Thursday, May 31, 2007

Right-wing logic, as it were.


Shorter Fred: "Some city council members somewhere in England are idiots; therefore, all environmentalists are mathematically illiterate morons."

Hey, can I play, too? Let's see -- some members of the Blogging Tories are inane, babbling dunderheads ... do I really need to finish this for you?

1 comment:

Adam C said...

Blogging Tory math: the BBC cites the cost of the project as 15M, but somehow it became 29M by the time it hit Gay and Right.

Even then, the article doesn't make sense. 15k streetlights will save 20k pounds per year?

So, each streetlight will save 1.33 pounds per year. A good estimate (Wikipedia) holds that the light will be on for 4000 hours. At, for the sake of argument, 10p per kWh (I don't know off-hand what they pay), that would mean that the new light uses 3.325 W less than the old one. Even if they only pay 5p that would be less than 7 W of improvement.

Hmmm... is that believable? That a new 1000-pound lamp would save 3-7 W over the old one? Somebody's math is fucked up here, but I bet it's the Beeb's, and not the city council planners.

My guess is that they expect to save 20k pounds each year over and above the cost of the project, spread out as an annual cost over the expected lifetime of the new lamps, compared to the expected replacement costs of the old lamps.