Americans like to think that conserving power and water is a huge inconvenience. But in Europe, it’s just the way things are, and somehow people survive.
Toilets have two buttons: a big one and a small one, depending on how big a flush you need.
In public buildings and hotels, motion sensors turn the lights on when you enter a hallway, off again once you’re past.
Hotel showers tend to have wall-mounted shampoo dispensers, to prevent millions of small plastic bottles from winding up in the landfill every year.
And most controversial (to Americans) of all, your room key has to be inserted by the hotel-room door to turn on power and air-conditioning.
Yes, it means that your room takes a couple of minutes to cool when you return in the summer. But it also means that you can’t leave for the day with all lights and chillers blazing...
The power, water and time savings of the tweaks we’ve observed here are designed to address whole-world problems. And they’re something more American institutions might want to consider.The questions:
1) How are "a huge inconvenience" and "inability to survive" the same thing? Should human beings be happy to suffer huge inconveniences imposed by environmentalist ideology and government force (or lots of small inconveniences) so long as we can continue to exist as we suffer the inconveniences? If it is more convenient for human beings to waste a greater amount of materials and energy than to suffer mandatory inconveniences in the name of waste reduction, how is making our lives harder automatically the better alternative?
2) How is having two buttons on a toilet so that you can have two different kinds of flushes better than having a toilet that flushes in one way but adequately for every occasion? Do the European bathrooms Pogue saw have the two-button flush toilets because hotels have voluntarily implemented the feature, or was it imposed on them by government force?
3) Are the wall-mounted shampoo dispensers that Pogue observed in some European hotels mounted in those hotel rooms because a government mandates this or because the hotels have some independent reason for preferring dispensers to small plastic bottles? If American public bathrooms feature soap dispensers, as they have for at least decades, does that mean that the purpose of builders and owners has been to avoid the tragedy of "millions of small plastic bottles winding up in the landfill every year"? Also, what difference does it make whether "millions of small plastic bottles [wind] up in the landfill every year"? Do shampoo bottles make up the bulk of all the garbage that ends up in landfills, or only a tiny percentage? As long as a business makes sure that the garbage it produces is properly disposed of, what is the problem?
4) Why is it a bad thing, on a 101-degree day, for a 92-year-old who has paid for a hotel room to be able to leave the air conditioner on so that the room will be cool when he returns? Is the necessity of using the hotel key card to turn on power and air-conditioning in a European hotel room an innovation voluntarily accepted by the hotels in order to either better satisfy customers and/or to save on their own expenses; or has the restriction been imposed on the hotels by government force?
5) How does Pogue distinguish technological changes designed to address the specific problems of specific businesses and their specific customers from technological changes designed to solve so-called "whole-world problems"? Do the latter refer to all those solutions which are imposed by government force and/or advocated with an air of a social engineer's sanctimony? If you buy food from a supermarket or patronize a restaurant because you're hungry, is your intention to satisfy your own hunger for your own sake, or are you thereby most importantly addressing a "whole-world problem"? Is the function of industrial civilization in making human survival possible and easier via sundry waste-producing conveniences a "whole-world" solution, or just a solution that every convenience-loving human being on the planet is happy to have?
