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Roseland, Mark. Toward Sustainable Communities. Canada: 1998. ISBN 086571374X , Pages 1 and 2 Canadians and Americans consume more energy per capita than any other nation. Environmental impacts of our consumptive lifestyles include ozone layer depletion, acid rain, smog, potential climate change, and other forms of pollution and environmental degradation. Our addiction to energy also manifests itself in congested roads, urban sprawl, excessive heating, cooling, lighting, and ventilation expenditures in buildings, costly inefficiencies in commercial and industrial equipment, weaker local economies, and excessive taxes. Citizens and their governments hold tremendous power to change our patterns of consumption and support sustainable ways of using energy resources. Designing more energy-efficient buildings, and retrofitting existing homes, office and civic buildings saves millions of dollars in energy expenditures, and frees up money for investment in schools, hospitals, community economic development, and a more secure future. If additional supply is needed, renewable energy production, such as wind power and photovoltaic (solar) power, as well as cogeneration are more sustainable options. For heating options, technologies such as ground-source heat pumps and districts heating, are more efficient and environmentally responsible than most conventional heating systems. By encouraging energy efficiency and clean, renewable or efficient energy supply strategies, communities foster local self-reliance and economic diversification. This is not science fiction—these are “off-the-shelf” technologies and techniques that are available today. All that is required is public and political will. Energy-efficiency simply means “more bang for your buck.” It implies use of products, such as refrigerators, lightbulbs, washing machines, computers, printers, copiers, industrial motor systems, air conditioners, space heaters, and ventilation systems that deliver the same service as other units, but with a fraction of the energy or electricity demands. Energy-efficient building use strategies and technologies, such as passive solar design, light shelves, light-tubes, and high-performance windows, to reduce energy consumption by minimizing or even elimination the need for heating, cooling, ventilation systems, and day-time lighting. Predicting when oil production will stop rising is relatively straightforward once one has a good estimate of how much oil there is left to produce. We simply apply a refinement of a technique first published in 1956 by M. King Hubbert. Hubbert observed that in any large region, unrestrained extraction of a finite resource rises along a bell-shaped curve that peaks when about half the resource is gone. To demonstrate his theory, Hubbert fitted a bell curve to production statistics and projected that crude oil production in the lower 48 U.S. states would rise for 13 more years, then crest in 1969, give or take a year. He was right: production peaked in 1970 and has continued to follow Hubbert curves with only minor deviations. The flow of oil from several other regions, such as the former Soviet Union and the collection of all oil producers outside the Middle East, also follows Hubbert curves quite faithfully. The global picture is more complicated, because the Middle East members of OPEC deliberately reined back their oil exports in the 1970s, while other nations continued producing at full capacity. Our analysis reveals that a number of the largest producers, including Norway and the U.K., will reach their peaks around the turn of the millennium unless they sharply curtail production. By 2002 or so the world will rely on Middle East nations, particularly five near Persian Gulf (Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates), to fill in the gap between dwindling supply and growing demand. But once approximately 900 Gbo gave been consumed, production must soon begin to fall. Barring a global recession, it seems most likely that world production of conventional oil will peak during the first decade of the 21st century. More on peak oil: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3777413.stm If you think oil prices are high at $40 a barrel then wait till they are four times that much. How will you pay to run your car? How will you get the children to school?How will you heat your house? How much will transported food go up in price? How will we pay for plastics, metals, rubber, cheap flights, Simpson’s DVDs, 3G phones and everlasting economic growth? The basic answer is, we won’t. This is the message from the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO). The group of oil executives, geologists, investment bankers, academics and others has been warning the world of high oil prices, and the ensuing fallout, for some years now. The end of cheap oil It includes a diverse range of oil industry insiders. People like Ali Bakhtiari, head of strategic planning at Iran’s National il Company (NOIC), Dr Colin Campbell, a former executive vice president of Total-Fina, and Matthew Simmons, an energy investment banker and adviser to the controversial Bush-Cheney energy plan. They are united by one idea, that global oil production is about to peak, which in turn will signal the permanent end of cheap oil. And they warn that this is the foundation of the current rise in oil prices. Who hurts when prices explode? “Oil is far too cheap at the moment,” says Mr Simmons. “The figure I’d use is around $182 a barrel. We need to price oil realistically to control its demand. That is because global production is peaking.” Large new oil fields are ever more difficult to find “In my opinion, unfortunately, there will be no linear change,” says Iran’s Ali Bakhtiari. “There will only be sudden explosive change.” “The people who will be least affected will be the super poor, who already have no access to energy, and the super rich who do not care if oil is $100 a barrel.” “It is everyone who is in the middle who will be hurt the most,” says Mr Bakhtiari. “When the crisis comes there will be enormous changes.” Oil rationing? Dr Campbell says endless growth is not possible Much of ASPO’s predictions stem from the calculations of Dr Campbell. His work on oil reserves has long suggested that many official oil data are either flawed estimates or at worst downright lies. Scandals like the 23% of ‘lost’ reserves at Royal Dutch Shell have helped to boost interest in his work. False reserves threaten the security of energy supply, just as do bombs under pipelines. Dr Campbell’s conclusion: oil production and consumption should be regulated by governments. “Many reserve figures are highly questionable,” says Dr Campbell. “Many great oil fields are increasingly old and inefficient. But I don’t think oil is easy to produce with a sniper behind every palm tree.” “The way to increase energy security is to reduce demand,” he says. ‘Difficult times’ At ASPO’s recent conference in Berlin, companies such as BP and Exxon and men such as Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency, began to talk to the proponents of the peak oil theory. Whilst they may not agree with Dr Campbell’s theories, their attendance highlighted ASPO’s emerging importance in the oil debate. In public, Mr Birol denied that supply would not be able to meet rising demand, especially from the buoyant economies in the USA, China and India. But after his speech he seemed to change his tune. He pinned his hopes for an increase in production squarely on troubled Saudi Arabia. “If Saudi does not increase supply by 3 million barrels a day by the end of the year we will face, how can I say this, it will be very difficult. We will have difficult times. They must invest.” Can Saudi deliver? But even Mr Birol admitted that Saudi production was “about flat”. Three million extra barrels a day would mean a huge 30% leap in output in just a few months. North Sea oil production is in decline When BBC News Online followed up by asking if this giant increase in production was actually possible rather than simply a desire he refused to answer. “You are from the press? This is not for you. This is not for the press.” Asking other delegates - admittedly supporters of the peak oil theory - whether such a steep increase was feasible, the answers were unambiguous: “absolutely out of the question,” “completely impossible,” and “3 million barrels - never, not even 300,000.” One delegate laughed so hard he had to support himself on a table. Some recent figures tend to back up ASPO’s outlook. North Sea production is declining at an increasing rate, having peaked in 1999. Not at the predicted flat rate of decline of 7%, but gradually accelerating from 7% to 8.5% to 11%. And the number of major new oil fields discovered around the world fell to zero for the first time in 2003, despite an obvious increase in technological expertise. “We need transparency with the figures,” says Dr Campbell. “This avoids profiteering from shortages, the collapse of poor countries and it will stimulate alternatives.” “Consumer countries need to be able to audit fields, but at the same time ‘flat earth’ economists who believe in endless growth need to change their ideas.” And Dr Campbell has a dire warning: “If the real figures were to come out there would be panic on the stock markets, in the end that would suit no one.”
“Paying the Pumper” By J. Robinson West Friday, July 23, 2004; Page A29 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/> The world will not run out of oil soon, but there’s still good reason for alarm. What the world is running short of is production capacity. There’s plenty of oil—we just can’t get it out of the ground. It’s important to understand some history to appreciate the problem. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing through the energy crisis of the ‘80s, the oil industry was restructured. The Western international oil companies, which had controlled reserves and production just about everywhere except the Soviet Union and Mexico, had many of their largest assets nationalized by governments in such countries as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Iraq and Venezuela. These governments organized national oil companies to manage their resources. National companies are government agencies accountable to their governments first and the international markets second. In response, competition among the international firms became intense as they focused on exploration in places where they were still permitted to invest: the United States, Canada, the North Sea and Australia. These companies diversified global oil production to the extent they could. With the development of sophisticated technology, they moved into deep-water production, notably in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of West Africa. Whenever a new petroleum province opened for investment, they tried to enter—in Yemen, Colombia, the Caspian Sea and Russia. The technical and political risks were immense, and some large investments failed. The indigenous oil industries in these countries, usually national companies, resist international foreign investment. They don’t want the competition, nor do they wish to share the economic rent from the oil. When oil prices were low, and governments needed money, as in the 1990s, some foreign investment was permitted in certain countries, often over the objection of the national company. Substantial production growth resulted. Oil prices are now high, and most of the national oil companies are capable of meeting the financial requirements of their governments without foreign investment or interference. The world economy is confronted with a situation in which there are large reserves—more than in 1985 -- but in places where it is hard to tap them. The international oil industry is the only business in the world in which global capital cannot invest in the lowest-cost, most efficient production. National oil companies provide about 60 percent of the world’s production but control 87 percent of the reserves, and their share will rise. Many commentators point out that a rising share of our oil will come from fewer countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Should these countries continue to maintain their production, or even increase it, as we expect, there will remain the fundamental problem of increasing production capacity sufficiently to meet growing world demand. For example, sustained Saudi production is likely to grow by no more than 3 million barrels per day over the next 10 years, but worldwide demand, driven by the United States and China, is expected to grow by 15 million barrels per day. The capabilities of the national oil companies vary widely. Some are as competent as the international firms, with excellent management and efficient operations. Others are deeply corrupt and lack the capital and skills to meet the sophisticated requirements of portfolio and reservoir management. Furthermore, exploration for new reserves can involve massive risks, which most governments are unwilling to underwrite, whereas the internationals, with huge balance sheets and diversified portfolios, are quite comfortable with these risks. The thesis of the Hubbert curve is correct, but the conclusion that a fall in global oil production has inevitably begun is not. The Hubbert curve analysis applies where full commercial exploitation has taken place, but in many areas, other factors, including politics and policy, weigh in. It is true that production in most of the United States, Canada and the North Sea is in decline—there, exploration and production have been exhaustive. But the most oil-rich areas, notably Mexico, Venezuela, Russia and the Middle East, have not been fully explored. National oil companies may open up for investment if there are enough political and economic incentives. Production may also increase if there are changes in technology. This has happened many times before, most recently with the development of deep-water technology in the 1980s and ‘90s. One approach includes enhanced oil recovery from existing fields, where more than 60 percent of the oil often remains in place. Another breakthrough may come in efficient production from extra-heavy oil and tar sands, which is now very costly and capital-intensive. There are greater reserves of extra-heavy oil in Venezuela and Canada than in Saudi Arabia. Likewise, the industry has been seeking commercial breakthroughs in gas-to-liquids technology, converting natural gas reserves into ultra-clean diesel fuel. Supply will increase if costs remain high long enough to justify the huge investments necessary. But oil markets have been cyclical for more than 120 years, and too much investment in capacity, as in the 1970s and ‘80s, inevitably leads to price crashes, followed by further commercial and political uncertainty. Virtually every thoughtful policymaker knows that there is a serious problem in energy, but they are afraid to act. The U.S. government can do little to increase oil supply, but steps can be taken to reduce demand. Getting between Americans and their cars is the third rail of American politics. But if the American people refuse to accept some modest discomfort now, they will almost certainly be dealing with higher prices and serious economic disruption later. The obvious solution is for politicians to gather their courage and tackle demand. The writer, a former assistant secretary of the interior, is chairman of PFC Energy, strategic advisers on international oil and gas. Peering into oil’s future The world began running out of oil soon after the birth of modern drilling during the 1850s. The question since then has always been: When will the spigot start drying up? Mounting evidence suggests that an important turning point may be close. According to several studies, oil production is expected to begin a permanent decline within a few years, prompting social and economic upheaval across the globe. Whom can you believe? It all depends on how accurate researchers are in calculating such complex variables as future oil consumption, production and discovery. “One has to be very skeptical about any prediction,” said David Goodstein, author of the recently published book “Out of Gas: The End of Oil,” and a physics professor at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The numbers that some researchers are relying on “are extremely undependable” and are being put forth “by companies and countries that have strong interest in tilting them one way or another,” Goodstein said. Worries over falling crude production inevitably arise when fuel prices spike, as they have recently. Oil futures, at $38.08 per barrel, are near a 13- year high, while the average price of a gallon of unleaded gasoline in California hit a record $2.18 earlier this month. Historically, researchers have been woefully inept at predicting a permanent decline in global oil production. They have made dire forecasts since at least the 1920s, only to eat crow as pumping increased. What researchers are trying to determine is when oil production will begin to taper off as a natural consequence of dwindling reserves. At some point, there just won’t be enough oil left to keep pumping increasing amounts from underground, analysts agree. As it is, global oil production has grown most years since the turn of the last century. The world produced nearly 67 million barrels of oil a day in 2002, up 11 percent from a decade earlier, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The added crude has fueled economies across the globe, including the United States, and enabled millions of new drivers to take to the road. Without the new supplies, oil and gasoline would undoubtedly cost a lot more. But the era of abundance is in peril, judging from an important industry yardstick. More oil is being produced each year than discovered. It’s similar to when you spend more money than you bring in. Unless the pattern changes, your bank account will eventually run dry. The trend started in 1986, according to IHS Energy, an energy research firm based in Houston. The only exception since then was 1991, when a big field in the Persian Gulf, off the coast of Iran, was discovered. “There are discoveries being made all the time, but they are smaller and smaller,” said Jim Meyer, director of the Oil Depletion Analysis Center, a London organization that disseminates information about the threat of dwindling supplies. “The big fields have all been found, or at least they’re few and far between.” If big reserves are to be found anywhere, they will likely be in the former Soviet Union and in the polar regions, according to analysts.Libya, Iran and Iraq, all of which have been largely unexplored in recent years, are also possibilities. The ebb and flow of oil production is known as the “Hubbert’s Peak,” after M. King Hubbert, a Shell geologist. He gained fame for correctly predicting in 1956 that U.S. production would peak in the early 1970s and then decline. Hubbert’s theory is that oil production, when plotted on a chart, is a bell curve. Production rises quickly as big, cheap-to-operate fields open. It flattens out as those fields become depleted. New, smaller, more costly fields can’t offset the loss, leading to the curve’s inevitable decline. Differing dates Today’s generation of oil researchers is applying Hubbert’s principles to global production. They agree that pumping will eventually peak worldwide, but they differ widely on exactly when. Colin Campbell, a retired geologist in Ireland who has worked throughout the oil industry, including Texaco, BP and Amoco, says the peak will come before 2010. It may be already happening, he said, given that global oil production has declined slightly since 2000. Some researchers say the drop is a temporary and deliberate response by oil producers to cut back because of the bad economy and lower demand. Campbell, however, believes that virtually all nations are pumping at full capacity. “I think we may live to see that 2000 may have been the peak,” Campbell said. “We’re hitting capacity again now—oil prices are surging. It’s reasonable to think that by 2010, you will have a volatile period of recession, oil spikes and price shocks.” The U.S. Energy Information Administration paints a different picture. The agency, part of the Department of Energy, pegged the peak at anywhere between 2021 and 2112. The wide time frame takes into account 12 scenarios. Different assumptions about production growth and reserve size produce different peaks. The earliest peak, in 2021, is achieved with 3 percent annual growth in crude production and relatively low reserves. The latest peak, in 2112, assumes no production growth and big reserves. Pete Stark, vice president of industry relations for IHS Energy, agrees with the Energy Information Administration that there is no immediate crisis. Production won’t crest until at least 2020, and probably much later, he said. “We don’t see it as much of a peak, but more of a plateau,” Stark said. “It’s not a calamitous situation. It’s one we have time to adjust to.” The oil industry operates under the assumption that peak oil production is decades away, if not more. John Felmy, an economist with the American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group, characterized more imminent forecasts as “Chicken Little predictions.” Part of the reason researchers are so divided is that there is no standard formula to determine oil reserves. Instead, they rely on a range of estimates of how much oil is available to pump. For example, the U.S. Geological Survey says that there are up to 3.9 trillion barrels. Campbell estimates reserves at about half that amount. The biggest known onshore and offshore reserves