch the niceties in AI prompts to save energy use, say researchers
A UN report warns of the rapid growth in AI energy consumption, but suggests users can improve efficiency by making prompts more concise
Overcoming Salience Bias: How Real-Time Feedback Fosters Resource Conservation
Inattention and imperfect information bias behavior toward the salient and immediately visible. This distortion creates costs for individuals, the organizations in which they work, and society at large. We show that an effective way to overcome this bias is by making the implications of one’s behavior salient in real time, while individuals can directly adapt. In a large-scale field experiment, we gave participants real-time feedback on the resource consumption of a daily, energy-intensive activity (showering). We find that real-time feedback reduced resource consumption for the target behavior by 22%. At the household level, this led to much larger conservation gains in absolute terms than conventional policy interventions that provide aggregate feedback on resource use. High baseline users displayed a larger conservation effect, in line with the notion that real-time feedback helps eliminate “slack” in resource use. The approach is cost effective, is technically applicable to the vast majority of households, and generated savings of 1.2 kWh per day and household, which exceeds the average energy use for lighting. The intervention also shows how digitalization in our everyday lives makes information available that can help individuals overcome salience bias and act more in line with their preferences. This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.
A Reality Check on Our ‘Energy Transition’ | The Tyee
To our peril, there’s been no green revolution. Just green addition to rising fossil fuel use.
We’re Squandering LEDs’ Potential to Save Our Night Skies
Bad decisions have turned efficient technology into a driver of light pollution. There is a better way
Static! Designing for energy Awareness
From the boost of the first cup of coffee in the morning to the glow of a nightlight that keeps a child company after dark, much of our contemporary lifestyles is powered by electricity. Today, however, the economic and environmental costs of energy require us to think again. While recognizing the complex social functions and cultural forms of electricity in everyday life, the current challenge for design is to change practices and patterns of (over)consumption. Static! explores design as a basis for increasing awareness of energy. Familiar furnishings and products have been reinterpreted to materialize electricity, to make it more visible and tangible for people. The resulting series of conceptual design examples express the poetics – and politics – of everyday electricity consumption. A design research project at the Interactive Institute funded by the Swedish Energy Agency, Static! has proved to be a pioneer in opening a current and critical research area at the intersection of design, energy and information technology. This book presents the Static! design examples and perspectives on issues in (sustainable) design today. Grounded in passion and humor, as well as rigor and research, the book asks designers and consumers – that is, all of us – to rethink the form, and future, of electricity in the world around us. Editor: Ramia Mazé. Authors: Christina Öhman, Sara Backlund, Johan Redström, Ramia Mazé, Sara Ilstedt Hjelm, Sara Routarinne.
The future is made of energy | Orca Notes
A megatrend way bigger than decarbonization is probably the key to abundance and sustainability both.
The Profit Paradox
Shareouts from ATScience 2026 in Vancouver - ATScience Notes
Since when do science conferences have such wild energy?
The geopolitical fight to come over green energy
The struggle for sustainable energy will soon put China, the US and Europe on a geopolitical collision course. But moving away from fossil fuels is a Herculean task, and a greener politics will not transcend tragedy.
Energy Production and Consumption
Explore data on how energy production and use varies across the world.
Guest post: If you’re going to critique science, be scientific about it
Loren K. Mell Editor’s note: This post responds to a Feb. 13 article in The Atlantic, “The Scientific Literature Can’t Save Us Now,” written by Retraction Watch cofounders Adam Marcus and Ivan Oran…
More and More and More
It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one. Indeed the very idea of transition turns out to be untrue. The author shares the same acute anxiety about the need for a green transition as the rest of us, but shows how, disastrously, our industrial history has in fact been based on symbiosis, with each major energy source feeding off the others. Using a fascinating array of examples, Fressoz describes how we have gorged on all forms of energy – with whole forests needed to prop up coal mines, coal remaining central to the creation of innumerable new products and oil still central to our lives. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before. This book reveals an uncomfortable truth: ‘transition’ was originally itself promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a means to put off any meaningful change. More and More and More forces its readers to understand the modern world in all its voracious reality, and the true nature of the challenges heading our way.
