Quotes About Efficiency

plan ahead. '[The] keys to success are to plan ahead, to choose manageable recipes and to cook in batches' (The New York Times). Always tautological. Would you plan behind?

advance planning. The advance in advance planning is always redundant. All planning must be done in advance.

The inescapable conclusion is that higher spending in America doesn't necessarily result in better medicine, just higher costs.

Post-it notes

The Glock is lighter by a good measure than the Beretta I was trained on, with a better grip, and I've heard it's accurate, but weapons are like cars—you know they have standard stuff like lights and an ignition and windshield wipers, but it still takes a few seconds to figure them out when they're unfamiliar. So I burn precious moments getting a feel for it before I'm ready to point and shoot—

She is buttoned-up as always, a smart suit, dark hair pulled back, never letting her guard down while on camera. Her job, she has told me more than once, is not to make friends with the staff but to keep them organized, praise good work, and sweat the details so I can focus on the hard, big stuff.

Remember that we need to find solutions for all five activities that emissions come from: making things, plugging in, growing things, getting around, and keeping cool and warm.

Solar cells, for example, got almost 10 times cheaper between 2010 and 2020, and the price of a full solar system went down by 11 percent in 2019 alone.

In the coming years, as electricity becomes an even bigger part of our overall energy diet, we'll need models like these for grids around the world. They'll help us answer questions like: Which mix of clean energy sources will be the most efficient in a given place? Where should transmission lines go? Which regulations stand in the way, and what incentives do we need to create? I hope to see a lot more projects like this one.

Finally, after the fertilizer is applied to soil, much of the nitrogen that it contains never gets absorbed by the plant. In fact, worldwide, crops take up less than half the nitrogen applied to farm fields. The rest runs off into ground or surface waters, causing pollution, or escapes into the air in the form of nitrous oxide—which, you may recall, has 265 times the global-warming potential of carbon dioxide.

Consider that the first Model T that rolled off Henry Ford's production line in 1908 got no better than 21 miles to the gallon. As I write this, the top hybrid on the market gets 58 miles to the gallon. In more than a century, fuel economy has improved by less than a factor of three.

How much stuff does it take to build and run a power plant? That depends on the type of plant. Nuclear is the most efficient, using much less material per unit of electricity generated than other sources do.

To sum up, the path to zero emissions in manufacturing looks like this: Electrify every process possible. This is going to take a lot of innovation. Get that electricity from a power grid that's been decarbonized. This also will take a lot of innovation. Use carbon capture to absorb the remaining emissions. And so will this. Use materials more efficiently. Same.

These "point capture" devices have existed for decades, but they're expensive to buy and operate, they generally capture only 90 percent of the greenhouse gases involved, and power companies don't gain anything from installing them. So very few are in use.

Power density is the relevant number here. It tells you how much power you can get from different sources for a given amount of land (or water, if you're putting wind turbines in the ocean). It's measured in watts per square meter. Below

I'm also a technophile. Show me a problem, and I'll look for technology to fix it.

In particular, Green Premiums are a fantastic lens for making decisions. They help us put our time, attention, and money to their best use. Looking at all the different premiums, we can decide which zero-carbon solutions we should deploy now and where we should pursue breakthroughs because the clean alternatives aren't cheap enough. They help us answer questions like these:

New Rule: You can't force the ATM to do something it doesn't want to do. Excuse me, lady in front of me at the Citibank ATM, but you've been standing there punching buttons for ten minutes--what are you trying to do, write a novel on it? You hear those beeping noises? That's the ATM saying, Stop it, you're hurting me. A chicken would have gotten forty bucks out of that thing by now just by pecking the buttons randomly.

Just like in the workplace, women who are good workers are the best workers.

New Rule: Apple's next device must be a computer that you control with your tongue. Thanks for eliminating the keyboard and the mouse, but pointing and pushing at things already seems too complicated and tiring. We're Americans--and until you free our hands from the computer entirely, we can never attain our ultimate goal: Web surfing while eating and masturbating.

Sloth is the thief of time. The character defect of putting off actions "until things get better" is one of the most destructive detours we can make. Delays never make problems "go away;" they only make success harder to attain.

Why waste time learning when ignorance is instantaneous. ---Hobbes

HOBBES: All this modern technology just makes people try to do everything at once.

Reading goes faster if you don't sweat comprehension.