are in Saudi Arabia, followed by Canada and Iraq, according to the Oil & Gas Journal. Unreliable numbers Reserve figures provided by oil companies are often unreliable, according to some analysts. To meet Wall Street expectations, the companies sometimes understate or overstate the totals, the analyst said. In the past couple of weeks, for example, Royal/Dutch Shell has lowered the numbers for its proven reserves twice, for a total of more than 20 percent, forcing the resignation of the firm’s chairman. Company executives had designated some oil and natural gas as likely to be pumped when in fact drilling was questionable. Securities and Exchange Commission rules require companies to include only oil that is “likely recoverable” in their proven reserves. However, the rules apply only to firms that trade publicly in the United States. Getting clarity on reserves is further clouded by figures provided by oil- producing countries with nationalized industries, according to analysts. Some countries, especially members of OPEC, have raised reserve estimates significantly without explanation or have reported the same reserves several years in a row, apparently failing to deduct ongoing drilling. “It’s a minefield,” said Meyer, from the Oil Depletion Analysis Center. Researchers generally factor additional oil from future discoveries into their calculations. But potential improvements in technology, such as the ability to drill deeper from offshore platforms and the extra oil it may produce, are not usually considered. Analysts readily admit that future developments in the oil industry might require them to adjust their forecasts. Indeed, the peak in production may be further off than they currently believe, they concede. However, pushing the date more than a few years into the future would require the discovery of vast quantities of oil, according to Meyer. Only finding the equivalent of a Saudi Arabia or two would make a significant difference, he said. “Even if these near-term forecasts are off by a decade, this should still be of public concern,” Meyer said. Some elected officials, including President Bush, have advocated opening parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for drilling to help make the United States less dependent on imports and to help lower oil prices. An Energy Information Administration report released last week said up to 876, 000 barrels of crude a day could be produced in the refuge by 2025. On a global scale, the amount would comprise less than 1 percent of all production expected in that year. The added drilling, if it ever happens, would do little to offset a decline in world oil production, according to analysts. Some of the analysts who foresee imminent drops in oil production advocate making greater use of alternative sources of energy, including nuclear, geothermal and biomass. They all call for conservation. “One thing we could do now is use less oil now, and that can certainly help soften the blow and put off the peak,” said Goodstein, the author and Cal Tech professor. Felmy, the industry economist, said oil companies already have initiatives to develop fuel cells, windmills and solar and hydrogen power. He was especially enthusiastic about the potential for frozen methane, which he described as abundant in permafrost and underwater. Stark, from IHS Energy, was sanguine about doomsday scenarios. Even in the improbable event that no new oil is discovered, he said, the world can continue consuming existing reserves at the current pace for another 106 years. Table (1) Oil production and reserves Some researchers are predicting that oil production will begin to decline within a few years. The following charts show current production and known reserves. Top world oil producers, 2002 -- In millions of barrels per day United States - 9.08 Table (2):. Countries with the biggest oil reserves, 2003 In billions of barrels Saudi Arabia - 261.8 IS OIL PRODUCTION ABOUT TO DECLINE? Oil production has mostly increased to satisfy the world?s growing appetite for crude. If predictions are correct, production may soon begin to decline, sending the line on this chart downward permanently. Table (3) World crude oil production, 1960-2002: The resulting estimate gives a peak production year of 2003 and a total eventual oil recovery of 2.12 trillion barrels. The peak year, 2003, is the same year that we got by fitting Campbell’s 1.8-trillion-barrel estimate to the production history. Other published estimates, using variations on Hubbert’s methods, give peak years from 2004 to 2009. I honestly do not have an opinion as to the exact date for two reasons: (1) the revisions of OPEC reserves may or may not reflect reality; (2) OPEC production capacities are closely guarded secrets. If your country has surplus production capacity you are A Player in the global oil game. If your wells are currently producing to capacity, you are merely a spectator. Energy efficiency means providing the same or better energy services using less energy; indeed, the latest efficient technology typically provides more pleasing light, more reliable production, and greater comfort and control. In contrast, energy conservation achieves lower energy use by giving up some quality of service. Energy conservation is turning down the thermostat and donning a sweater. Energy efficiency is insulating a building or using new high-performance windows. The inescapable implications of these findings are first, that many efforts toward energy efficiency actually constitute a kind of shell game in which direct fuel uses are replaced by indirect ones, usually in the forms of labor and capital, which exact energy costs elsewhere; and second, that the principal factor that enabled industrial countries to increase their energy efficiency in the past few decades - the switch to energy sources of higher net yield - does not constitute a strategy that can be applied indefinitely in the future. Thus the curtailment of energy usage offers clearer benefits than improved efficiency. … Given that, from a historical and cross-cultural perspective, Americans' average standard of living is lavish, it would seem that some curtailment of consumption may not be such a bad thing. After all, people currently have to be coaxed and cajoled from cradle to grave by expensive advertising to consume as much as they do. If the message of this incessant propaganda stream were simply reversed, people could probably be persuaded to happily make do with less. Many social scientists claim that our consumptive lifestyle damages communities, families, and individual self-esteem; a national or global ethic of conservation could thus be socially therapeutic. As innovation has brought ever-cheaper computing power and new ways to make use of it, capital has become increasingly cheap relative to labor. The returns on investment in new labor-saving, high-tech equipment have soared. Given that labor accounts for about two-thirds of the cost of making and selling products, greater labor productivity in today's global economy is tantamount to corporate survival.. As a result, productivity is growing even faster now than in the late 1990s. And it's a real job killer this time: A one-percentage-point increase in annual productivity growth costs about 1.3 million jobs. Up to now, the pressures have been most evident in the manufacturing sector, at both old-line factories and New Economy giants. Increased foreign competition has forced the Big Three to design and engineer new cars on the cheap. General Motors Corp. used to make midsize cars for different global markets using several platforms. Now, the auto maker builds four different midsize cars on one platform designed in Germany. So GM doesn't need to hire more designers and engineers in the U.S.; instead, it has slashed salaried U.S. staff in each of the past three years by 10%, to 40,000 currently. Meanwhile, tech equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. is also boosting its productivity, increasing Internet-related savings from $650 million in 1999 to $2.1 billion in the latest fiscal year. Cisco says that only when it hits $700,000 in sales per employee-it reached $632,000 per worker in its most recent quarter-will it consider widespread hiring. Now, a broad range of services industries, and even small businesses, are striving to make similar gains in efficiency. That is especially true in retailing, which employs nearly 12% of all U.S. workers. Retailers from department stores to gas stations to restaurants are now able to move a 35% greater volume of goods and services out the door per worker than they did five years ago, meaning far fewer workers are needed. To take just one example, Home Depot Inc. has self-checkout counters in almost half of its 1,707 U.S. stores, allowing it to move as many as 1,000 cashiers to the sales floor. The shift helped drive sales per labor hour up 4% last year alone. Another big factor: the explosion in goods moved through e-tail sites, which have done away with salespeople, restockers, cashiers, and other posts required in traditional retailing. It’s not only that companies are getting efficiencies from the equipment they have been laying in over the past year. More important, they're still squeezing productivity gains from the technology acquired during the'90s. Many continue to find new ways of integrating technology into their production and distribution processes, and of getting customers to tap into the technology to make their purchases. Southwest Airlines Co., which made major investments in new technology to upgrade its reservation system during the 1990s, is now eliminating three of its nine reservation centers as increasing numbers of fliers book their tickets online. Plus, those earlier outlays are now facilitating new investments in self-service kiosks. The result of such moves: Even as the discount carrier's fleet grew from 375 to 388 planes last year, its payroll fell from 33,705 to 32,847. Does Energy Efficiency Save Energy: The Economists Debate 1. Introduction A recent paper which gives a good, and very readable, review of this debate is by Richard Howarth (Howarth 1997). This debate has also promoted discussion among US energy analysts and the climate change community over the extent of the ‘rebound’ or ‘take-back’ effect. That is how much of the energy saving produced by an efficiency investment is taken back by consumers in the form of higher consumption. An excellent review of the literature on the rebound effect is in an as yet unpublished (Jan 1998) report by Lorna Greening and David Greene commissioned by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA. Purpose of this Paper I believe that conservationists - who I define as those seeking to improve the efficiency of energy use in the belief that it will lead to a reduction in national energy consumption - should pay attention to the views of economists, if they want to have their views adopted by the energy industries and government. For economists are far more influential on policy formulation than conservationists: after all governments and most businesses have economic advisors, but how many have an energy efficiency adviser? Economists who deal with energy issues, often termed energy economists, have their own professional organisations: the International Association for Energy Economists (IAEE) in the USA with national branches such as the British Institute of Energy Economists (BIEE). In contrast conservationists are weakly organised, they have no professional organisations, and their only forum is conferences such as the biannual ECEEE (European Council for an Energy Efficient Economy) conference in Europe or the annual ACEEE meeting in the USA. This paper is not concerned with energy efficiency at the microlevel, that is by the individual consumer or firm, but at the macrolevel, that is at the aggregate or national level. Its question is ‘does the promotion of energy efficiency (at the microlevel) reduce energy consumption (at the macrolevel)’? It presents arguments that the precise effect of energy efficiency decisions at the microeconomic level is impossible to quantify at the macroeconomic level. Furthermore the effects may be in the unsought direction and that this has been known (to economists) for a very long time. This paper’s context is the desire to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with the policy of improving energy efficiency being put forward as a means to reduce national energy consumption. The paper concludes by drawing on recent work by ecological economists, such as Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, who have written on investing in natural capital. They and others have suggested ways in which energy efficiency combined with market instruments can help achieve ‘sustainable development’. Hopefully readers will not interpret this paper as an attack on energy efficiency or those institutions struggling to promote it. High levels of energy efficiency are an essential part of a dynamic productive economy. Low economic productivity and energy inefficiency go hand-in-hand as the former Soviet Union demonstrates. Len Brookes, the leading UK author in this debate, comments (1998): “It is inconceivable that we should have had the high levels of economic output triggered by the industrial revolution if energy conversion had stayed where it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Energy productivity and the productivity of other factors of production fed on one another with rising energy efficiency contributing to rising productivity of other factors of production - labour and capital - and rising output contributing to rising energy efficiency by way of embodied technical progress. Without this interactive process we should not have had, in the meantime, the very large increases in energy consumption alongside large improvement in energy conversion efficiency...” This point about energy growth during the Industrial Revolution is also made by Inhaber and Saunders (1994) in the US journal The Sciences. 2. The Energy Efficiency Debate From Jevons to Saunders Jevons argued that ‘it is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth’. He points out that ‘the reduction of the consumption of coal, per ton of iron, to less than one third of its former amount, was followed, in Scotland, by a ten fold increase in total consumption, between the years 1830 and 1863, not to speak of the indirect effect of cheap iron in accelerating other coal-consuming branches of industry’. The papers by Brookes and Khazzoom applied broad brush economic principles in an attempt to make judgements about long run macroeconomic effects. Saunders’ papers take a more mathematical approach and argue that the KB postulate is consistent with neo-classical growth theory over a wide range of assumptions. For a full understanding some knowledge of economics is required and there is no real alternative to studying the papers themselves. However the following analogies illustrate the consequences of improved efficiency on demand from the labour markets and aircraft travel. Employees are told that they must raise their productivity if they are to improve their job prospects. On the local microlevel this seems absurd, as many shop stewards (and the Luddites) once argued. However on the macrolevel the increased economic output, resulting from higher labour productivity, has lead (in the long term) to a growth in the number of employees. The introduction of wide bodied passenger aircraft, to replace smaller aircraft, was forecast to reduce the number of flights. In fact the resulting lower cost per passenger led, in a competitive market, to a large increase in air travel that more than offset the increased size of the aircraft. The raised productivity per aircraft called for more aircraft, not fewer (Spare 1990). The Khazzoom-Brookes postulate It warns that although it is possible to reduce energy consumption through improved energy efficiency it would be at the expense of loss of economic output. It thus argues that overzealous pursuit of energy efficiency per se would damage the economy through misallocation of resources. In other words reduced energy consumption is possible but at an economic cost. The effect of higher energy prices, either through taxes or producer-induced shortages, initially reduces demand but in the longer term encourages greater energy efficiency. This efficiency response amounts to a partial accommodation of the price rise and thus the reduction in demand is blunted. The end result is a new balance between supply and demand at a higher level of supply and consumption than if there had been no efficiency response. Under the economic conditions that have prevailed in the UK most of this century, of falling fuel prices and a free market approach, energy consumption has increased at the same time as energy efficiency has improved. During periods of high energy prices, such as 1973-74 and 1979-80, energy consumption fell. Whether this is due to the adverse consequences of higher fuel prices on economic activity, structural changes or energy efficiency improvements was a matter of some dispute. The lower level of energy consumption at times of high energy price may be at the expense of reduced economic output. This in turn is due to the adverse effect on economic productivity as a whole of the high price of an important resource. Richard Howarth comments (1997): Conservationist Disagree Howarth in his review of this debate (Howarth 1997) writes that Brookes has put forward this hypothesis as a general claim without accompanying caveats, and that it does not hold under most conditions. Similarly he disagrees with the conclusions of Saunders’ (1992) analysis, saying that Saunders does not consider the distinction between energy use and energy services.... The conclusion of Howarth’s analysis is that ...the macroeconomic feedbacks of energy efficiency may be less substantial than Saunders’ initial study suggests... The link between energy efficiency and economic activity lies at the heart of this debate. As Schipper and Grubb (1998) remark: There has been a long running debate over these issues between energy economists and energy efficiency supporters for the last 20 years. It was in a review of Leach’s pioneering work, A Low Energy Strategy for the UK, that Brookes (1979) first criticised the bottom up approach to estimating national energy savings because of its failure to consider macroeconomic factors. The debate over low energy futures continued into the 1980s, with influential contributions from John Chesshire (1986), Bill Keepin & George Kats (1988), and again Gerald Leach (1991). This conservationist argument that improved energy efficiency will reduce national energy consumption in the future to less than what it would have been (even though there may still be an increase in consumption) is impossible to either prove or disprove, as there is only one future. The debate grew more intense in the 1990s, spurred by global warming concerns. It was conducted most in the pages of Energy Policy and Energy Journal, with contributions from economists Manne & Richels (1990, 1995), Maddison (1995) and Nordhaus (1995). The debate is inconclusive because of the language gulf between economists and conservationists, although there have been attempts to seek common ground (Sioshansi 1991, 1996). However attempts by conservationists, often physicists or engineers, to justify their programmes on economic grounds, such as market failure, have lead to their defeat at the hands of economists, who obviously have superior economic knowledge. Most economists have not bothered entering this debate, but some top ranking energy economists have dropped remarks that reveal their thinking and convictions on this issue. These include Richard Gordon, Professor of Mineral Economics and Director of the Centre for Energy and Mineral Policy Research, Pennsylvania State University, Nathan Rosenburg, Professor of Public Policy, Department of Economics, Stanford University and Robert Solow, a Nobel Laureate famous for his seminal work on growth theory. While Gordon may be labelled a ‘contrarian’ in believing that economic forces and man’s ingenuity will always solve any resource shortages, Solow has issued dire warnings against running out of key resources like energy. Richard Gordon, Winner of the 1992 IAEE prize for outstanding contribution to the profession of energy economics said in a review of measures to deal with global warming (Gordon 1994, p11): In rejecting Grubb, Gordon makes it abundantly clear that he rejects Grubb’s microeconomic approach to energy efficiency as having anything to offer to understanding of the problem at the macroeconomic level. A more considered view comes from a review by Hilliard Huntington (1992) of Grubb’s book Energy Policies and the Greenhouse Effect. He singles out Grubb’s economic assumption about saturation rates, which results in forecasts of low levels of energy demand. Huntington writes: While saturation of individual appliances can be expected, rapid economy-wide saturation need not occur as new energy services and energy-using appliances are constantly emerging. The volume offers no evidence, historical or otherwise, for its assumptions about saturation rate. In the USA energy efficiency advocates have lobbied for electric utilities to invest in energy efficiency - or negawatts - as a means to reduce consumption and lower consumer costs (Hirst 1992, Lovins 1996). A review of these utility programs, entitled What Does a Negawatt Really Cost? by Paul Joskow and Donald Marron (1992) notes that many economists have expressed considerable scepticism regarding the more optimistic estimates of the magnitude of the net savings in both electricity and total societal resources that can be achieved by these programs. A special issue of Energy Policy, in April 1996, was devoted to reviewing the success or failure of utility energy conservation programs. It concentrated on whether utility programs can correct the claimed ‘market failures’ existing for energy efficiency measures. Ronald Sutherland (1996) concluded these programs had failed due to a misconception about the existence of ‘market failures’. He stated that conservation programmes do not reduce market failures but instead may exacerbate inefficiency by increasing market or regulatory failure. In the UK this debate surfaced at the British Institute of Energy Economists’ Conference at Warwick in December 1995. At the session on energy efficiency Eric Price, a former economist with the Department of Energy, disputed all the arguments put forward to justify Government intervention. He concluded (Price 1995) that arguments based on imperfect market structures, imperfect knowledge, and learning curve advantages of encouraging innovative energy efficiency products are no more valid in the energy sector than elsewhere. Ecological Economic Two environmental economists, Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees in their wide acclaimed book Our Ecological Footprint, and in a journal article explicitly make the point that ‘technological efficiency may actually lead to increased net consumption of resources’ (1997). Both in their book, in Box 4.1 entitled Will Efficiency Gains Save Resources?, and in their 1997 paper they extensively quote Jevons, and cite the work mentioned earlier by Saunders (1992). Interestingly they also note that in contrast to the now current official consensus of “the gospel of global efficiency” (Sachs 1988), some leading environmental writers such The Limits to Growth team (Meadows et al 1972 and its follow up (Meadows et al 1992) and Lester Brown have recognised the limitations of increasing efficiency on resource use. Lester Brown and his colleagues (1991), all well known US environmental authors, using the example of rising US gasoline consumption despite increased auto efficiency, state that ‘continuing growth in material consumption...will eventually overwhelm gains from efficiency causing total resource use...to rise.’ As Wackernagel and Rees conclude: Environmental history Empirical Evidence Howarth stresses the importance of analysing historical data, and to thus determine long-term trends in energy efficiency and economic activity (Howarth 1997). He writes: Historical data from the Unites States for the period 1929-1970 shed interesting light on this question. During these years, energy prices were falling gradually through time. One therefore may attribute the energy efficiency improvements that occurred during this period to technological change as opposed to price-induced substitution The main problem is in measuring energy efficiency (Herring 1996). Its two indicators, energy intensity (energy use per unit output) and the energy coefficient (the output elasticity of energy consumption), can give false signals. Schurr maintained that allying capital and labour inputs with new injections of energy into economic systems can increase the productivity of both capital and labour. This results in a fall in energy intensity due to a larger denominator in the shape of higher economic output. This can deliver a false message when in fact there have been no change in the efficiency of conversion of fuel to useful heat and work. Nevertheless it is accepted that there is a steady long term trend in efficiency improvement in the economy, due to the ‘vintage effect’. That is the tendency for new plant and appliances to be more efficient than those they replace. Thus it is limited by the rate of stock turnover and the rate of additions to stock, generally due to economic growth. Schurr’s empirical findings (1982) was that for the period 1920-1953 new technologies, often using electricity, not only raised the productivity of labour and capital but also improved energy productivity - that is reduced energy intensity. Energy efficiency improved at the same time as energy consumption rose and economic output increased. But total output grew at a faster rate than energy intensity declined, so total energy consumption increased. It was only in exceptional circumstances, such as the 1979 oil price hike, that energy productivity exceed multifactor productivity - which actually fell at that time due to economic recession. Other work examining US energy data is by Bill Hogan and Dale Jorgenson (1991). They looked at time series data on energy intensity for large number of sectors and found that there is a trend of increasing energy intensity, once price effects are carefully taken out. Schurr (1985) also found that energy efficiency increased more rapidly at times of low energy prices, and Brookes (1993) said this was because technological progress of all types is likely to flourish when the availability of an important resource like energy is high enough (and price is thus low) to stimulate economic growth. Howarth, however is sceptical. Commenting on the US data for 1929-1970 he writes (1997): Biophysical economics Kaufman warns that “...the link between economic activity and energy use is stronger than believed by most neoclassical economists, and attempts to reduce the environmental impacts of energy production and consumption will be more expensive than is commonly assumed”. Energy Analysts Lovins (1988) has maintained that the ‘rebound’ or ‘takeback’ effect by consumers, of energy efficiency gains is minimal, whereas Khazzoom (1987, 1989) argues his analysis is completely mistaken, as it does not take into account macroeconomic responses to implicit changes in energy price caused by efficiency improvements. Lee Schipper and his colleagues have conducted a major study on the energy intensities and the development of energy indicators for OECD countries, which was published in a special issue of Energy Policy. He states that much of the change in each energy intensity is related to changes in efficiency, once structural effects are eliminated (Schipper & Haas 1997). While acknowledging that energy intensities have significantly declined since 1970 he concludes that ‘...current emissions targets, expressed as a return to the 1990 level of emissions for most countries, will be hard to meet unless the rate of intensity decline approaches that of the early 1980s, which is unlikely’ (Schipper et al 1997, p671). His colleague William Golove and he, conclude that this is because changes in the levels of economic activities have tended, all other factors being equal, to increase emissions, whereas declines in energy intensity and shifts in fuel mix have tended to restrain emissions (Golove & Schipper 1997, p803). The role of the ‘rebound effect’ is acknowledged by two energy analysts, Lorna Greening and David Greene (1998), colleagues of Lee Schipper. They state in the abstract of as yet unpublished paper: 3. British Policy Debate When global warming became a political issue after 1988, economists like David Pearce argued for a cost-benefit approach. He and his colleague David Barbier, called for estimates to be made of the damage caused by global warming and for it to be offset by higher fuel prices through a carbon tax and tradeable permits (Barbier & Pearce 1990). Regulatory Policies Policy makers have relied on a variety of pragmatic solutions: banning or regulating practices that have adverse external implications (e.g. smoke control policies), establishing property rights and suing where appropriate, and use of market instruments, like taxes and tradeable permits. Government Policy The UK Government has a target of a 20% reduction, below 1990 levels, in CO2 emissions by 2010 and has put forward a policy of promoting the efficiency use of energy in order to lower energy use and hence reduce CO2 emissions. However the Government has no plans to introduce energy taxation, except to increase duty of road fuels above the rate of inflation. The impact of deregulation of the domestic gas and electricity market is likely to reduce energy prices, as it has done in the deregulated industrial and commercial markets. Thus government efforts to promote energy efficiency will take place against a background of falling energy prices. Current UK policy on increasing energy efficiency is likely to be ineffective, and could possibly be counter productive as it would lead to greater energy use, and hence more emissions. 4. Can we afford cost-saving energy efficiency? In other words they propose an environmental tax, which they extend to all resource use (see below). Natural capital rehabilitation “This can only be achieved in the relatively short term through the institution of resource depletion taxes, marketable resource quotas, and other elements of ecological tax reform (including reductions in income taxes and other penalties on labour).” Robert Costanza and Herman Daly give some details of a natural capital depletion tax (1992). They believe that technological progress for sustainable development should be efficiency-increasing rather than throughput-increasing. Furthermore there should be high resource taxes, especially on non renewable energy sources, to stimulate this efficiency shift with the proceeds invested in renewable projects. As they comment such a resource tax would keep both energy efficiency enthusiasts and resource pessimists happy: “Technological optimists who believe that efficiency can increase by a factor of ten should welcome this policy which raises natural resources prices considerably and would powerfully encourage just those technological advances in which they have so much faith. Sceptics who lack that technological faith will nevertheless be happy to see the throughput limited since that is their main imperative in order to conserve resources for the future. The sceptics are protected against their worst fears; the optimists are encouraged to pursue their fondest dreams.” Costanza and Daly are under no illusions of the political feasibility of this taxation policy. They conclude that it “...represents a major shift in the way we view our relationship to natural capital and would have major social, economic, and political implications. But these implications are just the ones we need to expose and face squarely if we hope to achieve sustainability”. Some classical economists however disagree with this approach on conservation of resources. They argue that the best legacy one can bequeath to the next generation is a high level of real output per capita, and voluntarily foregoing opportunities to that end for mistaken altruistic reasons may be doing a disservice to the next generation. Anthony Scott (1973), in his book Natural Resources - the Economic of Conservation, commented: “It is ridiculous to say then that conservation is a movement that has the welfare of the future particularly in mind: conservation will not necessarily increase the future inheritance but simply change its composition from capital goods to natural goods.” The choice of whether to bequeath natural or (man-made) capital goods to future generations lies at the heart of the debate on ‘sustainability’, and ‘soft’ (light green) versus ‘hard’ (deep green) approaches to achieving it. 5. Conclusions At the microlevel, energy efficiency improvements do result in reduced energy consumption, though there is often a ‘take back’ of some of the savings, a process termed the ‘rebound effect’. For instance, when insulation levels are improved in low income households, some of the energy savings (due to the higher insulation levels) are taken back in the form of higher comfort levels. However simply aggregating identifiable savings at the microlevel - even after taking account of the rebound - fails to take into account many macroeconomic factors. For example there is the effect of new consumers previously priced out of particular energy services before they were made cheaper by higher energy efficiency. Overall, macroeconomic analysis leads to the conclusion that even if the economy is made more energy efficient the eventual outcome is for it to use more energy. A dissenting voice is that of Richard Howarth. He questions both the conceptual underpinnings and the empirical evidence for this effect. According to his model improved energy efficiency cannot give rise to increased energy use except under implausible assumptions (Howarth 1997). His model (using a Leontieff formulation rather than a Cobb-Douglas function for the energy service sector) and hence his conclusions, will no doubt will be challenged by other economists. To resolve this issue is no easy task. Howarth (1997) comments: Sorting out the empirical dimensions of the Khazzoom-Brookes hypothesis...would require detailed models that merge engineering approaches to energy efficiency, microengineering studies of the demand for energy services, and macroeconomic models of savings and investments. The construction of such models is an ambitious task... Perhaps the KB hypothesis should be analysed more as history than as economics. Richard Howarth again (1998) makes some very pertinent comments, which may pave the way for future research paths, when he remarks: ...the Khazzoom-Brookes hypothesis is most credibly grounded on the story of the steam engine, coal and the Industrial Revolution. In important respects economic history, evolutionary economics, and institutional economics shed more light on this issue than neoclassical growth theory. One can specify growth models that account for the stylised facts surrounding this development, but in a sense the event marked a type of structural change in technologies, lifestyles, and social institutions that transformed economic relationships rather than fostering smooth change in a continuous model. Economic policies A problem with environmental taxes, as a means of directly reducing environmental damage, is that they require the taxing authority to estimate the damage associated with energy use and incorporate it in the price. This is a near impossible task that leads in practice to a purely arbitrary level for the tax. Also for goods where the energy demand is inelastic, such as in domestic electrical appliances, the tax has to be continually raised to have any lasting effect. However taxes are very effective at raising revenue which can then be used to compensate for adverse effects. However most governments are reluctant to introduce such taxes, for fear of political unpopularity and damaging national competitiveness. Instead there are plans in many countries to deregulate national fuel industries and bring about more competitive markets, which are likely to result in lower energy prices, and greater energy consumption. The reluctance of governments, including our own, to introduce politically unpopular measures, such as energy or carbon taxes, to reduce national energy consumption has led them to emphasise a policy of energy efficiency. This has so far been through voluntary means - such as labelling, voluntary standards and best practice schemes - but it could include compulsory policies, such as regulation and subsidies, to alter consumer behaviour. However this paper has argued that the result of such compulsory policies could not only be an increase in energy consumption but also possibly higher economic growth (depending on the soundness of the energy efficiency measures). Brookes (1992) argued that the best response Governments can make to a situation of energy constraint, is to allow consumer freedom to respond: Schipper and Grubb (1998) think that the emphasis given to energy efficiency policies may be mistaken. They conclude: An alternative approach This could tie in with measures to combat global warming, such as investment in carbon sinks - such as forests - and in non-fossil fuel energy sources - such as renewable energy sources and nuclear power. Carbon taxes could be recycled into natural capital investments and non fossil sources. Role for energy efficiency Thus energy efficiency becomes a matter for the Department of Trade & Industry, concerned with economic growth, rather than the Department of Environment (now DETR), concerned with environmental protection. Government can also promote energy efficiency on non-economic grounds, such as social welfare, by providing measures to improve the heating comfort of the poor and the elderly. Utilities, like any other business, will invest in energy efficiency to the extent that it optimises its resources. The UK electricity industry has a long tradition of investing in its own internal energy efficiency, such that the combined efficiency of generation, transmission and distribution has increased 10 fold this century. The UK Government is also supporting, through its aid programme, modernisation of overseas utilities through efficiency investments to reduce losses. A Personal View However the blanket statement, such as adopted by many environmentalists and the UK Government, that a policy of improving national energy efficiency will lead to lower national energy consumption is too simplistic and likely to prove false. A more feasible way to cut energy consumption is through energy taxes and regulation, but these involve economic costs to society. Cost-effective improvements in energy efficiency may, however, improve our economy such that we can easier afford the shift to less carbon intensive fuels, such as gas, renewables or nuclear. Regretfully I have to end with the lame lament that ‘more research is needed’. Governments should, in the meanwhile, continue to promote energy efficiency on both economic and social welfare grounds. For high levels of energy efficiency are an essential part of a dynamic productive economy with a high ‘quality of life’. Low economic productivity and energy inefficiency go hand-in-hand with a low ‘quality of life’ as the former Soviet Union demonstrates. Encouraging efficiency, in all factors of production, will result in a higher ‘quality of life’ and enable us to fund the transition to ‘sustainable development’. REFERENCES Dan Charles “Leaping the Efficiency Gap” from Science, 14 AUGUST 2009 VOL 325, pages 804 – 811Experience has shown that there is more to saving energy than designing better light bulbs and refrigerators. Researchers say it will need a mixture of persuasion, regulation, and taxation THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO IN BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, TWO YOUNG physicists named Steven Chu and John Holdren were present at the birth of a campaign to curb Americans’ appetite for energy. They saw their colleague Arthur Rosenfeld abandon a successful career in particle physics and set up a new research division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) devoted to energy efficiency. Then- Governor Jerry Brown and state regulatory agencies adopted Rosenfeld’s ideas with astonishing speed. California canceled planned nuclear power plants, passed pathbreaking efficiency standards for refrigerators and buildings, and ordered electric utilities to spend money persuading their customers to use less power. Today, Chu, now the U.S. secretary of energy, cites Rosenfeld as a model for scientists and California as a example for the nation. He points out that per capita electricity consumption in California stayed flat for the past 30 years yet rose 40% in the rest of the United States…. Alan Sanstad, an LBNL researcher who also worked with Rosenfeld, looks at the same data and concludes that California’s efficiency offensive wasn’t nearly effective enough. He points out that California’s total energy use over the past 3 decades grew at almost the same rate as it did in the rest of the country, while the state’s population soared. Anant Sudarshan and James Sweeney of Stanford University’s Precourt Energy Efficiency The biggest challenge is not inventing new technology but persuading more people to adopt technology and practices that already exist. A new generation of researchers and government officials is now examining new strategies for energy efficiency, looking for the key—or a whole ring of keys—that will unlock its full potential. “It’s a wonderful The human dimension For the most part, energy-efficiency programs around the country have followed Rosenfeld’s line. They offer financial incentives for adopting energy-saving, cost-effective technology, and trust that consumers will follow their economic self-interest. Research has produced some intriguing insights. For instance, people believe that others waste energy because of their inner characters, but they regard their own wasteful practices as the product of circumstances. More information doesn’t usually produce energy saving behavior; experts leave the lights on, too. The concrete example of a friend or neighbor who walks her children to school is much more powerful than any impersonal exhortation to drive less. And don’t tell someone that he needs to save energy because nobody else does. “It could end up backfiring,” Armel says, because most people When people are asked to choose among options that they don’t fully understand, such as a list of investment plans, they tend to select the “default option”: the one that doesn’t Frustratingly, “green” buildings often don’t deliver what their designers promised Paying the cost Schipper’s views are shaped by his own particular specialty: transportation, including So Schipper has come around to the idea that conserving energy really does demand that Rosenfeld, the man who once provided a professional home to many of these efficiency researchers, quietly agrees with Schipper. “Of course we need an energy tax,” he says simply. The “father of energy efficiency” is modest in physical stature and demeanor….
