♫ Everything you know is wrong ♫
♫ Black is white, up is down and short is long ♫
♫ And everything you thought was just so ♫
♫ Important doesn’t matter ♫

—”Everything you know is wrong,” Weird Al Yankovic

Presumably Mr. Yankovic was just having his usual way with words and catchy tunes, but somewhat surprisingly the refrain from this song also reflects the public’s continuing misunderstandings about energy conservation.

New Scientist had a recent summary of a new journal article Public perceptions of energy consumption and savings. It uncovers some mismatches between what people consider to be significant means of conserving energy, and practices that actually do. The New Scientist article is a nice summary, but it glosses over a lot of detail, and if you have any objections to the findings or want more detail it is worth checking the paper itself, which is freely available, before dismissing it outright.

An older article from Science Blog discusses common misconceptions in general, but opens with a discussion of energy used to heat homes.