Hmmm, I am gonna have to disagree with on this one. By the same token there is no reason to waste energy just because we can. This is the main problem with this country, the whole concept that it's OK to do things just because we can makes no sense more often than not.
I would say that the main problem of this country is that about 50% of us think that everyone BUT THEM is a blithering idiot and MUST be oppressed and controlled, to be protected from themselves, and to be made safe for others.
That freedom is evil and the government must control every aspect of our lives, from our choices in health insurance coverage, to our employment, production, and income (communism)
Still, I believe there are reasons to save energy just for the sake of saving because there is absolutely no reason to waste it at all.
First law of thermodynamics: The law expresses that energy can be transformed, i.e. changed from one form to another, but cannot be created or destroyed. It is usually formulated by stating that the change in the internal energy of a system is equal to the amount of heat supplied to the system, minus the amount of work performed by the system on its surroundings.
When you are "wasting energy" what are you doing? You are consuming a product. Fossil fuels are nothing but naturally occurring high density and cheap energy stores; carbohydrates from ancient algae that have been preserved through many years. But autotrophes constantly collect more energy from the sun.
In the end, the energy is not produced, it is transformed, the product is "useful energy" (aka electricity). Useful energy is produced (by transforming non useful energy) by people for people. It takes more effort on behalf of humans to transform sun/nuclear energy into useful energy than it does to transform the energy stored in fossil fuels, but so what? you simply pay for it. Money is nothing more or less then a measure of your contribution to that amazing thing called society. You acquire money by doing things for others in society, you spend your money on energy collect and transformed for your use (110 or 220V AC electric current... metered) and use it as you will. I DO conserve energy, because I want to spend the minimum of money (my contribution to society) on paying for energy. But I also weigh it against other costs. I will not pay extra 5$ for a RAM module that will save 0.05$ a year on power (actual costs of a low energy DDR3 RAM module I saw, I made said calculations to decide whether to purchase it or not).
The main claim that people make is that producing energy is !EVIL-BAD TM!... Their argument hinges on a posit that human Carbon Dioxide emissions cause global warming... There are lots and lots of reason why this is utter ballony... and all of them scientific.
I used to be very derisive of anyone who would oppose AGW, because I bought the line of "they are just religious fundamentalists who say God controls the weather, and humans cannot affect it, and they are opposing scientific evidence that shows it does".
As an atheist and a scientist that seemed really REALLY stupid to me... however, my liberal upbringing EXTOLLED the virtue of the Open mind... so I listened with an open mind and found out that opposition to AGW does NOT stem from the above strawman. Just like religious fundamentalists attack strawman (false representations of the other's argument meant to be easily counterable) of evolutionary science, so do communist interested in the destruction of capitalism (and thus, the corporations that represent them) have been using strawman. The actual arguments against AGW are all scientific in nature and often championed by Atheists and Scientists who are sickened at seeing the perversion of science that AGW is.
Political pundits are falsifying evidence, hiding research, ignoring fact, or simply declaring unresearched opinions as scientifically proven fact.
The claimed that the Himalayas are melting... A college student INVENTED that with 0 research, it was published in his college newspaper (not an actual scientific publication)... the politicians in the IPCC (which outnumber the scientists in the IPCC 5 to 1) read it and decided to publish it as fact.
The head of the hurricane research department of the IPCC quit in rage, in his letter of resignation he said that he and his team found NO CONNECTION between so called rising temperatures and increased hurricane activity... but that the IPCC politicians simply took their reports, ignored them, and told the media that they found that it DOES cause an increase.
The dean of the geoscience department of (IIRC) the university of massechusets did not quit his position in the IPCC, but did go to the media himself saying how the politicians in the IPCC are misrepresenting their results, and explaining in detail what they found (which is zilch). He is currently in the IPCC and goes out and contradicts the "official stance" of the IPCC (compiled by the politicians that run it, not the scientists who are members in it).
Then there is the issue with shutting down 3/4s of the USA's weather monitoring stations... all of which in colder /cooling areas. The fact that solar activity about matches the temperature.
the fact that carbon dioxide is 0.036% of out atmosphere, but that earth wasn't much hotter when it was nearly 20% way back in its early days. That there has never been a reproducible lab test tying carbon dioxide to temperature (even though we have reproducible lab tests showing spontaneous formation of basic biological compounds in artificially replicated primordial soup conditions)
That sun activity was causing the frozen carbon dioxide poles on mars to melt in conjunction with temperature changes here. That we have been having repeated periods of cooling and heating in the past century alone (in the 1970s they wanted to paint the poles black to stop global cooling... which was supposedly caused by the same emissions now causing global warming)
Oh, and let us not forget, humans emit 3% of the total carbon dioxide that is emitted into the atmosphere every year... almost half of it from breathing (we oxidize sugars to produce water and carbon dioxide) and the other half from our industry... Vulcanos, undergrown coal fires, etc account for the other 97%. The USA has spent a LOT of money and effort (and lives, its dangerous work) chocking and forcing some of its underground coal smoldering fires to extinguish. If the chinese do the same they could reduce global emissions from natural sources of carbon dioxide by more than 5 times the total human production (we can't really staunch vulcanoes though... nor should we)...
It should be noted that carbon dioxide is absolutely VITAL for plant life... We pump it into greenhouses to increase yields, and any time there is an increase, it merely results in a surge in autotroph population. (some of which CAN be bad though, such as algeal blooms)...
Anyways, the list goes on and on. If there IS a real HUMAN CAUSED global warming issue, it is being discredited most by those so called "supporters" of the "cause" with their clumsy attempts at misdirection and falsification (which are eventually caught). But in truth, they are mostly opponents of "greed" (read: they hate businesses with a passion) and simply use AGW as a blunt instrument to force extra taxation and limitation to harm them.