Cooper, Gail. Air-Conditioning America. Maryland: 1998. ISBN 0801857163, Page 3 Early air-conditioning systems required that buildings -- and, consequently, people's activities -- be organized around technical requirements. The question became, then, not simply whether to air-condition buildings, but what form the technology would take and who would determine that configuration. The public discussion was widely based and included workers, factory owners, public health officials, laboratory researchers, school reformers, electrical manufacturers, public utilities, and homeowners. Although most people in these groups were not qualified to critique the design of air-conditioning systems in terms of the mechanics of condensers and compressors, they showed a keen interest in such elements of atmospheric control as recirculation, air volume, temperature, and humidity. thus, the debate ranged from abstract issues, such as the proper relationship between mechanical civilization and nature, to practical concerns, such as schoolroom odors. The legacy of this struggle is two distinct traditions in the deployment of air conditioning. One is the choice of design professionals, engineers and architects, who favor a controlled and rational system, a building that is so integrated with its mechanical services that it becomes a machine itself and is controlled by technical authority. A second is the choice of some users, who want an interior that is more comfortable but not necessarily ideal and who favor a technology that is above all flexible and responsive to the consumer's needs. The first is represented by the powerful central air-conditioning systems found in modern hotels and office buildings, which most nearly achieve the ideal of man-made indoor weather; the second is represented by the affordable and portable window air conditioner with its small blast of cold air. Page 42 As air-conditioning engineers increasingly became concerned with controlling production process, they began to argue the benefits of air conditioning in controlling the work force as well. Air-conditioning companies extended their predictions to workers as well as production to appeal to manufacturers. Clearly, the concept of a totally controlled environment lurked behind the idea of man-made weather. But besides the intrinsic appeal of what vision to engineers, it was articulated just when the technical community had begun to concern itself with issues of labor, machinery, and workplace control. Thus at the same time that Willis Carrier presented his psychrometric formula to the American society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) as the basis for an understanding temperature and humidity, Frederick W. Taylor was expounding the science of efficiency. And as Taylor had claimed for his new management strategies, air-conditioning companies portrayed the new technology as an advance that benefited all members of the industrial community. However, the adoption of air conditioning reordered the balance of power between the different parties that composted that community. What is striking about the consequent realignment of power in the factory is the extent to which engineers increased their authority relative to both management and workers. Page 49 In both macaroni and tobacco drying, CEC had not been able to improve upon the product of traditional craft practice. Engineers clearly knew less about the complexities of natural materials than skilled workers did. Part of the difficulty that they experienced was a clash between the quantitative approach of engineering and the sensual approach of craft production. In yet another example of this, Walter Fleisher lamented his own failure in drying. He had calculated that to dry skins for a leather company, his equipment should be able to remove 10 percent of the water by weight. Yet even after the removal of 17-26 percent, the client claimed the skins were still not dry. Only the removal of an additional 1.5 percent satisfied the client. "Their method of testing a skin to see whether it was dry," Fleisher recounted, "was entirely by feeling. They seemed to know that they considered was a dry skin, and cared very little for percentages of moisture removed. Once again, engineering approaches to the processing of natural materials failed to replicate older methods, and craftsmen were often the judges who set the standards. In the eyes of these workmen at least, quantification led to oversimplification and not to precision. Carrier's response to Fleisher's dilemma and his own was to call for more science, not less. He argued that the appropriate level of residual moisture in a properly dried material could be experimentally determined and quantified. He called upon scientific laboratories to produce such data for a range of materials and for engineers thus to arm themselves. The air-conditioning engineer's dilemma was that he was in direct rivalry for control of production processes with skilled workers whose claim to authority was experiential knowledge. Laboratory constants and quantitative standards were essential advantages to engineers who had lost the first round in the match between craft and engineering. Page 50 In a way that was consonant with the popular enthusiasm for "science" and "efficiency," air-conditioning engineers thus fell back on science and quantification as a way to bolster the uncertain performance of environmental engineering in the factory. For a large body of workmen at the turn of the century -- especially those employed in hygroscopic factories -- "skill" could be more accurately characterized as the skills necessary to match natural materials to industrial production. Workmen were essentially knowledgeable about the natural world, and factories were inevitably connected to it. That reality made industries that processed natural materials more chaotic and organic than rational and mechanical. It was this connection to nature that air-conditioning engineers sought to break through the adoption of new technology and new standards. However, if a close look at the practice of engineering shows an unsurprising hostility toward labor, it also reveals an ambivalence toward management. Greater authority for engineers was achieved by nibbling away at the traditional prerogatives of both management and labor. The engineer's struggle for control over factory production was allied to that of management but not identical to it. As long as each system was the product of engineering design, custom-made for each factory, the division of power over factory production became a three-way split between workers, engineers, and managers. With that larger voice in the direction of the factory, engineers promoted a technology that had embedded in it a quantitative approach to life and one that reordered the factory around those values. Page 55 Air conditioning fit into the category of technical improvements -- like scientific management advocate Frederick W. Taylor's concept of a fair day's work for a fair day's pay -- that seemed to benefit everyone. Air-conditioning companies argued that improved worker comfort led to increased efficiency and greater profits. A Buffalo Forge Company catalog pointed out, "It is a recognized fact that atmospheric conditions have marked effect upon the comfort and efficiency of a workman. Thus, the maintenance of proper atmospheric conditions within a plant pays big returns in comfort and contentment of the workmen themselves and in increased and better production." Best of all, such mutual gains were automatic. Manufacturers did not have to assess or pay for the benefits of worker comfort, nor did they have to compromise ideal processing conditions. One observer noted that "fortunately for the people who work in them, most of the industries requiring conditioned air can utilize temperatures and humidities close to those normally desired for human comfort. Page 67 Swayed by such opinions, Mrs. Anderson agreed instead to fund an investigatory commission. New York governor William Sulzer cooperated with the Milbank Memorial Fund by appointed the New York State Commission on Ventilation, a quasi-official commission, funded by Mrs. Anderson. Its members included Professor Charles-Edward Amory Winslow, associate professor of biology at he College of the City of New York: Dwight D. Kimball, a ventilating engineer at R.D. Kimball & Co.; Frederic S. Lee, Dalton professor of physiology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons; James Alexander Miller, director of the tuberculosis clinic, Bellevue Hospital; Earle B. Phelps, professor of chemistry at the U.S. Hygienic Laboratory; and Edward Lee Thorndike, professor of educational psychology, Teachers College, Columbia University. In the public-spirited character of the investigation, commission members served without compensation. The commission conducted experiments to determine the health, efficiency, and comfort of various types of schoolrooms. It is investigated four common schoolroom conditions: high temperature, odors, drafts, and low humidity. The members studied sensations of comfort, attendance records, and learning efficiency in an attempt to settle scientifically the question of what constituted a beneficial schoolroom environment. The central issue, however, was whether mechanical or window ventilation produced the best climate for learning. The various independent reports commissioned for the study differed on this question, and commission members must have found it difficult to write the summary report. Indeed, in one experiment designed to measure learning efficiency under various atmospheric conditions, Dr. J. Crosby Chapman and Dr. William A. McCall concluded that "when an individual is urged to do his best," the atmospheric conditions made no difference in the quantity or quality of the student's work. Their findings emphasized the human environment rather than the atmospheric environment. The open-air crusaders, however, were unwilling to separate the physical environment from the social. Page 68 The final report of the commission concluded, much to the indignation of the engineering community, that window ventilation best served the purposes of the classroom. The support for window ventilation was bolstered by opposition to the costs of mechanical ventilation. The commission perceived its charge as the determination not only of the "atmospheric conditions most favorable to human health, comfort, and efficiency," but also of "the most efficient and economical practical methods for securing such conditions." Putting the matter that way settled the issue. Window ventilation was cheaper by far than any mechanical ventilation system. The commission completed its work in 1917, but the final report was not released until 1923. It seemed that the weight of scientific evidence would be on the side of window ventilation. The ASH&VE Laboratory In those years the findings of the New York State Commission on Ventilation were not public, but neither were they secret. The heating and ventilating community knew in advance what the final report would say, and they were well aware that they had lost a highly visible round of the ventilation fight. In this battle between experts the engineers countered with scientific research of their own. Their experimental data in support of mechanical ventilation largely came from the ASHE & VE Research Laboratory, established in 1919 at the U.S. Bureau of Mines in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The laboratory served diverse needs within the profession. One of its most critical contributions was to bolster public confidence in the ventilating engineers' expertise at a time when other professionals were ranged in opposition to them in the regulatory battles. Page 117 The onset of the Depression not only made markets tighter, it also presented an ideological challenge to technological development in general. As the economy plunged deeper, critics argued that the economic collapse had been partially caused by overproduction and a runaway technology that increased unemployment by replacing men with machines. In England there was talk of a moratorium on research and development to allow society's moral and social development to catch up with recent scientific and technological growth. But few in the engineering community felt that technology per se was in any way responsible. The most radical instead blamed capitalists' control of productive technology. The engineer Henry L. Gant had developed just such a critique of the uses of technology in American society following World War I. Struck by the extent to which factory owners used their machinery for profit rather than maximum "efficiency," Gant had articulated a technocratic policy that called for the management of production by technical experts who put rationality and productive gains above mere profits. The call for a more technocratic leadership made a brief, fiery appearance on the American national scene in response to Depression conditions, but soon fizzled. The most politically charged versions of technocracy seem to have had limited appeal among both engineers and the general public during the 1930s. Perhaps Herbert Hoover's election as the country's first engineer-president blighted technocracy's appeal from the beginning. Page 143 Industry ambitions were seemly fulfilled by a steady climb in sales. In 1945 just over 1,000 room air conditioners were shipped; the next year, nearly 30,000. By 1950 production had increased sixfold to 193,000, and it climbed to 1.3 million by 1956. Although air-conditioning production increased rapidly after the war, it began its rise from nearly zero. Thus, each year manufacturers achieved remarkable percentage increases, yet a decade elapsed before the volume of sales began to match the extravagant rhetoric about air conditioning's potential. Page 158 As late as November 1958 an advertising campaign promoting worker comfort that was slated to run in Fortune and Business Week drew doubts from company executives. The firm used the term "industrial comfort" for these kinds of systems, but the advertising department was leery of its appeal. One internal critic pointed out that in 1959 American industry was "going to want to get labor to work harder. Management will be 'sweating out' a difficult cost-price squeeze and their thinking will not be to provide 'comfort' for labor. They will expect them to 'sweat' too ... It seems to me that 'efficiency' is undoubtedly a more appropriate theme for us to use." Carrier Corporation's chief executive officer, Cloud Wampler, was convinced and concluded that "something other than 'comfort' has to be the keystone of this campaign." Eventually, the industrial comfort campaign was abandoned. In the industrial comfort campaign was abandoned. In the industrial world, at least, comfort still carried overtones of ease and relaxation. Such anxieties led some advocates to try to dispel the association of comfort with luxury, by means of careful language: "The word comfort, as here used, does not imply a condition of languorous ease, but rather a composure of body and mind which will increase the alertness and the productivity of the individual by removing distracting and vitiating factors of atmospheric environment." Office efficiency proved to be easier to sell than industrial efficiency. Ad hoc tests of federal employees in 1946 suggested that typists were more productive in an air-conditioned office. Typists transferred from a regular office to an air-conditioned space increased their output by 24 percent. In offices, where workers' pace and discipline were not defined by piecework incentives or assembly lines, claims for intangible incentives to greater productivity, such as "heightened morale" and "increased energy," seemed convincing. The reasoning that greater personal comfort would lead to higher worker productivity found more favor among managers of white-collar workers than it had among factory supervisors. Its acceptance as an aid to office efficiency was no doubt helped by the fact that management and office workers often shared the same general work space. Page 160 Wampler argued that, more than local weather, a competitive business climate dictated the inclusion of air conditioning in a new office building. He speculated that whenever 20 percent of the office buildings in any one city included air conditioning, the remaining buildings must air-condition to maintain their first-class status. In New York City between 1945 and 1957, seventy-one large buildings, with 23 million square feet of space, were built with air conditioning. The critical 20 percent level was reached in 1953, when renovation was done in twenty-four major buildings. Wampler judged that Philadelphia had also reached the critical level, and by 1955 Philadelphia Electric Company reported that "air conditioning had become an accepted requirement in all new office buildings." In the utility company's opinion, cost had become "secondary to comfort," for one office building that had cost $10 million spent an additional $5 million to add an air-conditioning system. Rising expectations about personal comfort were believed to be a powerful ally for the industry. Wampler told businessmen: "Tomorrow your employees will find non-air conditioned offices unacceptable. The trend is inevitable." In 1957 a survey of 376 companies revealed that 88 percent rated air conditioning the most important item for "office efficiency." Page 178 While central air conditioning needed to be built into a new home to be affordable, window air conditioners could be added to nearly every building. Adaptable, affordable, and cool, they formed an advance guard for the increasing popularity of air conditioning. By 1960 there were about 6.5 million air-conditioning units of all kinds in use, and by 1970 there were more than 24 million, nearly 17 million of which were room units.
Mark Hopkins and Ted Jones, Getting In Gear The Alliance To Save Energy, Washington: January 1995, Page 6 Energy conservation vs. energy efficiency Energy conservation traditionally refers to efforts to lower energy costs by decreasing use or eliminating waste—such as lowering thermostat settings or turning off lights when they’re not in use. In other words, getting less benefit by using less. Energy efficiency, on the other hand, refers to making capital investments in more efficient end-use products—such as compact fluorescent light bulbs, high-efficiency motors and drives, or more efficient heating systems. In other words, getting the same benefit, but using less. Both approaches are useful in the home, office or plant. But conservation has its limits; after all, a thermostat can be turned down only so far. On the other hand, the potential for energy efficiency improvements is virtually limitless as new, more advanced technologies are developed. Compact fluorescent lights, for example, produce the same amount of light as a traditional incandescent bulb, but they use one-quarter of the energy. Research now under way should lead to even more advanced lighting products. Through advances in reflective fixtures, better controls, and daylighting, techniques that now reduce energy use by a factor of four will soon reduce energy use by a factor of 10.
Romm, Joseph J., and William D. Browning. Greening the Building and the Bottom Line. There is a crucial difference between designing for energy efficiency and energy conservation. Both lower energy consumption, however, conservation entails some level of curtailment of service-freezing in the dark. Energy efficiency must meet or exceed the quality of service that it replaces. The most efficient design typically focuses on giving users what they need, for example task/ambient lighting as opposed to a purely ambient strategy. It is important to reiterate that the goal of the companies in these case studies was to create energy efficient workplaces. The gains in productivity were for the most part an unanticipated effect. Some of the companies were aware that the measures implemented would improve the quality of spaces, however, the decisions to undertake the energy efficiency actions were based solely on projected energy and maintenance savings. In all the examples the measures of productivity had always been monitored by the companies. Additionally, none of the cases involved a change in management style.
From the Alliance to Save Energy’s newsletter, April 1998 But energy efficiency is a far cry from the energy conservation images and practices of old—of doing with less or doing without, of being uncomfortable or less comfortable. Not unlike the tremendous technological strides on the computer, electronics, and other fronts, energy efficiency takes advantage of advances in technology to provide significantly better, smarter services.... Energy efficiency is the single best, immediate, cost-effective win-win solution to stem carbon dioxide emissions that lead to air pollution, global warming, and climate change.
Chartwell Report on Energy Efficiency Spotlights Best Practices Case Studies and Provides Benchmarking Data Online Exclusive, Nov 11, 2003, 12:00 a.m. ET As a result of their energy efficiency programs, the top 15%-performing investor-owned utilities save at least 5.5% of their total electricity sales and spend no more than $3 per MWh to achieve these results, according to a new Chartwell report, "Utility Energy Efficiency Programs and Benchmarking Data." Utilities in the Western Electricity Coordinating Council save an average of 1.42% of electricity sales. But WECC utilities in the 90th percentile save 7.47% of total electricity sales. While utilities in the region spend an average of US$118 to save one MWh, the top performing utilities spend only $3 per MWh saved. Included in Utility Energy Efficiency Programs and Benchmarking Data are more than a dozen charts and graphs providing details -- by utility type and NERC location -- on the MWh savings that the top 10%, top 15%, and top 25% of performers achieve. (To develop this data, Chartwell analyzed information that more than 950 utilities submitted to the Department of Energy.) The data include: · incremental effects (new programs or new participants in 2001, the year for which the data was reported). Chartwell's best practices research features case studies and spotlights important initiatives within the industry. Among the seven case studies in the report are: · Seattle City Light's wide-ranging and award-winning energy efficiency program that is marketed neighborhood-by-neighborhood. US is far more efficient than in ‘70s - but also more determined to consume.
Winner, Langdon. Energy Regimes and The Ideology of Efficiency. Beverly Hills: 1982. Page 265 To be taken seriously in energy policy deliberations, therefore, every concerned person must first bow down before the altar. One must swear to God and country that what ultimately matters are questions of efficiency. Something resembling an oath is taken that pledges one to examine all possible alternatives to discover those which give the most energy per dollar. It is possible to fiddle a bit with the specific definition of efficiency one employs. Some hope to modify the ritual by arguing that we must first identify and measure the end uses to which energy is put. But suggestions of that kind, as helpful as they are in certain respects, do nothing to change the fundamental nature of the discussion. One still puts Btus or Kilowatt-hours in the numerator and dollars in the denominator and worships the resulting ratio as gospel. In politics, the rule of efficient, well-trained professionals was seen as a way of sanitizing government of the corruption of party machines and eliminating the influence of selfish interest groups. Throughout the progressive era and in decades since, an eagerness to define important public issues as questions of efficiency has been a common strategy; adherence to this norm has been welcomed as a way of achieving the ends of democracy without having to deal with democracy as a living process. Thus, it is not surprising to see efficiency reappear at the center of today’s energy debate. For Americans, to demonstrate the efficiency of a course of action conveys a sense of scientific truth, political wisdom, social consensus, and a compelling moral urgency. Page 266 In fact, an astonishing feature of today’s energy projections and recommendations is how thoroughly devoid they are of any vision of history, how completely divorced from any theoretical grasp of the present situation other than that provided by neoclassical economics. When history is mentioned at all, it is typically represented on a set of graphs that show the rise and decline of various energy sources, rising or falling energy prices per unit consumed, and the relationship between energy use and gross national product over several decades. The history of the energy problem, it would seem, began in 1973, although some reports proudly point out that the cognoscenti had gotten wind of it three or four years earlier. If there is a story to be told about what it meant for modern society to adapt to the expanding use of hydropower, coal, natural gas, and petroleum, that story is never mentioned. Page 269 To persist in looking for the most efficient energy path to sustained economic growth, to establish the lowest cost kilowatt-hour or Btu as a primary social goal, to talk as if everyone had an equal share in the achievement of these objectives—such an approach means that questions about the quality of human association as affected by the social organization of energy will forever be put aside.
Sharon Beder, Power Play. New York: The New Press, 2003. ISBN 156584808X Page 1. ELECTRICITY RATIONING IN BRAZIL ... Blackouts from California and New York to South Australia and Buenos Aires ... Mass protests in India, Africa, and across Latin America. Enron, the seventh-largest company in America, goes bankrupt ... And in Auckland, New Zealand, the central business district goes without power for weeks. Welcome to the brave new world of electricity deregulation and privatisation. Dozens of governments have embarked on the pathway to electricity deregulation and privatisation since the mid-1990s.2 It is referred to as `liberalisation' by its advocates, who use the term to disguise what is in essence a massive shift of ownership and control of electricity from public to private hands, in the name of economic efficiency and in the cause of private profits. The privatisation of electricity is not something that citizens have demanded or wanted. In general, there has been very little public participation in electricity-reform decisions; instead, as experience has built up, there have been a number of bitter protests. Popular uprisings have occurred in Argentina, India, Indonesia, and Ghana. Protests have halted privatisation proposals in Peru, Ecuador, and Paraguay. In the Dominican Republic, several people were killed during protests against blackouts imposed by privatised companies….
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. New York: 1918, Page 354 To him, the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight; but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring—scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power—while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.
Drexel Insulation Newsletter. Volume 16 #6. Nov/Dec 1998 A major reason, however, is the so-called “take-back effect.” Occupants believe that after retrofitting they have an energy-efficient home, and they can now be less concerned about saving energy. For instance, they open windows more frequently and for longer periods of time or they raise their thermostat setting in the winter and lower it in the summer.
Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology University of Chicago Press, 1986. ISBN 0226902110, Pages 53-4 As the Ford Foundation’s Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group explained: “When analyzing energy, one must first decide whether ordinary rules of economics can be applied.” The group decided that, yes, energy should be considered “an economic variable, rather than something requiring special analysis. After that decision had been made, of course, the rest was simply a matter of putting Btus or kilowatt-hours in the numerator and dollars in the denominator and worshipping the resulting ratio as gospel. Even those who held unorthodox viewpoints in this debate found it necessary to uphold the supreme importance of this criterion. Thus, Amory B. Lovins, a leading proponent of soft energy paths, wrote of this method: “While not under the illusion that facts are separable from values, I have tried ... to separate my personal preferences from my analytic assumptions and to rely not on modes of discourse that might be viewed as overtly ideological, but rather on classicial arguments of economic and engineering efficiency (which are only tacitly ideological).” To Lovins’s credit, he consistently argued that the social consequences of energy choices were, in the last analysis, the most important aspect of energy policy making. In his widely read Soft Energy Paths, Lovins called attention to “centrism, vulnerability, technocracy, repression. alienation” and other grave problems that afflict conventional energy solutions. Lovins compares “two energy paths that are distinguished by their antithetical social implications.” He notes that basing energy decisions on social criteria may appear to involve a “heroic decision,” that is, “doing something the more expensive way because it is desirable on other more important grounds than internal cost.” But Lovins is careful not to appeal to his readers’ sense of courage or altruism. “Surprisingly,” he writes, “a heroic decision does not seem to be necessary in this case, because the energy system that seems socially more attractive is also cheaper and easier.” But what if the analysis had shown the contrary? Would Lovins have been prepared to give up the social advantages believed to exist along the soft energy path? Would he have accepted “centrism, vulnerability, technocracy, repression, alienation,” and the like? Here Lovins yielded ground that in recent history has again and again been abandoned as lost territory. It raises the question of whether even the best intentioned, best qualified analysts in technological decision making are anything more than mere efficiency worshippers.... As Paul Goodman once noted, “Now, if lecturing at a college, I happen to mention that some function of society which is highly centralized could be much decentralized without loss of efficiency, or perhaps with a gain in efficiency, at once the students want to talk about nothing else. That approach is, indeed, one way of catching people’s attention; if you can get away with it, it is certainly a most convincing kind of argument. Because the idea of efficiency attracts a wide consensus, it is sometimes used as a conceptual Trojan horse by those who have more challenging political agendas they hope to smuggle in. But victories won in this way are in other respects great losses. For they affirm in our words and in our methodologies that there are certain human ends that no longer dare be spoken in public. Lingering in that stuffy Trojan horse too long, even soldiers of virtue eventually suffocate.
