A 50% saving is not a small scale change here and there for most people. Thats a massive and probably unachievable change for most in the UK. We could get nowhere near that unless we didn't drive to a lot of things i.e we didn't do a lot of things. I would wager most people are the same.
When I am talking micro vs macro I mean that someone in the UK saving 10% off their already 66% lower energy usage vs their US counterpart means that they might go from lets say 3.3 down to 3 whereas an American cutting down an easy 20% probably just by using a car that gets more than 3MPG would make a massively larger difference going from 10 -> 8. If a company is looking to save a lot of money they don't ask people not to use too many pens, they cut business class flights and expensive client meals and get smaller offices. You target the big spends first and then you worry about micro optimising.
I'm sure there are some people who have huge carbon footprints in the UK but they are unlikely to cut back or care because they are likely rich. Most of us don't have that much fat to trim which is why I am saying that trying to get people in the UK to cut their emissions / usage a lot is silly when countries like the US are still really really bad.
Things like leaving lights on and boiling a full kettle 5 times a day and running washing machine daily, turning off all appliances at wall when not in use, making sure the Fridge is clean and not on a setting it doesn't need to be and such forth are all things that can be cut back easy enough and have a huge impact where it could be 2-3kWh a day saving still, so yes if the average is 8-10kWh then okay it not exactly 50% but it still a decent amount.
So you multiply that by a few million people and over a year it is still a huge saving. Why does what anyone else do have any bearing on what I should do. It is very short sighted to just say well they don't care, why should I. Our office has changed policy on heating, coffee machine, dishwasher use and such forth introduced because of the changes. Changes to making sure all PC's are actually off and if it is left on without justifiable reason a written warning for instance because it is something we should be doing.
Lots of people have a larger than they expect carbon footprint because they just don't realise what the impact of some things are. Our own UK policy should not be dictated by another country. If we did that then you could also compare to a country that has way less emissions and usage than ours and then say well surely we should be matching them because it is silly we are using so much energy when others aren't? Surely stepping in the right direction and just being conscious to think about the usage is what we should be doing.
If we are being conservative about the figure at 1kWh per household a day out of 27.8 million households saved then that is 27.8GWh a day saved! So in a year that saving is 10,147GWh. That is £2,820,866,000.00 a year saved. Or that is 8.5 Billion US pounds of CO2 saved.
If you used your 0.3kWh which is still well below what could on average be saved in my view that is still 3044.1GWh a year saved. Or in monies terms would be £846,259.800.00 a year saving for the UK households. Or 2.55 Billion US pounds of CO2 saved.
