It seems necessary to point out that given this input is invited by the City of Vancouver and by extension Province of B. C., (hopefully Mayor can speak to the Premier about his experiences on sustainability) we must limit our suggestions in which City and Province can have some control through legislative or executive (planning) functions or operation. In the context of smart appliances it does not appear that City of Province can do anything. It is entirely a consumer choice matter. Role of consumers in sustainability is huge and possibly 80% while legislators are only responsible for 20% therefore it is necessary to self regulate our consumption more than begging the Province or City to regulate that for us.

Smart appliances can only reduce energy consumption by 20-30% while getting rid of the appliance would cut it 100% which makes a lot more sense. There were days when all clothes were laundered by hand and it gave people a good workout too. A superb consideration isn’t it. We are in a time crunch here folks to deal with the climate as well as biodiversity devastation concurrently. We cannot afford to settle for modest tweaking of 10% here 20% there. We have to go for bigger chunks of cut backs. We Vancouverites have an personal ecological footprint (PEF) that is 4-5 the permitted level making tiny nibbles of cut backs here and there is not going to bring us down to one PEF unit because if we don’t do that we are violating human rights of those whose PEFs are a fraction of a unit PEF.

Once again, I completely agree.
So far, smarter appliances have only lead to more and more used appliances (or vehicles, or building upgrades, etc.), which in turn leads to FAR more waste and, counter-intuitively, more energy consumed.

Truly smart appliances would be thouse that run on human horsepower. It is bit troubling that no one has yet tried to harness electricity from the power lifters weights. That energy would be lot more than that harvested from the stationary bikes. Something to look into. Power lifts are really huge source of energy that is not being harvested yet.

How about smart people first before we spend money on smart appliances. They are smart enough already. What we really need is smarter people. What we have to hope is that human stupidity peaks before the GHG will ever peak. Read about Peak Stupidity here http://vsrbc.web.officelive.com/PS.aspx