Nye, David E. Consuming Power. United States: 1998. ISBN 0262140632, Page 198
“Forecasting Follies.” Power Engineering June 1998, Page 76 Watkins-Miller, Elaine. “Mobil Corp. Fuels Energy Efficiency.” Buildings magazine November 1998. Page 88
Gersh, Jeff. “Capitalism Goes Green?” The Amicus Journal Spring 1999, Page 38
Frankel, Carl. In Earth's Company. Gabriola Island, BC VOR 1XO, ISBN 0865713804, Page XIV
Shuman, Michael. Going Local. New York: 1998. ISBN 0684830124, Page 49
Wackernagel, Mathis, Man—Influence On Nature Our Ecological Footprint, Philadelphia, 1996: ISBN 0865713111, Page 128-9 Box 4.1: Will Efficiency Gains Save Resources? Many economists and environmentalists believe that advances in technological efficiency are a potential panacea for the sustainability crisis. This follows from Buckminster Fuller’s reasoning of “doing more with less: and contains the hidden assumption that efficiency gains automatically lead to resource savings and reduced consumption. For example, industrialist Stefan Schmidheiny lauds the 50 percent energy efficiency gains by the chemical industry in recent decades, forgetting that chemical production had doubled in the same period. Even Our Common future was devoted to what Wolfgang Sachs calls “the gospel of global efficiency.” However, as effective as these efficiency strategies might seem on the micro-scale, decreasing the ratio between input and output does not necessarily lead to lower resource use. On the contrary, technological efficiency may actually lead to increased net consumption of resources. Various authors have recognized the resultant dilemma. Limits to Growth pointed out in 1972 that a doubling of agricultural productivity accompanied by continued economic expansion would extend food limits by only 20 years and leave us with a more intractable problem. Lester Brown from the Worldwatch Institute observes that “... continuing growth in material consumption—the number of cars and air conditioners, the amount of paper used, and the like— will eventually overwhelm gains from efficiency, causing total resource use (and all the corresponding environmental damage) to rise...” Real data confirm this speculation; in the U.S., despite the increasing fuel efficiency of cars, aggregate fuel consumption is on the rise. Similarly, as The Ecologist notes, while energy use per dollar Gross National Product (GNP) decreased by 23 percent in the Western industrialized countries between 1973 and 1987, total annual energy consumption actually increased by 15 percent over the same time span. On the micro-level: Improved energy or material efficiency may enable firms to raise wages, increase dividends or lower prices, all of which lead to increased net consumption. Economists call these wage and price effects the “rebound effect.” Similarly, technology-induced savings by individuals are usually redirected to other forms of consumption, canceling some of the initial gain. On the meso (or regional) level: Typically, industrialized countries import much of their energy, mostly in the form of fossil energy. Such imports weaken local economies through the loss of direct spending (Leakage) and the loss of that spending’s re-spending (the multiplier effect). By contrast, the money for both the energy-saving equipment as well as the moneys saved through improved energy efficiency will most likely be spent locally, thus stimulating the local economy. On the macro-level: According to economist Paul Samuelson, technical innovations or efficiency gains account for 75 percent of GNP growth, thereby contributing to increased aggregate resource throughput. Analyzing the effects of efficiency gains, economist Harry Sanders concludes that “... energy efficiency gains can increased energy consumption by two means: by making energy appear effectively cheaper than other inputs; and by increasing economic growth, which pulls up energy use...” Other studies reject the claim that GNP and energy consumption have ever been decoupled in industrialized countries. In general, it seems that technical efficiency gains that produce increased returns to capital will attract investment and ripple through the economy. As economist Stanley Jevons observed in 1865 in The Coal Question: “... the progress of any branch of manufacture excites a new activity in most other branches and leads indirectly, if not directly, to increased inroads upon our seams of coal...” In short, profitable efficiency gains—and these are the ones that get implemented—contribute to upward-trending expectations of returns to capital and higher investment in efficient firms. This induces the competitive spread of the efficient technologies to other firms an sectors, which may well increase total demand for resources. Ideally, efficiency savings should be captured for investment in natural capital rehabilitation. This can only be achieved in the relatively short term through the institution of resource depletion taxes, marketable resource quotas, and other elements of ecological tax reform (including reductions in income taxes and other penalties on labor). If we don’t implement policies that will force us to do more with less now, we may be forced by nature later to do the same (or even less) with less later!
Huber, Peter W. Hard Green. New York: 1999. ISBN 0465031129, Pages 61 and 143 Efficiency figures even more prominently on the Soft agenda for energy. Most important for Lovins, more important than all the organic fuel, is conservation. “Technical fixes,” Lovins insists, can cut energy “waste” in half. “Negawatts” are cheaper, safer, better in every respect than megawatts. Making cars more efficient is soft, drilling for more off-shore oil is hard. Roof insulation is soft, artic gas, hard. Even better than solar in Arizona or a windmill in California is utility-sponsored home weatherization in New York. It is in the promotion of efficiency that Soft energy pundits claim to have achieved the most, the fastest. The drive for efficiency succeeded beyond all expectation. Our ceilings today are insulated twice as well, our walls 40 percent better, our floors four times as well. New furnaces, air-conditioning units, heat pumps, refrigerators, water heaters, washers, and dishwashers all use much less energy than their predecessors. Gas furnaces are 20 percent more efficient, mainly because pilot lights have been replaced with electronic starters. The efficiency of refrigerators has more than doubled; washing machines and dishwashers are 60 percent more efficient. Cars averaged 13.5 miles per gallon in 1975, 22.5 mpg in 1995. Extremely efficient fluorescent lights are proliferating. And almost all of these excellent numbers continue to rise steadily. In other words, billions upon billions of barrels and watts have been saved by technology that simply made them unnecessary. The Softs quote these statistics all the time. It is easy to convert such numbers into equivalent numbers of oil tankers unfilled and power plants unbuilt. The Softs often do. Yes indeed, we have certainly grown very smart at conserving calories. Yet our contumacious scale refuses to acknowledge the fact. Could it be broken? We know in our hearts that it isn’t. Wardrobes full of clothes that are now several sizes too small tell us the same. The scale is not broken. Despite all those calories conserved, we have just grown fatter. The Softs were wrong. Completely, laughably, ridiculously, preposterously wrong. For what it’s worth, Hard is far more efficient than Soft. But it’s not worth what the Softs say it’s worth, for the simple reason that “efficient” has almost nothing at all to do with “frugal.” This is true for food, and it is true for energy. The whole gigantic myth to the contrary is no more or less than a case study in wishful, credulous, anti-scientific propaganda…. Outrageous though the proposition may sound, it is the free market that delivers real efficiency—economic efficiency -- in refrigerators, cars, and homes. Not because it minimizes use of oil, watts or an other single factor of production. But because economic freedom lets us optimize our economic choices along the many different dimensions that value and wealth comprise: comfort, pleasure, and satisfaction. Yes, a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicles is, indeed, “efficient.” It wastes gas, but it is still efficient in the holistic, economic sense, at least once pollution costs are properly internalized. The gas guzzler makes the driver who buys it richer, in that he is happier owning the car then something else he might have bought with the money. That’s why he bought it. That’s what “efficiency” means, in economic parlance. And as I shall argue in the following section, that kind of efficiency, economic efficiency, is the only kind that limits growth. It does so by making us richer. But the Softs, as I say, just don’t distinguish economic efficiency, which in the end is green, from the thermodynamic kind, which isn’t, at leas not the way they set about delivering it. They deliver it by prescription. And whatever it may do for the motor in your refrigerator, prescription is economically inefficient. Economic efficiency is never conjured out of the depths of government codes, registers, proclamations, prescription, regulation, and meddlesome forms of tax or subsidy. However loudly they may be rationalized in efficiency’s good name, those things deliver only its counterfeit, its precise opposite. Governments can’t prescribe or impose efficiency, not the economic kind. Free choice in a free market is as efficient as you can get. We ought to have learned that by now.
Sachs, Wolfgang. Greening the North. New York: 1998. ISBN 1856495078 Page 85
Architecture Magazine December, 1999 Suburbanites drive 110 more hours each year than city dwellers.
Earthtalk, radio show on WHYY-FM 12/21/1991 Mike Lawbacher, host: There’s an intriguing sentence in the book about sustainable development and alternative technologies in developing nations. The sentence was “Beware of the green technofix!” Can you elaborate on that—the green technofix? Johnathan Poritt, former director of the British Friends of the Earth, United Kingdom: Yes. An awful lot of people beset by difficulty of these problems have looked to new energy-efficient, environment-friendly, leaner, greener technologies, as it were, to dig us out of the problem. So, instead of questioning whether or not the motor car is actually a form of transportation which a finite planet cannot sustain, they have looked more readily, more enthusiastically at ways of “greening” the car—fitting catalytic converters, using alternative fuels, increasing energy efficiency, trying to make them recyclable, thinking ahead to the future using hydrogen or fuel cells—or whatever else it might be, everything under the sun—including I might say, solar-powered cars— everything under the sun instead of answering the key question which is “Is that particular form of transportation any longer compatible with the huge sustainablility constraints we are now under as regards managing the earth’s environment?”
Ris, Howard. Undated fundraising letter from the Union of Concerned Scientists, Cambridge, MA Please join the campaign to clean up one of the biggest sources of environmental damage in our nation. I'm talking about sport utility vehicles (SUVs), minivans,and light trucks. SUV s spew up to 5 times as much air pollution as cars. Almost half of all Americans breathe air choked with smog. Young children and the elderly suffer most -- from rising rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses. When I reveal to SUV owners how their vehicles are making America's air unhealthy, most are shocked. Drivers of SUVs are not the problem.
USEA Energy Efficiency Committee In the not-too distant past, “saving” energy implied doing without. Energy curtailment, rationing, and even conservation still carry negative connotations for many people. Fortunately, however, over the past twenty or so years, technology and know-how have enables us to “conserve” energy by using it more efficiently; avoiding energy waste either by providing the same level of service (or output) using less energy, or by improving the level of service without increasing levels of energy. ABOUT THE UNITED STATES ENERGY ASSOCIATION (USEA)
Michael Silverstein, How Business Will Thrive The Environmental Economic Revolution, New York: 1993 ISBN 0312097972 Page 178, 179 Instead of finally coming to grips with new market realities that make environmentally sound and economically sound behavior synonymous, companies are encouraged by this government-sponsored policy to delay intelligent and progressive investments in real efficiency.
Brookstone – Catalog of Hard to Find Tools – “Two Heads Are Better Than One—Double Your Shower’s Efficiency!” The two pressure-equalized, water saving heads on this quality extension allow two people to shower as efficiently as one—or one person to shower more comfortably and effectively in half the time! Norgard, Jorgen. Technical Energy Savings versus Changes in Human Behaviour. Denmark: 1996. ISSN 13964038, Page 10 Declining efficiency of lifestyles The concept of efficiency is usually associated with technology, and it might seem misplaced to discuss the efficiency of the daily way of life, defined by the equation: lifestyle efficiency = satisfaction/energy service) consumption. Since the satisfaction, the numerator, is a subjective parameter and cannot be quantified. The same is true about the whole lifestyle efficiency. Nevertheless, the concept can be useful for discussions. It seems safe to claim, that the efficiency of our lifestyles in Western Europe is rapidly declining, even to the extend that growth in consumption might not increase satisfaction at all. Which means zero or even negative efficiency. Since growth in consumption, esp. of energy services, is the basic cause of environmental damage, and since technological efficiency options alone cannot continue to outbalance the consumption growth, we must stop and reverse the present trend in our lifestyle towards lower efficiency. The conventional economic strategy for improving people’s living conditions has been to increase private consumption, including the consumption of energy services. This actually means to increase the cost of lifestyle—the denominator in the lifestyle efficiency equation—assuming the benefits will increase also. As indicated above, this is not likely to continue to be the case in regions with a material welfare as high as in Western Europe. And it is an irresponsible strategy, considering the environmental limitations for our material activities in the world as a whole. In other words, it is now crucial to take a more critical look at the way we live our daily lives as well as the economic policy supporting this lifestyle.
Lawrence Agbemabiese, Kofi Berko, Jr., and Peter duPont, Center for energy and Environmental Policy, U.of Delaware, Air Conditioning in the Tropics: Cool Comfort or Cultural Conditioning?” ACEEE 1996 8.1 Many tropical natives adopt this addiction to the air conditioner when they stay in the West for long periods of time. For example, Ghanaians and Thais are increasingly traveling and living outside their country, especially in temperate regions. These travelers return home periodically for holidays and during special occasions. When they do, most of them use air conditioners during the hot periods, since their stay in temperate countries has socialized them to use the air conditioner on hot sunny days. Some people adopt Western customs and technologies (such as air conditioners) as a symbol of an improvement in lifestyle. Just as the adoption of Western architectural styles requires a greater reliance on compressor-based cooling, the adoption of Western styles of dressing requires a lower ambient temperature in order to remain comfortable.
Rosenberg, Nathan, How The West Grew Rich, 1986: ISBN 0465031080, Page 214 The layout of the machinery in the factories was governed by the need to locate the machines with the greatest power demand closest to the engine. The efficient flow of work was a secondary consideration. About 1890, it became possible to provide each machine with an electric motor and to transmit power to the motor through an electric wire. Many factories attached an electric generator to their steam engines and provided their own electricity, but in addition it became possible to draw almost any amount of power from the new central stations. The substitution of electric wires and motors for shafts and pulleys was at first justified by easily calculable savings in maintenance, fuel consumption, and interest and depreciation on investment. But the calculable savings were not the most important: what mattered most was that the wires could be bent to any shape and run to almost any desired length, for transmission losses in wire were small. This introduced new flexibility into the design of factories, and the efficient flow of work between successive steps in the production process claimed its natural priority in plant layout.
Meyer, Herbert E. The War Against Progress. New York: 1979. ISBN 0935166009, Page 124 Current efforts to conserve energy merely by using less of it, such as the law which limits our driving speed to fifty-five miles per hour, are intellectually satisfying but useless in a practical sense. We can never solve the energy crunch solely by using our present equipment slightly more carefully; we can do it only by discovering new supplies of energy and by developing new equipment that is structurally more efficient than whatever we are using today. For instance, we will need to develop new auto-body materials that are every bit as strong as steel but that weigh less, and auto engines whose fuel consumption rates are regulated by built-in microprocessing units. At the same time, we will need to develop new techniques for recovering every last drop of oil and every last cubic foot of natural gas from our present wells, and every last ton of coal from every working mine. And of course we will need to develop wholly new sources of energy, such as solar power and laser fusion power. But none of these developments will be possible once scientific research is destroyed, once technological innovation becomes impossible, once the country’s economic growth rate plunges down toward zero. And as the supply of available energy dwindles due to the lack of new scientific breakthroughs and new technologies, even more jobs will evaporate as businesses curtail their operations or shut them down completely for lack of fuel.
Heinrich V. Pierer, Siemens AG “Efficiency Improvements Are Critical for a Bright Tomorrow” in Power Engineering, October, 1996, Page 58 By the year 2000, the value of electrical and electronic components in luxury cars will reach 25 to 30 percent of the total and they will make a major contribution to further cutting energy needs.
Berman, Daniel M. Who Owns The Sun, United States, 1996: ISBN 0930031865 Page 116-17 While the Collaborative Process in California legitimized the concept of energy efficiency as a tool and goal of energy management, it turned the control and profits of that tool over to monopoly utilities that have an interest in expanding electricity consumption, while meanwhile stilling public criticism. And barred from expansion locally, California utilities are now vigorously seeking markets elsewhere—in area free from PUC regulation. Despite boasts by PG&E and Southern California Edison that they are stabilizing emissions of carbon dioxide in California-produced electricity, both companies have created unregulated subsidiaries to build and operate coal - and gas-fueled power plants throughout the world. Their goal is to grab market share in Latin America and Asia, where electricity consumption is expected to double every six to fifteen years. U.S. Generating Company, a PG&E subsidiary owned 50-50 with construction giant Bechtel, owns or is building at least seven coal-fired and four gas-fired power plants in the United States. In 1994, U.S. Generating became the nation’s second-largest non-utility electricity generator by acquiring J. Makowski Company, Inc., a Boston-based firm that specializes in producing both natural gas and electricity, and which maintains offices in Canada, Germany, India, and Scotland. Investment analysts surmised that the new acquisition was aimed at bolstering PG&Es presence in the rapidly expanding Asian market.
“Unplugged.” October 1998, Environmental Working Group and the World Wildlife Fund, Page 3 Power would be available when people need it. With well-funded energy efficiency programs in place, utilities would very like not have had to ask customers to turn down their air conditioners in the peek of the summer heat wave in June.
