Couch-surfing ‘superheroes’ saving energy, if not their health

‘Vindication!” he pronounced, pushing his laptop between me and my lunch. “I’ve been waiting for this.”

I had time to read only the title displayed on the glowing screen — “Changes in Time Use and Their Effect on Energy Consumption in the United States” — before Nature Boy whipped the device away and replaced it with his face.

“And, all these years, you thought I was being a lazy bum [his word, not mine — I used a different word] spending all that time watching TV and surfing the web. You didn’t believe me — oh, no! — when I said it was necessary for my work, that I needed to be au courant with popular culture to do my job. Well, Ha! I say, Ha!”

“Um, you haven’t been doing that kind of work for several years now,” I waved my spoon at him, “yet you’re spending even more time onscreen.”

“Oh, ye of little faith. Read this. All this time, I — yes, I! — have been working to saving the planet.”

“Well, get your toupee out of my soup and let me read.”

The document in question is a research paper published in the science journal Joule. The researchers describe how they used data from the American Time Use Survey to determine how Americans changed the way they spent their time from 2003 to 2012, and what that means for energy used and saved. The survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, measures the amount of time people — as many as 11,000 Americans annually — spend on activities such as paid work, child care, volunteering, sleeping, socializing and being on a computer.

By mining the data, the researchers found that Americans spent more time at home in 2012 — an average of 7.8 days more each — than in 2003, and correspondingly less time travelling, working in offices or shopping in brickand-mortar stores.

The increased time at home was used mostly to work, watch TV or videos, and use computers.

The researchers did some fancy analyses on the data using computers at their office — which they would have travelled to — to estimate how those lifestyle changes affected energy consumption.

Then they extrapolated the results to the country’s 314 million official residents in 2012.

Despite increased home-energy use due to all the extra time spent at home and a documented 52 per cent increase in total transportation energy use from 1975 to 2015, the reported results point to possible overall lifestyle-based energy savings.

The researchers found the additional time at home and its correspondingly reduced use of fuel for commuting and keeping the lights on in non-residential buildings could potentially represent an 1,800-quadrillion-joule decrease in national energy demand. That’s 1,800 followed by another 18 zeros.

Yet 1,800 quadrillion joules (1,800 exajoules) would equal only 1.8 per cent of total energy used in the U.S. in a year.

As a society in recent years, we’ve put a lot of effort into increasing how efficiently our vehicles, appliances and, to some extent, homes use energy, but this is the first time somebody has put an energy value on being a couch potato.

“The country-wide savings are hypothetical, and the researchers include a lot of caveats,” I point out to Nature Boy. “They also don’t account for the hidden energy costs of sitting around watching Netflix all day — how much energy is used for all those late-night trips to the convenience store for Doritos and soda or for having pizza delivered.”

“Pshaw!” Nature Boy pshawed as he preened and posed. “You just don’t want to admit I’m a superhero.”

“They also don’t calculate the social and health costs of these lifestyle changes.”

Researchers know that sitting in front of a computer surfing the net or sprawling on the sofa watching Netflix for hours on end are as bad for our health as smoking. Other studies show that social isolation and lack of face-to-face interaction with other living, breathing people — versus onscreen avatars or TV or movie characters — are more significant risk factors for heart disease, dementia or mental illness than being obese, smoking or sitting all day.

“Ah,” said Nature Boy, “those are just the sacrifices we superheroes have to make when we go about saving the planet.”