The worst part is that convincing people to use less is difficult even when it’s something easy. Let’s say for example that your dryer brakes and you need to replace it and up until this point you’ve been using either a standard resistive electric dryer or a gas dryer. Heat pump dryers are now readily available, of good quality, and use literally 1/4 the power of a resistive electric to do the same job.

If we could convince everyone to just only buy heat pump dryers from this point forward that alone would create a ridiculous drop in energy usage for drying clothes as it’s a very energy intensive task. But people don’t like things that are different and so convincing them to try it is very hard. I had to basically purchase one for my grandparents to get them to be willing to try it and now they love it but initially they were very strongly against trying

There’s also a bunch of dumb but sometimes arguments. Take LED stop lights for example one of the biggest arguments against them is in places where it tends to snow every year they say oh well they aren’t worth it here because when it snows they get covered and if you put a heating wire on them to melt the snow then you’re not saving any power over the standard ones. But it’s like hello rub a couple brain cells together unless you are somewhere where it snows 365 days of the year you’re still saving the power whenever it’s not snowing which is a pretty drastic amount of power across an entire city or state.

I could sit here and give examples all day but suffice to say convincing people to use less even when It ultimately results in a better end result for them is exacerbatingly difficult