Patio Haters

From London to Cape Town and from Washington DC to Lisbon, I've dined al fresco in slightly nippy weather thanks to the wonderful invention that is the patio heater.

Members of the European Parliament, a body that is always at the ready to squeeze the pleasure out of the lives of its 350 million constituents, want to ban the devices in an attempt to maim two birds with one stone: global warming, and smoking.

[Patio heaters] give a vital boost to trade at pubs, cafes and restaurants by enabling customers to sit outside in cool weather. They have become particularly important to pubs since the smoking ban prevented customers smoking inside pubs. Industry experts say a ban on outdoor heaters could cost the pub and catering trade £250 million a year in lost business.

Euro MPs are today due to vote on a resolution calling on the European Commission to set a timetable for abolishing goods with low energy-efficiency ratings, with outdoor patio heaters specifically mentioned.

A United Nations climate-change scientist called bullshit on the supposed environmental impact of patio heaters, however, pointing out that

It would take an equivalent of more than five patio heaters to produce as much CO2 as one TV on stand-by mode does in a year.

Well, Europe's political classes could go after families with more than one TV next, I suppose. Or after citizens who use their outdoor grill in excess of once a month. Or they could ban night-time sports matches, which require blazing lights. And hey, those eternal flames on the tombs of various Unknown Soldier-monuments all over Europe are pretty wasteful too, you know. There ought to be extensive rules and laws for all of that, don't you think?

Just to show that I'm not averse to helping the environment, I can think of one exercise in shameful profligacy that'd be easy to eliminate with just a little political will. It's the European Parliament's own wholly unnecessary monthly schlep between Brussels and Strasbourg, which, in terms of carbon-dioxide production, is the annual equivalent of 150,000 transatlantic flights.

Comments

[benpal]

It seems that you expect politicians in the EU Parliament to engage in logical thinking. In fact they do. But they are not accountable to the "people", they are accountable to those who provide them with their job: their respective political parties.
The European Parliament is not a democratic institution.

[Kevin]

It is entirely unfortunate pseudo-government agencies promoting Global rule, have chosen to govern themselves in the national socialist mold. They started out with much more noble intentions [or so we are told]. The practice of managing diseases, can not avoid the reality you have to micro-manage the personal lives of individuals and promote segregation, hatred and bigotry to make it effective.

Paternalism produces abusive parents. Bans can only serve to separate us and disease management can not possibly accept or even seek a cure.

Think about smoking bans and fat pandemia or even SARS or AIDS. How much extremely expensive media pro-[motion/paganda] has been expended [Who is paying for this stuff?]in controlling peoples lives by promoting the high drama of fear and hatred, as opposed to finding cures and compromises which could eliminate the fear mongers largest complaints.

I don't need to be protected and in the real world parents do an excellent job of protecting their children on their own. I don't believe industry paid lobby groups would make good parents. But hey thats just me...

The kind of protections offered by Hitler and his neo-Nannies we could all do well without.

[Russ]

I have a feeling this isn't going to pass, based purely on an anecdote. My sister went to Sweden for work last year, she said she was surprised to see so many people eating at outdoor cafes with temperatures in the upper 40's, but everyone had blankets over their shoulders and heaters placed nearby; summer is far too short in Sweden so people stay outside until the weather gets really bad. And my sister won't go anywhere near cigrette smoke, so I'm fairly certain these setups had nthing to do with accomodating smokers.

[David]

> It would take an equivalent of more than
> five patio heaters to produce as much CO2 as > one TV on stand-by mode does in a year.

I simply do not believe this and would like the see the exact details of the calculation. Patio heaters -- large resistors -- clearly suck up lots of electricity. TVs on standby clearly do not.

I want proof.

[Jerry]

He was probably talking about the ones that are run on propane, plus they are not on all the time. In fact, I would guess only several hours a night if necessary.

I don't think the analogy was good either, but it does ring true. This is another blast of hot air (pun intended) from idiot politicians who couldn't tell the difference of their ass or their elbow.

[delurking]

Rough numbers

Patio heater typical output: 40,000 BTU/hr which is roughly 4*10^7 Joules/hr.

Television typical standby power consumption = 1 W, which is 1 Joule/second, which is 3*10^7 Joules per year.

So, one patio heater running for an hour uses roughly the same amount of energy as a TV on standby for a year.