Saving energy through guilt

There are many ideas about how to save energy. Michael Webber and Amanda Cuéllar, both from the University of Texas, have a novel suggestion: stop wasting food.

According to the researchers, the U.S. wastes about 27% of all food items every year. That means almost a third of the energy needed to grow, harvest, and transport food is thrown away with our uneaten green beans. All told, we’re throwing away about 2% of our total energy bill this way. That's the equivalent of 350 million barrels of oil per year.

Not wasting food wouldn’t get us off foreign oil, but it would be a fairly painless way to get back that 2%.