From Power$mart – Easy Tips to Save Money and the Planet -- a booklet from the Alliance to Save Energy Why Become Power$mart? Available technology can plug major energy leaks. The average household in the U.S. spends about $1,300 each year on home energy, according to DOE. What if you could save up to a third or half of that using the tips in this booklet? You could go away for a fabulous long weekend, see 40 movies with a friend, save for college, or buy the latest video games, attire, and those cool shoes.
Norgard, Jorgen S. Towards sustainable Energy Welfare. Denmark: 1993. Page 322 One paradoxical aspect of focusing just on improving the technical efficiency is that efficiency can be accomplished by increasing energy consumption. For instance, if a family replaces their house with a larger house that is fitted with the same standard of insulation, indoor comfort, etc, the larger house will use less heat per square metre of floor space, because the ratio between the heat-losing surface and the surface which provides floor space is reduced. Therefore, in accordance with normal technical practice, the house would be considered more energy efficient, even though it consumes more energy. Similarly, a large refrigerator unit will—everything though it consumes more energy. Similarly, a large refrigerator unit will everything else being equal consume more electricity than a small one, but nevertheless also be technically more efficient in terms of electricity consumption per unit volume of storage space. In transportation the paradox also holds. To drive long distances will obviously require more fuel, but usually produces better efficiency, when measured as fuel consumed per km travelled. These examples are not just accidental paradoxes. They illustrate a general view which dominates today’s energy policy. It is unfortunately considered acceptable to increase energy consumption as long as the output—the energy service—grows even faster so that efficiency increases. The absolute limits to the acceptable global energy consumption, expressed by CO2 - emission and other environmental factors, make this fixation on efficiency an obsolete view on energy conservation.
Lewis Mumford. Technics and Civilization New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934, Page 271-2 And Mr. Bertrand Russell has noted that each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because the contrivance that would have enabled him to save time had he remained in his original situation now—by driving him to a more distant residential area—effectually cancels out the gain.
Roy Morrison, Ecological Democracy, Boston: 1995 ISBN 0896085147 Page 220 While U.S. residents per capita consume more than their body weight in resources per day (presumably including fossil fuels, metals, water, wood, and agricultural products), this consumption yields only three and a half pounds of consumer “garbage.” Thus, elegant technical fixes to make this process “more efficient,” while continuing maximal production and consumption, will merely slow, not stop—more importantly, not reverse—the rate of ecological and social destruction. Lindsay, R.B. The Role of Science in Civilization. 1963. Page 85 It is this vast increase in the energy supply which has made urban life possible for huge populations and more recently has facilitated its extension to suburbia. At the heart of these urban complexes stand the electrical power station, the water pumping and sewage disposal plants, the gas pipeline, and the gasoline and diesel oil stations. All these place at our disposal numberless energy slaves ready to do our bidding at the turn of a cock or the flick of a switch. Supplementary to these large scale energy supplies are those involved in communication, namely, the telephone, radio, and television. These too use up energy, albeit at a smaller rate per head of population. Civilized man in the twentieth century has got himself into a mental state where he takes all these energy slaves for granted, and when for any reason some temporarily cease to serve him, his dejection becomes profound. He apparently rarely realizes how lucky he is to have all this, which can be bought in Western civilization with relative ease, and often is tempted to listen to political demagogues who strive to convince him that it all costs too much, in spite of the fact that it has brought him leisure to develop his own interests undisturbed by the crushing load of labor which was the lot of the vast majority of his predecessors not many years ago. Though one would suppose that contemporary civilized man should consider himself lucky with all his energy slaves, a simple glance around indicates that all this has not proved to be an unmixed blessing. More energy has meant more problems of all sorts. We expect to discuss these in summary fashion later in this section. But first we look into a practical problem. Assuming that it is the vast increase in the energy supply which is really at the basis of modern material progress, what assurance do we have that the supply is sufficient to meet our needs, real and fancied? This demands a little examination of the nature of the supply
Joseph R. Knisley, “MGM Grand Hotel Meets Energy-Efficiency Lighting Needs” EC & M August 1995 Because of advanced planning, the 2.4 million sq ft MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada presents the most energy-efficient facility that was economically feasible to build and operate. “Our charge from MGM management was to make the hotel property, including the lion symbol, the most energy-efficient in the world, “ explained Robert Ash, president of ABF consulting Engineers, Las Vegas. “The ABF team, including VP Gary Gosz, was responsible for electrical and control segments of the design. “Part of the electrical effort was lighting, and after working with other designers, the result is that guest room/suite areas as well as public areas and ‘back of the house’ portions of the hotel use only a maximum of 3 - 4 W/sq ft. “This cut in energy consumption, using the latest in lighting technology and a computer-controlled energy management system, enabled the facility to qualify for a six-digit Nevada Power Company energy conservation rebate.” For example, the entranceway lion sculpture is lighted with 16 750 W high-pressure sodium lamps mounted on four 30-ft steel poles; this provides 3 fc average (maintained) on the figure. While it’s important that the lion have the proper look, the light source has to meet our energy conservation criteria,” explained Reon Onstine, director of facilities for the property. “Elsewhere, any light source selected has to be energy-efficient and meet EPA Green Light criteria.”
Gorman, Jean. "Grand Stand." Architectural Lighting. November 1999, Page 30 Suggestive of elements in the set of a Deco-era musical, the gigantic 75-ft.-tall illuminated exterior walls span 1,000 ft., are accompanied by one of the largest video-showing LED TV screens in the world and stand as primary features of the overall design scheme outside. Peppered with the chores graphed colored light of LED screens and framed with four colors of neon concealed along massive pilasters, they create an attention-grabbing, moving spectacle of ever-changing colors and patterns. Complex construction schedule and budget constraints aside, pulling off the lighting features was no simple feat. "Ross had major hurdles to overcome," said Dougall. "He needed to find fixtures that could be integrated in tight spaces so that they wouldn't be visible from the street and yet be powerful enough to throw light long distances -- 45 to 60 ft. Also we needed to be sure that lights that frame the cyclorama wall wouldn't wash out the LEDs, " said Dougall. "Another issue was getting FAA approval for the sky beams," said De Alessi. The McCarren International Airport is only one mile away and local authorities were keenly conscious of the need to squelch any potential danger to air traffic, so the lighting designers preprogrammed the control system for the oscillating beams to prevent more than a five-degree tilt toward the airport. Page 31 WHAT A RELIEF Inside, the Deco theme is more palpable -- a sumptuous staircase adorned with bas-relief plaster panels and an ornate metal balustrade ascends beneath a 170-ft dome as the centerpiece of the space. Here, both custom decorative fixture -- developed by Dougall Design -- and integrated architectural lighting allow the technology of the "90s to enhance design elements of the '30s in a way that wasn't possible when the Deco style was born. The decorative alabaster sconces and torchieres, fitted with diffused neon or dimmed incandescent lamps, complement the architectural features while punctuating the space with pockets of inviting warm light. Low-voltage strips, concealed within a cove, allow for a smooth distribution of light and enhance the bas-relief entablature ringing the balcony level, while three rows of separately controlled cold cathode tubes of different colors illuminate the murals on the ceiling around the edge of the dome. The lamps were dimmed to mimic the quality of light that would have existed in the Deco period. Other hidden T8 fluorescent fixtures backlight metal grillework at the base of the entablature, and adjustable quartz focal lights mounted atop the entablature highlight Lalique crystal panels above and allow the gray-painted dome to glow with the deep blue colored light developed in conjunction with theatrical producer Andy Behar.
Mean Streets Pedestrian Safety And Reform of the Nation’s Transportation Law April 8, 1997 Indeed, people are 1.6 times more likely to get killed by a car while walking than they are to be shot and killed by a stranger with a gun.
Lovins, Amory B. and L. Hunter. “Better Energy Security” Christian Science Monitor June 28, 1982 John Polimeni, Kozo Mayumi, Mario Ciampietro, and Blake Alcott, The Jevons Paradox and the Myth of Resource Efficiency Improvements, Earthscan, 2008 London. ISBN 978-1-84407-462-4 Page 87-89 Doubling the efficiency of food production per hectare over the last 50 years (the Green Revolution) did not solve the problem of hunger. Unfortunately, this doubling of efficiency actually made the food shortage problem worse, since it increased the number of people requiring food, the fraction of animal products in the diet and the absolute number of the malnourished (Giampietro, 1994). In the same way, doubling the number of roads did not solve the problem of traffic, but rather made the traffic condition worse since it encouraged more use of personal vehicles (Newman, 1991). As more energy- efficient automobiles were developed as a consequence of rising oil prices, American dar owners increased their leisure driving (Cherfas, 1991). Along with the expected performance of cars, the number of miles driven increased; moreover, US citizens are increasingly driving heavier vehicles like minivans, pick-up trucks and four-wheel drives. And as a further example, refrigerators have become more efficient but also bigger (khazzoom, 1987). A promotion of energy efficiency at the micro level of economic agents tends to increase energy consumption at the macro level of the whole society (Herring, 1999)…. However, an increase in efficiency would lead to resource saving only if the process of evolution did not modify the existing portfolio of behaviors in response to efficiency improvements. As a matter of fact, evolving metabolic systems, especially human systems, tend to adapt quickly an defectively to any changes in efficiency improvements. As soon as a series of ‘technological improvements’ are introduced into a social system, more room is generated for a further expansion of current levels of activity (for example people make more use of their old cars) within the original option space and an expansion of the option space with the addition of new possible categories and activities (for example new models of car including new features such as air-conditioning, faster acceleration or more space per person.)…. Looking at the evolution of cars in time, we can say that the introduction of more efficient car engines has determined that some features – such as air conditioning – which were optional in the past became standard features of modern cars. Thus an increase in efficiency in one of the attributes of performance – generating power in the engine – has led to the addition of a new set of standard attributes in the definition of ‘what modern cars are and should be’ from a consumers’ perspective. Increases in efficiency have also made it possible to introduce new categories of cars such as minivans or SUVs. This represents an increase in the diversity of possible options within the set of accessible states for consumers looking for a vehicle. This expansion of the option space has added ‘mew meanings’ to the original set of meanings associated with the word ‘car’. The introduction of these new meanings can be viewed as the emergence of new couplings between external referents (what we have in mind when we think of a car) and formal identities used in the mathematical representation adopted in the models (the syntactic representation of the car). Because of this, the set of variables and attributes useful to provide a quantitative representation of the performance of an SUV will differ from those useful to provide a quantitative representation of the performance of a small car.
America’s dependence on foreign oil growing Consumers have spurned energy-efficient cars in favor of gas-guzzling. By Bob Fernandez Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday, 08-Sep-96In 1994, Americans drove 2.4 trillion miles, up from 2.1 trillion miles in 1990 and 1.8 trillion miles in 1985. Experts say that figure is growing at 3 percent a year, faster than overall population growth. The lifting of the federal 55-m.p.h speed limit will lead to higher fuel consumption, too. Wind resistance on a car increases with speed, ramatically lowering fuel efficiency, experts say.
Kunstler, James Howard. Home from Nowhere New York, 1996: Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0684811960, Pages 67, 69 and 75 No other country depends as heavily on cars as the United States. The average American drives twice as much as the average driver in Europe and Japan. Americans use cars for 82 percent of their trips compared to 48 percent for Germans, 47 for the French, and 45 percent for the British. In 1990, there were a record 190 million motor vehicles registered in the United States, which amounted to 23 million more cars than licensed drivers. More than 60,000 square miles of U.S. land is paved over, amounting to 2 percent of the total surface area, and possibly 10 percent of arable land.... The Federal Highway Administration expects freeway congestion to quadruple over the next twenty years and to double on ordinary roads. The National Transportation Board predicts that annual delays in travel time (gridlock) will increase by 5.6 billion hours in the same period, wasting an additional 7.3 billion gallons of fuel, adding 73 million tons of carbon dioxide to the current emission levels, and costing $41 billion more per year. Congestion in Los Angeles has reduced average freeway speed to 31 mph. If the current rate of increase in cars is sustained, average freeway speed will fall to 11 mph by the year 2010. Seventy percent of daily peakhour travel on urban freeways (that is, roads without traffic lights) now occurs under stop-and-go conditions, a 30 percent increase since 1983. The U.S. General Accounting Office cites estimates of national productivity losses caused by highway congestion at $100 billion a year.... There is every reason to believe that super-hyper-electro-vehicles will only make these problems worse by perpetuating the delusion that we can continue to live vast distances from the places where we sleep, work, shop, and play—or that we should want to continue. In this light they are classic follies, shortsighted ideas divorced from any consideration of what constitutes a life worth living, or a decent human habitat, and it is rather appalling that so-called environmentalists would take such ideas seriously.
W. Stanley Jevons. The Coal Question, third edition Augustus M. Kelley, New York 1965. (First edition, 1865; second edition, 1866; third edition, 1906) Chapter VII, Of the Economy of Fuel, Page 137 But the economy of coal in manufactures is a different matter. It is wholey a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth. As a rule, new modes of economy will lead to an increase of consumption according to a principle recognised in many parallel instances. “The economy of fuel is the secret of the economy of the steam engine; it is the fountain of its power, and the adopted measure of its effects. Whatever, therefore, conduces to increase the efficiency of coal, and to diminish the cost of its use, directly tends to augment the value of the steam engine, and to enlarge the fields of its operation” [C.W. Williams, The Combustion of Coal, 1841] The result of these efforts at economy is clearly exhibited in a table [showing the number of pounds of coal consumed by engines at different periods for each horsepower developed.]
Descker, Douglas A., and Alan Berolzheimer. Policy Evolution: Energy conservation to Energy Efficiency. Georgia: 1997. ISBN 0881732745, Page xi Many conference participants expressed the conviction that “conservation” implied not using, doing without, and diminished expectations. While there was a strong consensus about the enormous value of conserving resources and using them judiciously, the sentiment prevailed that the fundamental goal should be the wise use of energy. For the federal government, that meant helping agencies reduce costs, be more productive and fulfill missions. For the general public, it meant economic and employment growth, environmental protection, equitable sustainable development and broad-based prosperity. Page xii In 1990, the big questions centered on how to encourage a conservation ethic among Americans and promote energy efficiency within the government apparatus. Page 18 Let me conclude with a few observations. First, there is a national consensus with regard to energy efficiency. Energy efficiency is a good thing. Conservation is a good thing. Everyone agrees on that. But conservation means different things to different people. That there now is a national consensus about and support for energy conservation is somewhat novel. When President Carter stated that conservation was the cornerstone of the energy program, there was an adverse reaction. Conservation was not the American way! Production was the American way! In the course of the last 12 years, that kind of attitude has disappeared. It is now universally recognized that conservation, it only for environmental reasons, is an appropriate objective for both the society at large and the federal government. The change has been so great that everyone is now obliged to pay lip-service to energy efficiency. Page 119 Energy for Tomorrow’s World Bailey, Ronald. Earth Report 2000. New York: McGraw Hill, 2000, Page 116-17 * The 25-year government campaign to promote renewable energy has cost consumers between $30 and $40 billion, but it resulted in only a 1.5 percent market share for favored fuels. Government subsidies and preferences have failed to make uncompetitive technologies competitive and are not likely to do so in the future. * Energy markets are not infected by market failures that are serious enough to warrant government intervention. Energy markets are forward looking; are not prone to frequent, wild swings in price; and are not realistically vulnerable to embargo. * Fossil fuels, rather than becoming more scare, are becoming more abundant with time and will likely * Energy subsidies do not and have not significantly affected energy markets or consumer behavior. * Government intervention in the energy marketplace has, over the course of the twentieth century, worked to the * Mandates, subsidies, and governmental preferences for energy-efficient technologies fail benefit/cost tests by a wide margin. * The total costs associated with unconstrained global warming are quite minimal (no more than 2 percent of the
Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: 1973. ISBN 465012817, Page 75 Industrial societies are economizing societies, that is, they are organized around a principle of functional efficiency whose desideratum is to get “more for less” and to choose the more “rational” course of action. Thus a decision to use natural gas rather than coal as an energy fuel will be dictated by comparative costs, and the decision of how to schedule work will depend upon an appropriate combination of materials and skills available. Ideology, to this extent, becomes irrelevant and is replaced by “economics” in the guise of production functions, capital output ratios, marginal efficiency of capital, linear programming and the like.
David Lewis Feldman, The Energy Crisis Virginia, 1996: ISBN 0801853613, Page 177 Achieving what has come to be called sustainable development requires meeting the growing energy demands of developing countries. Energy efficiency is often appealed to as a means of addressing energy pollution problems. Efficiency is certainly important for many reasons. However, because developing countries are growing, energy efficiency alone will not solve environmental problems. Page 188 Furthermore, energy efficiency has historically often been a source of growth in the industry because it reduces costs and prices and increases the benefits of energy consumption (Anderson, 1993a). For example, the price of electricity has fallen by a factor of fifteen or more in the United States this century, largely because of greatly improved power-station thermal efficiencies, which have risen from around 5 percent in 1900 to 45 percent and greater for new stations today. Assuming a price elasticity of --0.5, this alone would have led to a fourfold increase of demand. Similarly, demand-side energy-saving innovations have increased rather than decreased applications of energy, and thus have increased demand (e.g., the fluorescent lamp invented for commercial lighting in the 1930s). While energy efficiency does not always lead to reduced demand, it still has significant economic benefits. 1993a. “Energy Efficiency and the Economics of Pollution Abatement.” Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 18: 291 -- 318.
