Low carbon eggs

“I’d stay outside if I was you – you might find what I’m doing disturbing.” The kitchen door sprung open immediately.“Please don’t tell me you tried to boil an egg in the microwave. For someone who thinks they’re intelligent, you do some really stupid things,” said my wife as she observed me scraping bits of boiled egg from the inside of the microwave. “Everyone knows you can’t boil an egg in that thing. They blow up.”
I kept quiet; somehow saying that I wasn’t boiling the eggs, simply reheating them didn’t seem a strong enough retort.
The issue of the most energy efficient way of eating eggs had vexed me for a week now. I had boiled and shelled four eggs a couple of days ago and was trying to find the best way of heating them up again. It didn’t look good. Four eggs (240g) in 1000g of water and pan – and then there was the matter of reheating them. Making an omelette had a more favourable ratio of mass of food to mass of utensil, but two day old omelette tastes rubbish. The best solution seemed to be to make micro-waved scrambled egg: whisk the egg, add milk (soya of course), heat in the microwave for 45 seconds give another stir and then another 45 seconds in the microwave. Total GHG emissions from cooking 0.02 kgCO₂e - about a fifth of the energy from boiling a single egg.

How many lobbyists does it take to stop a light bulb being changed?

In March 2007 the leaders of the European nations agreed to phase out the tungsten light-bulbs. This was a brave decision – perhaps the first banning of a technology purely on poor energy efficiency performance. In some ways it’s a no-brainer - low energy compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) are a mature technology and have been around for 30 years; they use just a fifth of the electricity used by tungsten light bulbs. Though they cost more to buy, they last 10 times longer. The Energy Savings Trust says they will save £40 over their life time, and almost 80% carbon savings.

So every one is a winner? Well not quite. Some of the manufacturers of tungsten light bulbs found they were backing the wrong technology. General Electrics had poured $200 million of investment into high efficiency incandescent light bulbs. In a hurriedly issued press statement, appearing two days after Australia announced its ban on tungsten light bulbs and a few weeks before the EU did the same, GE claimed they were “re-inventing Edison”. In their brazen press release they boasted about a technological break-through that would be ready in three years, be less energy efficient than CFLs and last nowhere near as long! Edison must have spun in his grave ruing the fact he ever created General Electric.

One of the main criticisms against compact fluorescent light bulbs is their alleged poor light quality. This might have been true some years ago. But in a Pepsi taste-test style exercise the Energy savings Trust invited 761 shoppers to take the light bulb challenge and see whether they preferred the light from the tungsten light bulb or the newest CFLs. In the experiment 53% of shoppers either could not spot the difference between or preferred the CFL.