Is Eating Out More Eco-friendly?
Crunchy Chicken makes the case that eating out may be more eco-friendly than cooking at home. It's a counter-intuitive argument to be sure, but it comes down to the idea that taking advantage of economies of scale can save energy. Much like how sharing a giant diesel smoking bus with dozens of other people reduces your carbon footprint compared to driving separate clean burning cars over the same distance.
Another example that comes to mind is computing power. Does your average email and web user really need an energy sucking supercomputer sitting under their desk, or would a low powered computer running web applications (like Gmail) hosted on a finely tuned datacenter serve the same needs? I'm looking around my house to see what else could be offloaded, and it's an interesting lens to view everything through. Are we better off making every individual unit of consumption as efficient as possible, or should we move away from individual consumption and towards shared infrastructure?