Cottrell, William Frederick, Energy and Society, New York, 1955: ISBN 0837136792, Page 8
Hitoshi Shirai, “Can’t Beat The Real Thing” Lighting Design and Application magazine September 1995 The Coca-Cola trademark logo was reproduced in steel and 14 mm white neon tubes surface mounted with 38 1.8 A outdoor neon transformers. Behind the contour bottle are 2223 U-shaped neon tubes on 1223 0.47 A electronic transformers, which backlight the sea of surrounding cans creating a dynamic display. These newly developed electronic transformers made the sign energy efficient. The sign consumes 65 kW/hr—approximately 33 percent less electricity than conventional signs of the same size. the electronic transformers are controlled by electronic flashers programmed by a 163 Roms controller. The controller allows for free display of up to 1141 patterns for the sign. The 80 ton sign, sporting more than 3300m of neon, was installed with extreme care.
Barbarba Ward, The Rich Nations And The Poor Nations New York, 1962: ISBN 6211387, Page 95
Harrington Emerson, The Twelve Principles Of Efficiency The Engineering Magazine Co., New York, 1919, Page 352
Lamech, Ranjit. "When Energy Conservation Doesn't Work." Viewpoint, The World Bank, FPD Note Number 3. April 1994 , Pages 3 and 4 The mere existence of subsidy programs can create powerful interest groups who may block evolution to a more competitive power industry. The most obvious interest groups include: incumbent utility owners and operators for whom subsidy programs represent protection from competition, and stakeholders providing conservation services for the utility. Utility regulation is economically and conceptually different from the sector planning function. Regulators should ensure that utilities make low-cost decisions from a consumer's perspective, but not prescribe an investment strategy such as a specific conservation program. Regulation should allow consumers to choose between a subsidized program and lower rates. A regulator can ask for greater cost transparency, but cannot make inequitable and uneconomic choices on behalf of the consumer. Regulation should protect consumers from the monopoly power of public utilities. Regulation that allows the utility to make decisions on behalf of consumers offers no protection from monopoly abuse. They may encourage self-generation by large consumers who might opt for coal or oil-fired generation technologies to circumvent higher utility tariffs.
Gamba, Julio R. Industrial Energy Rationalization in Developing Countries. D.C.: 1986. ISBN 080183337X, Pages 7 and 8 Although opportunities for energy conservation abound, the response of energy users cannot be taken for granted. Even in a free-market economy, where energy prices tend to adjust to long-term opportunity costs, industrial and other consumers are often slow to invest in energy conservation measures, despite the potential economic and financial benefits. The response is even slower in developing countries. Five factors account for this lag: (1) the slow response, perhaps because of inertia, to changes in input prices, particularly when existing facilities have operated well in the past and when energy represents a relatively low portion of operation costs; (2) the complexity of energy conservation investments and the risks involved in adopting unfamiliar innovations and in interrupting production flows; (3) the low flows; (3) the low visibility of these investments, which normally consists of a large number of separate items and facilities; (4) the recent economic climate, which has made it difficult to generate internally (through cash flow) the financial resources needed for new investments; and (5) in countries with significant participation of the public sector in industrial activities, the emphasis on expanding output rather than on improving efficiency. Technical, financial, and economic barriers may also slow the adoption of energy-saving techniques. At the plant level, lack of information about the appropriate technical options and the absence of expertise in energy management often hamper conservation, as does conservation, as does the lack of energy-auditing capability and specialized equipment and instrumentation. Nelson, Eric. "More Stuff, Less Energy." Energy Efficiency, Wisconsin Energy Center Newsletter, Winter 2000, Volume 5, Number 1, Page 3 Compared to 1993, consumers are purchasing twice as many central air conditioners and four times as many room units. People are also buying more refrigerators than in previous years, and the units are bigger and have more features. Bigger doesn't necessarily mean more energy usage, however. "Refrigerators, for instance, are subject to federal minimum standards for efficiency," says Center project manager Richard Hasselman. Thanks to such standards – and voluntary efforts by manufacturers -- the appliances people shop for are more efficient than ever.
Timothy Somheil, “Time to Optimize” Appliance Magazine, October 1996, Page 29 Bauknecht introduced freestanding and built-in refrigerators using Aura Superinsulation, said to provide the consumer superior energy efficiency, environmental benefits, and maximized interior refrigerator space. The insulation supplier, Owens Corning, says the appliance offers enough extra space to store 50 more soft drink cans compared to other refrigerators with similar energy efficiency. Circle No. 202.
Sheahen, Thomas P. "CO-2 Tug-of-War." Independent Energy magazine April 1999, Page 4 Addiction -- it's a frightening word. Yet the most addictive man-made substance in the whole world goes unnoticed. That substance is electricity. Once hooked on electricity, nobody has kicked the habit." But what are its side effects? To meet the growing world demand for electricity, tremendous amounts of fossil fuels (mostly coal) are burned every day in power plants. The large amount of CO-2 released in the burning of fossil fuels raises the question of possible climate change due to the greenhouse effect. Infrared radiation, which would normally escape into space, tends to be trapped by a blanket of CO-2. Therefore, putting more CO-2 into the atmosphere ought to heat up the planet. Sounds plausible, but the scientific evidence about this is simply inconclusive. The best experimental data (from satellite observation) do not show any global warming, so far. Acting on the presumption of inevitable global warming, most industrialized countries are seeking ways to reduce the amount of CO-2 they emit. However, many critics have called the Kyoto treaty too hasty, especially since not all countries will agree to participate and abide by limits on emissions. Manufacturing may shift to developing countries that don't limit their CO-2 emissions. This might become a major political issue in the year 2000 elections. In the United States, the average person uses almost 31 kWh per day -- more than 1 kW constantly. Burning fossil fuels produces about 70 percent of that electricity. America's generating capacity stands at 2.7 kW per person, so there is no problem supplying the average person on an average day. Still, America could certainly be more frugal. In other developed nations (England, France, Germany, Japan), the per capita average ranges from 600 to 800 W. At the other end of the scale, in the developing countries, where a few cities are electrified but rural areas are without power, the number is much lower: Brazil uses 0.18 kW per capita, Mexico 0.14 kW, Thailand 0.14 kW, and Peru 0.06 kW. India is way down at 0.047 kW. China has a per capita electricity use of 0.078 kW. Electricity growth and economic development go hand-in-hand. The goal of the developing world is to elevate its electricity use to the European level within the next 50 years. If the United States were to curtail its electricity use, there would surely be some reduction in the CO-2 emitted from generators that burn fossil fuel. But how much? In fact, if the United States were to eliminate all electricity, stepping backward a full century and totally shutting down, the decrease in power consumption is easy to calculate: 266,000,000 people x 1,300 W/person = 346,000,000 W = 346 GW. 1,200,000,000 people x 600 W/person = 720,000,000 W = 720 GW. China's per capita power use is well below 0.1 kW; only about 165 GW capacity is in place. But China has a 600-year supply of coal, so it intends to build more than 500 new major coal-burning power plants over the next 40 years. That means more than one new plant will open per month, producing a lot of CO-2. Page 8 Further, India's 970 million people, presently consuming less than 0.05 kW per person, need more power. When all the world's planned/hoped for development is added up, global CO-2 emissions will roughly quadruple today's levels. China, India, Mexico and many other countries were very polite while declining to participate in the treaty negotiated at Kyoto. "As soon as we catch up" was the recurring phrase. The developing countries certainly don't have any sense of alarm -- "If America sees something wrong, let America work on a solution." They've got more important problems to overcome, striving to raise their standards of living. Fortunately, there is another solution to the C)-2 problem, but it isn't found in simple computational models. It's a biological solution called sequestration. Plant life locks up carbon atoms while releasing oxygen. Every piece of wood furniture represents a few more pounds of sequestered carbon. Shellfish in the ocean capture dissolved CO-2 and calcium hydroxide, forming calcium carbonate into their shells. They eventually die and the shells fall to the bottom of the ocean, and that carbon is sequestered for millions of years. Nature contains many such mechanisms to maintain balance by using up whatever chemicals are available -- we didn't originate recycling.
Pennsylvania Power and Light (PP&L) “How Conquering the Andes Illuminated the Jungles of Peru.” “Helping Build a Smaller, Wiser World.” Advertisement in Energy User News June 2000, Page 5 It was a task noteworthy for overcoming several insurmountable obstacles—a PPL trademark—thereby providing electricity to a region that desperately needed a reliable source of power. A 250-mile transmission line as constructed that stretched from Aguaytia, in the central jungle region of Peru, all the way to the coast north of Lima. It took 14 months, $282 million and the inspiration, ingenuity and dogged stamina of hundreds. We waited for the heavens to open and the rains (40 feet in 3 months) to raise the Amazon; only then could barges loaded with turbines and generators float upriver to Pucallpa. After the mud dried, we built roads and hauled the equipment as far as truck, mule and man would go. Then carried the lines across the Andes soaring 12,000 feet, across crests battered by high winds, ran them down into remote valleys and basins, pushed through the garua, the heavy mist, and traversed the Atacama desert and its searing heat. Always avoiding Incan ruins. Always ecologically sound. There are issues in our own backyard that loom as daunting as the Andes: deregulation, logistics, the environment, energy efficiencies. If we can conquer the Peruvian landscape, it stands to reason we can help solve your problems right here at home. We’re one of the largest national and global resource and delivery companies in the world with the wherewithal to plan, execute and manage an entire operation. We modernize Egypt’s Aswan High Dam, energize Chile’s distribution lines, operate power plants in Spain, conserve energy in the Philippines, and help Ukraine’s power suppliers function in a free-market economy. We deliver on our power. We deliver on our promises. So today, the villages in the densest jungle of Peru and the towns along its crowded coastline are supplied PPL electricity all year round.
Kunstler, James Howard Home from Nowhere New York, 1996: Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0684811960, Page 101 This results in a house that is built like a television set. Only the front matters, and it only matters insofar as it can broadcast some cartoonish image of what we want others to think about it—for instance, that it vaguely conjures up Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation house, or William Shakespeare’s birthplace. The windowless sides of the building are of no consequence. Often the sides are clad in a cheaper material than the front, and the completely incompatible with it. Around here, you get harlequin bricks on the front and yellow vinyl “clapboards” on the side. And, of course, the rear is where the plug comes out, so to speak. The rear of such a subdivision house is usually a hodgepodge of ventilation caps and weirdly shaped windows that have no relation to anything but the interior position of master beds, hot tubs, and kitchen sinks. That’s where the odd-shaped windows go, the little octagons from Home Depot.
Erickson, Rita, J. Paper or Plastic?: Energy, Environment, and Consumerism in Sweden and America. Westport: 1997. ISBN 0275957667, Page 140 Ultimately, cultural analysis cannot support the argument that the contents of habit, practice, lifestyle, utility or servicing are unimportant (i.e. that they simply need to be made more efficient across the board). An attempt to take that turn was made in the 1980s, when energy research broke with its historic concern for conservation, and adopted an interest in efficiency.
Pig, Scott., Eilers, Mark, and John Reed. “Behavioral Aspects of Lighting and Occupancy Sensors in Private Offices, ACEEE 1998 Summer Study.” Page 8.161 This paper examines people’s behavior as it relates to lighting usage in private offices in a university office building. Sixty-three private offices were monitored at one-minute intervals for room occupancy and lighting usage over an 11-month period in 1995. Walk-through observations were also conducted, and two written surveys were administered. Four lighting control configurations were tested; two configurations used manual dual-level switching, and two configurations used automated daylighting controls. All rooms had occupancy sensors, however these were disconnected for one group of offices to provide a control group. The results showed that people in offices with occupancy sensors were less likely to run off the lights when they left the room. Instead they relied on the occupancy sensors to control the lights for them. They were also somewhat less likely to choose a switch setting other than full illumination from the overhead lights. Both of these findings suggest that in this kind of setting, people modify their behavior in the presence of an occupancy sensor in ways that reduce the savings potential from the device. The tendency to rely on the sensors to control the lights was estimated to reduce the savings from the occupancy sensors by about 30% in this case. Overall, the occupancy sensors were not cost effective in these individual offices from the standpoint of saving lighting energy, because people managed the lights in their offices fairly diligently. The use of blinds was also found to be a significant factor in savings from the daylight controls.
Sanders, Scott Russell. “Beneath the Smooth Skin of America.” Ressurgence magazine At night on this journey you sleep in your favourite chain of motels, where you know the colour of the bedspread and the design of the wallpaper before opening the door, and where you watch on cable television your customary shows. Arriving by and by at your destination—perhaps in another suburb where your father’s family now lives, at their third or fourth address, or in a condominium where your parents have briefly settled—you may only be able to prove that you have travelled at all by checking the milometer on the car. Chances are, the local mall will feature the same stores, the same products, the same movies and, so far as you can tell from a quick visit, the same customers as the mall back home. In what sense have you in fact left home? Could you have simply driven to the far side of your own town and seen as much novelty? With every such journey a child takes—from the familiar to the familiar by way of the familiar—the smaller and more homogeneous the world seems.
Anderson, Victor. Energy Efficiency Policies. Routledge, New York: 1993. ISBN 0415 086965, Pages 30-35 1 Consumers are far better informed about the prices of consumer durables than about their energy efficiency and the costs of running them. In many cases consumers would be willing to behave 'rationally' and save money, as well as energy, by paying for more efficient consumer durables thereby saving money on running costs, if they had the information relevant to such a choice. 2 This tendency is encouraged by the relative invisibility of some costs even after the product has been bought. In particular, the cost of electricity and gas is often difficult for consumers to discover. In some cases, metering may not even distinguish between separate flats in a block or large house, and certainly is unlikely to distinguish between energy use by different appliances (electricity bills in the UK, for example, do not itemise the charges so that consumers can see how much they are paying to run each appliance), tariffs are often complex and therefore difficult to bear in mind when deciding on energy use, and bills may be paid automatically through direct debit, perhaps only annually. 3 Consumers often rely on the manufacturers and government to deal on their behalf with difficult to technical issues, such as energy efficiency. They do not always expect to have to deal with these issues themselves, and usually lack the necessary knowledge and technical skills. 6 Governments themselves often consume energy in an inefficient way, for a variety of reasons. This is often the case with publicly-owned buildings (such as council housing in Britain), public transport, and government administration itself. 7 The 'energy efficiency industry' is often fragmented and badly organised and generally unable to compete on equal terms with the energy supply industries, which are usually far larger, better-funded, and more influential politically. 8. Corporations in both private and public sectors often distinguish sharply between current and capital spending. 9 Rented accommodation creates particular problems, because investment in energy efficiency is not paid for by the same person as the one reaping the benefits of lower running costs. 10 One force which acts against efficiency in choices between more and less energy efficient options is the fact that poorer consumers lack savings and may be unable to borrow to finance expenditure on energy efficiency. 11 Standing charges to t end to reduce the financial benefit to the consumer from using less energy units, because standing charges are at a constant level regardless of the amount of energy consumed, and so money cannot be saved on them by consumers through energy efficiency. 12 Firms, and especially small firms, often lack the financial resources which would enable them to carry out the Research and Development necessary to develop, as producers, increasingly energy-efficient technologies. 13 The efficiency option in a situation of choice is also hindered by short payback periods. In most cases, opting for greater efficiency in the use of energy can be seen as a form of investment. This is because energy-efficient appliances, machinery, and buildings are usually more expensive to buy then their energy inefficient rivals or substitutes, but also cheaper to run. 14 Governments often provide subsidies for some forms of energy supply, as with current UK policies maintaining a levy to subsidise nuclear power, or past UK policies of subsidising coal production. Unless matched by equally significant subsidies for conservation and energy efficiency, this is another source of bias in favour of extra supply of energy rather than investment to reduce demand. 15 Energy costs are often perceived by domestic and industrial consumers to be only a small proportion of their total expenditure, and therefore are not seen as something important to deal with when time is limited. 16 Taxes often discriminate against energy conservation. For example, in the UK Value Added Tax is charged on energy conservation equipment but not on domestic fuel. 17 Options which tend to increase the amount of energy consumed have a number of effects on the environment which efficiency/conservation options do not have. These can be seen as 'costs' not paid by the consumers of the extra energy but paid by the environment (and hence by everybody, including members of future generations). 18 Other subsidies result from the importance of energy supply for the economy and society, and the dependence which this creates. The most important example of this is that dependence on energy imports may lead governments into war, threats of war, and preparations for possible war, in order to maintain their supplies. 19 Dependence on imports of petroleum and other forms of energy can create balance of payments difficulties. 20 Finally, it is important to mention a further external cost which represents a large subsidy for current energy use rather than efficiency or conservation. Depletion of fossil fuels reduces the resources which will be available to future generations. In that sense, future generations are subsidising current generations if we use more than 'our share' of fossil fuel reserves.
JAKARTA POST, “Energy efficiency called for to protect environment” 10/22/1998 JAKARTA (JP). “It’s totally wrong to think that bigger and more advanced technology will use more energy, either fuel or electricity,” Emy Perdanahari of the Ministry of Mines and Energy’s directorate general of electricity and energy development said. In the late 1970s households consumed most energy in relation to their productivity but the trend later shifted to industry followed by transportation in line with the country’s development and industrialization, Emy said. “Now industry leads in the consumption of energy, followed by the transportation sector and then households,” she said. In 1997 Indonesian offices used an average of 333 kWh per square meter while the average for the region since 1992 was 246 kWh per square meter.
