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Where can you find energy waste? In the city? Everywhere - but it's usually hard to see and measure without sophisticated equipment. How about an obvious, concrete example to help grapple with the problem. Unfortunately, you rarely get the luxury of looking straight up at a hot plume of power plant steam billowing overhead. That's happening miles away, and looks picturesque anyway. But taking a quick nighttime peak at Google Earth and seeing the bright glow along the US's northeast metro corridor makes it easy to understand. Unless you live in a place as backward as North Korea (click to see night sky), where you'll never see a computer's Google-glow during a hungry, kimchi-deprived lifetime, prevention - not detention - is the name of the game. (Border guards have caught tech-deprived Pyongyang teens trying to sneak across the Chinese border because they're so desperate for the freedom to work in Foxconn factories making Apple iPads.) I know energy waste is all around me, and I've always suspected a steady flow seeping out of wall sockets, door jambs, and the cable box - puddling around my ankles and up my knees, until I'm treading water. So I try to do my part. Usually small things. Turning unnecessary lights off. Recycling. Carless(ness). Dropping the thermostat lower at night while wearing a sweater in my small Manhattan apartment. So when a neighbor double-checks my already lowered thermostat with "that" raised eyebrow - and suddenly the world's calving icebergs... Blah, Blah, Blah- it's in one ear and out the other. This run-in triggering a little flinch - an annoying eco-tic. And eco-earnestness is everywhere. I'm even leery of riding in my friend's Nissan Leaf after watching a guilt-ridden commuter's redemption-by-bear-hug. An image wedged into my imagination like a bland, gummy rice cake (watch commercial).
Fortunately, a short film just posted on YouTube de-stresses me after a bout of eco-intrusiveness. "Light," directed by David Parker, initially began as a simple, straightforward project intended to bring awareness to energy waste. But the film, shot over a couple nights in Los Angeles as Parker and a friend drove around with a camera exploring the city's desolate streets, grew with the addition of clever special effects and a haunting soundtrack into a poetic statement about the human tendency to ignore the obvious: squandering our natural resources without much thought. (And it never hurts to reference "The Blob.")
Comments
Street lamps, bridge/tunnel lamps, traffic lights? I would consider these energy uses necessary, even if used only a few times at night. This would have been more effective if they'd used office lights, ads, or sprawling HVAC systems – not safety lights!
you're being a little too literal. Please don't overlook the the film's show-offy humor-- racking up film references all over the place. In any case, given the desolation-- no one's using the islands of illumination except a small dog crossing the street and a few passing cars-- the store, street, and elevator lights are all providing a lot of unused light. Since this short film is very nostalgic, highlighting the director's love of movies, particularly LA noir, you could say, at least by the time you get to a sprawling city like LA, that maybe we've built a dysfunctional habitat. Or that the city is providing lots of light but little human interaction and "warmth." Kent Kent
So where's the short film?
look to the upper right of the page Kent.