A Yen for cutting emissions!

I loved this little snippet that I caught on the news the other day – a real Make it and Mend it approach to cutting carbon emissions. In their vast wisdom, the Japanese have come up with a way of cutting carbon emissions without spending a Yen. 

Apparently the Japanese government is telling the people to go to bed an hour earlier and get up and hour earlier, and this will dramatically reduce their emissions. This claim is based on the fact that a staggering 20% of their energy output is consumed in the final hour before they go to bed when people potter around making their last cup of tea, brushing their teeth and catching that final TV programme.

This sounds like a brilliantly simple solution, however surely there is a basic flaw in this thinking? Surely somebody must have thought about the possibility that by moving your bedtime forward will just bring that 20% surge forward by an hour – people are still going to be making cups of tea, and still brushing their teeth etc.

Unless they have an extra hour asleep, this just isn’t going to work…or am I missing something here? 

Hilary