Ausubel, Jesse H. "Where is Energy Going." The Industrial Physicist October 26, 1999. Page 19 So, we must decarbonize, favoring natural gas strongly everywhere and preparing the way for hydrogen, which in turn demands a restart of nuclear construction. Hydrogen and electricity can cleanly power a hundred megacities. The global energy system has been evolving in this direction but perhaps not fast enough, especially for those most anxious about climatic change. With business as usual, the decarbonization of the energy system will require a century or so. The year 2000 will be remembered as the time of the sanctification of gas. But Saint Methane is only an apostle for hydrogen, the forever fuel. Already glimpsed, hydrogen will gradually gain its worldwide following, beginning soon, in the dawning of the nuclear millennium. |
John Polimeni, Kozo Mayumi, Mario Ciampietro, and Blake Alcott, The Jevons Paradox and the Myth of Resource Efficiency Improvements, Earthscan, 2008 London. ISBN 978-1-84407-462-4 Page 3 Certainly, one would think that improvements in energy efficiency will reduce energy consumption and increase the effect of a given supply. Yet the point we want to make in this book is that this is not always the case. We aim to show that increased energy efficiency leads to increased demand and consumption of energy…. We have written this book to provide a warning that relying on energy efficiency and technology as a solution is foolhardy. Page 24 All oxidized molecules, unless they are recycled by means of further energy inputs, as with carbon sequestration, must count as ‘final’ output. Space heating can be defined by the time needed for the space to return to (lower) ambient temperature from that desired, but the higher-entropy energy is nevertheless part of output. Lumens rather than ‘lighting services’ can be measured, but light pollution and heat as a ‘by-product are also output. Steel cannot be made without ‘scrap’. While a ‘first-law- ratio must be one-to-one, ‘efficiency’ must be variable, perhaps leaving no way around some concept of utility: we must measure inputs only against the output we like. While GDP thus aggregates unsatisfactorily, physical or combined physical/utility metrics have not yet been found. Page 47 Today’s environmental efficiency strategy claims that an input’s more efficient use lowers its rate of consumption. The inverse/corollary of this is that were processes to become less efficient, we would consume the input at a higher rate. Or had technological efficiency increase remained unchanged – stopped, say, around 1781 with ‘the introduction of Watt’s engine, the pit-coal iron furnace, and the cotton factory’ (Jevons, p270) – we would, according to the strategy’s assumptions, today consume a hundred or a thousand times as much – of infinitely more – labour or cotton or fuel than we do today after over two centuries of efficiency increase. To maintain that rebound is less than 100 percent one must defend this conclusion. Page 169 A variety of regions and countries were presented in this chapter to illustrate how the widespread the Jevons Paradox may be. The countries included in the case studies were both economically and geographically diverse. The case studies include a developed country with a mediocre record on environmental conservation, a developed region with a strong environmental record, developing countries on the verge of ‘developed’ status, and a developing country actively promoting environmentally sensitive energy policies. The results strongly suggest that energy-efficient technological improvements as the solution for the world’s energy problems will not work, Rather, energy-efficient technology improvements are counter-productive, promoting energy consumption.
Barboza, Steven. The African American Book of Values: Classic Moral Stories. New York: 1998. ISBN 0385482590 Page 9 Be saving. Don't burn lights unnecessarily. Be sure that the hot water faucet is turned off. Don't leave the hose on too long in the back yard. Don't drive the automobile around the corner when you can walk. Don't turn the radio on in the morning and let it run all day. Don't leave the outside doors wide open when the furnace is going full blast. “But the Air Was Clean” By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, June 22, 2004 [S]ure, it disrupted the lives of millions and cost the North American economy billions, but last summer’s blackout had one benefit, University of Maryland scientists say. Briefly, at least, the shutdown of more than 100 power plants cleaned up the air. The scientists say air monitoring conducted over central Pennsylvania on Aug. 15, the second day of the blackout, showed sharply reduced concentrations of ozone and sulfur dioxide, which contribute to haze and For nearly two decades, Maryland researchers have been monitoring air quality in and around the state using small planes. A monitoring flight was in the air on Aug. 15 when scientists realized they had a chance to conduct unique research. “It was an opportunity to quantify directly the contribution of power plants to haze and pollution,” said Dr. Lackson Marufu, an atmospheric chemist. So the plane was diverted to rural central Pennsylvania, downwind of shutdown power plants. The data from there was compared with same-day data from Northern Virginia and western Maryland, outside the blackout area, and with data from central Pennsylvania from a day in 2002 when wind and temperature conditions were similar. The researchers also modeled the air movement throughout the region in the hours before and after the sampling flight. The simulations showed that the cleaner air reached Baltimore, New York and other East Coast cities. Dr. Marufu said they had expected to find cleaner air - after all, power plants are a major contributor to smog. “What surprised us was the extent that they influenced the regional air quality,” he said. The scientists had to rely on simulations for the regional studies because there was little other data available that day. "The ground stations which normally monitor air quality were all down because of the blackout," Dr. Marufu said. Through dreamy eyes she gazed into the night "But, dear,"
Smil, Vaclav. Energy: A Beginner’s Guide One World Publications, Oxford, 2006. ISBN 3:9781851684526 Stobaugh, Robert and Yergin, Daniel, editors. Energy Future. New York: Ballentine Books, 1979, Page 176 In November 1973, shortly after the Arab oil embargo went into effect, the DWP [Los Angeles Department of Water and Power] realized that 11 million barrels of already contracted North African low-sulphur oil (more than half its annual consumption of oil) would not be delivered. Early in December, newspapers ran stories with panic headlines like “What to Do When the Lights Go Out.” Facing a substantial shortfall in electricity production, anxious city officials discussed ways to reduce consumption. They talked about limiting the work week, instituting rolling blackouts in various neighborhoods, and hiking prices massively. But they feared that major loss of jobs would result from reducing the work week, and that massive price hikes would arouse a storm of protest. In the middle of December, an ad hoc committee, representing a broad coalition of civic, business, and labor leaders, came up with an alternative—to set mandatory targets for reductions for all customers—but to leave it to the customers themselves to implement the specific cuts. And so, in mid-December, the city council adopted a two-phased Emergency Energy Curtailment Plan, the purpose of which was to “significantly reduce the consumption of electricity over an extended period of time, thereby extending the available fuel required for the production of electricity, while reducing the hardships on the city and the general public to the greatest possible extent.” Under Phase I, to go into effect immediately, customers were to cut back on their use, compared to the same billing period of the previous year. There was a stiff penalty for non-compliance: a 50 percent surcharge on the entire bill. The aim was to reduce the city’s total electricity consumption by 12 percent. The response to the targets of Phase I, to everyone’s surprise, went far beyond the targets themselves.
The drop was 17 percent, against a target of 12 percent. Much of the adjustment in commercial establishments, which accounted for 50 percent of electricity usage prior to the cutback, was done mostly through better control of lighting and air-conditioning. The Los Angeles Dodgers met their target by the simple expedient of starting baseball games at 7:30 instead of 8pm. Philip Hawley, head of the ad hoc mayor’s committee and chief author of the Los Angeles Plan, has observed, “It was important to tell people what was expected of them, to give them specific energy reduction targets.... Our job was to reduce the usage of energy, not to mandate lifestyles, not to reduce hours that businesses were open, and not to indulge in costly methods and select certain segments of the economy, but to protect employment to the maximum degree possible, and to try to do this in a way that would result in a minimum of job loss or preferably no job loss.” In May 1974, two months after the Arab embargo was lifted, the program was suspended, but its impact could still be felt a year later; in May of 1975, the total electricity sales were 8 percent lower than the 1973 level. In addition, there had been a far greater reduction in DWP consumption than in that of the three other largest electric utilities in California, none of which had adopted such a program. Congress is reworking legislation that addresses the nation's electricity transmission problems. What's in the new energy plan?
Kotler, Philip. Social Marketing. New York: 1989. ISBN 0029184614 Pages 102 and 154 Social marketers can use a variety of motivators to induce learning. For example, a social marketing campaign to change people’s perceptions of conserving electric energy used television and newspaper advertising to convey a fear message: “It is good to have electricity. Save, so you will not lack it.” The campaign took place right after a popular television show in Israel in 1980 that dramatized Israel’s overuse of electricity. The show’s host asked the audience to turn off all the extra lights in their homes. The viewers then saw the effect of their actions on their screen: a camera focused on the Israeli Electric Company’s electricity-consumption gauges. Within a few seconds, the gauges dropped sharply. The vividness of the means-end relationship that this campaign demonstrated convinced viewers to use electricity more carefully. Deutsh and Liebermann estimated that the collective behavior saved Israel 6 percent in aggregate electricity consumption during the 8 months of the campaign.... When a product or a message communicating a product arises from a campaign or campaign staff that enjoys great credibility and respect, the likelihood that the product will be adopted is greatly increased. For example, in 1978, to get customers to cut down on electricity consumption, one set of households received the campaign’s message from Con Edison (a low credibility source); a second set, from the New York State Public Service Commission (a high credibility source); and a third set, the control group, received no communications. The households received the marketing messages with their monthly electric bills. In the month following receipt of the energy-conservation communications, the electric bills of the three groups were compared. The two groups that received the electricity-conservation messages used significantly less electricity than did the group that received no such communication, and the group that received the message from the Public Service Commission used substantially less electricity than did the group that received the message from Con Edison.
James Howard Kunstler, “Virtual Is No Refuge From Reality - For children, no escape from America’s car-dependent, cheap-oil fiesta” Elm Street Writers Group 9/26/2003 One of the extremely painful lessons of our time, I’m convinced, will be that the virtual is not an adequate substitute for the real. It will be painful because the notion of virtuality has become a psychological crutch for a culture that is For one thing, it was a way of turning the lack of something into an opportunity to sell more products. The lack of town centers in suburbia led to malls. The lack of access to either complex integral townscapes or real rural landscapes led to theme parks or, in the case of Las Vegas, fragmentary ersatz urbanism. The general impoverishment of the public realm For adults the result has been an amazing amount of pervasive situational loneliness. Despite the fact that so many Americans own a car there is no place to go, at least no places of casual socializing unrelated to chain store commerce. So the chat rooms and listserves of the Internet are supposed to take the place of actually being somewhere. Captive Kids For children, this trend has been catastrophic because they lack the mobility to use environments designed solely for motoring. This consigns kids either to nebulous low-grade hangouts in the left over scrap places of suburbia – the 7-Eleven parking lot, the storm sump, the wooded “buffer” between the housing tract and the strip mall – or to virtual and heavily commercialized public realms of television and the computer, which include rentable movies, the Internet, and computer games. The most remarkable aspect of these movies and games is their violence, grandiosity, antisocial behavior, and exaltation of technology. A lone Bruce Willis potently and adroitly kills dozens of enemies and saves the world. A gamer manipulates a joystick to waste legions of invaders with virtual gunfire or death rays to save the world. The wish to save the world is obviously not inadvertent since it is based on the perhaps subconscious recognition that our immediate “world” of American culture and American place badly needs to be saved. It’s not a coincidence that the degree of grandiose fantasized empowerment provided by these “entertainments” exists in inverse relation to the loss of power that suburban children suffer in controlling their own lives. Stuck in a disaggregated habitat and totally dependent on chauffeuring to get from one part of their world to another, suburban children are deprived of the most fundamental process of growing up: Developing a sense of personal sovereignty, the confidence of being able to make decisions about using one’s environment, and then acting on those decisions. The fact that so many suburban children are obese should tell us that they have also lost control even of their own bodies, a final, tragic insult on top of the developmental injuries they endure. Technology, Cheap Oil, Listless Lives It has been an over-investment in technology that got us into this predicament — the wish to build a drive-in utopia. And it will be the failure of this entropic project that may rescue us, if it doesn’t put the human race out of business altogether. Specifically, the world is now facing the end of a century-long cheap oil fiesta with no real prospect of replacing fossil fuels with other things. There is not going to be any “hydrogen economy.” It’s a fantasy promoted by politicians and business leaders who see what is coming, are scared out of their wits, and have nothing offer besides wishful thinking. The bottom line is this: No combination of alternative fuels or procedures will allow us to run what we are currently running in the United States, or even a substantial fraction of it. If we want American civilization to continue we will have to rescale and reorganize everything we do, from farming, to schooling, to retail commerce, to the places we live in. We will have to rebuild local networks of economic interdependence and we will have to reconstruct real communities as the context for it to happen in. There will be a lot less motoring. Circumstances will compel us to do this or the future will belong to other people in other places. It will be a difficult transition in any case. But a half century from now we may look back and marvel that we had ever become so collectively psychotic to pretend that the virtual was the same as the real.
James Kunstler “No War For Oil? Forget about it in sprawl-dominant culture” What oil gluttons get, whether they are Republican realtor jingoists or Democratic leftist peacenik commuters, is war. Walking down the street of my traditional small town the other day I saw a bumper sticker that said it all: “War is not the answer.” I emphasize, a bumper sticker. On a car. But you see, war is the answer if you insist on a car-dependent, oil-addicted mode of living. Nobody in my crowd of middle-aged, ex-hippie, environmentally enlightened, putative political progressives has opted out of the American drive-in utopia. In fact, all spring they were driving down to the peace marches outside the post office. Now the Law of Perverse Outcomes is biting them on the butt. That law states that people don't get what they expect but they get what they deserve. And what oil gluttons will get, whether they are Republican realtors jingoists or Democratic leftist peacenik commuters, is war. The world is leaving the cheap oil epoch behind and that will change absolutely everything. The key to understanding what is about to happen is this: We don’t have to run out of oil to suffer tremendous disruptions in our sprawl-dominated living arrangements. All that’s necessary is to cross the tipping point of global peak production and enter the downward arc of depletion. The best estimates are that this will happen between now and the year 2010. The weight of opinion is lately pointing to the early end of the scale. The global oil peak will actually be more like a “bumpy plateau,” a period of a few years when worldwide oil production, while remaining robust, fails to keep with rising world demand. But on that bumpy plateau, economies will wobble and we will begin to see a process that might be called globalism in reverse. Economic relations we have taken for granted - like Wal-Marts filled with merchandise made 12,000 miles away - will fall by the wayside like overspecialized dinosaurs whose favorite food has died off in a climate change. In a few years we will look back on suburbia and all its accessories for what it actually was: The greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. Meanwhile, our Iraq adventure will be only the first of many international contests over the world’s remaining oil reserves. Many people - again of all political stripes - believe that the United States may find itself in a military occupation of Arabia in the near future, especially if the Saud tribe, which has owned the place and a huge percentage of the world’s remaining oil reserves for half a century, loses its grip on power. Guess what? We might be able to send an army in there, but there is no way that we can protect the oil infrastructure of that country from an endless supply of angry Jihadistas armed with rocket-propelled grenades, shoulder-launched missiles, semtech plastic explosives, and other easy-to-get small arms available to anyone with a few thousand dollars (or the equivalent in rapidly inflating 2003 dollars). Sooner or later, you understand, we will have to compete with China for the world’s remaining oil goodies. When that happens, Wal-Mart may find itself short of the stuff they stock their shelves with. And we will find ourselves with a cored-out industrial sector, unable to supply ourselves anything from frying pans to underpants. By the way, there is not going to be a smooth transition to a hydrogen economy. Hydrogen is the policy wonks? fantasy du jour for saving America’s drive-in utopia. It presents monumental problems that show little promise of being solved, at least not for decades, and quite possibly never. Hydrogen requires more net energy to make than the energy it produces and is extremely difficult to store and transport. None of these problems is any closer to being solved than the problems of breeder reactors, which were promised to us 30 years ago as a sure bet to produce cheap electricity. Nor will we be able to run what we are currently running in America on any combination of other alternative fuels or technologies, including wind power, solar power, tar sands, corn-based ethanol, or the much talked about fuel cell. The scary truth is that we are going to have to drastically downscale all the normal everyday activities of daily life in America. We will have to reduce the presence of cars in our lives. We’re going to have to live closer to the centers of things, namely in towns and villages. We’re going to have to grow much more of our food closer to home and produce more of our own household goods locally. We’re going to have to reconstruct the local networks of economic interdependence that were systematically destroyed by the Wal-Marts. We’re going to have to make schools smaller. We are not prepared for any of this. And because we’re not prepared, we are liable to live through a long period of political, social, and economic turmoil as events sort things out for us. (Then the question will be: Can we continue the project of civilization in the context of a democratic republic?) In the meantime, flaunting anti-war bumper stickers may make us feel morally superior to some of our other fellow citizens. But the mentality behind it is no more intelligent than the rationalizations of the sprawl-meisters and the Humvee buyers. James Howard Kunstler, who lives in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., is the author of The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere, and other books. He is working on a new book about the coming end of the cheap fossil fuel era. Reach him at Kunstler@aol.com. James Howard Kunstler. The Long the Emergency: surviving the converging catastrophes of the 21st century. New York: 2005, Atlantic Monthly Press ISBN 0871138883. Pages 29-30 It is a little hard to say what Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush really thought about America's oil predicament, because both affected to subscribe to a branch of evangelical Protestantism that posited an "End Times" apocalyptic scenario for the near future, meaning that it wouldn't matter what happened to the world very far into the 21st century because the kingdom of Jesus was at hand. Where Reagan and George H. W. Bush only pretending, or did they actually believe the future was irrelevant? During the Clinton presidency, baby-boomer hippies had matured into yuppies who enjoy the benefits of cheap oil so much (and were so spoiled by it) that they sell easily into a consensus trance regarding America's energy future: party on. The Alaskan and North Sea oil bonanzas had erased their memories of the brief 1970s oil crises. During most of the 1980s and 1990s gas prices at the pump were lower in constant dollars than at any other time in history. It was the former-hippie boomer yuppies, after all, who started the SUV craze and bought the McMansions way off in the outermost suburbs. At the same time, stunning advances in computer development (boomer-led), and the rapid growth of the huge new industry that went with it, had introduced among the boomer cultural elite the mentality of extreme techno-hubris, leading many to the conviction that our fantastic innovative skills guaranteed a smooth transition into the alternative fuels future -- which, of course, squared with the wishful views of conventional economists. It all amounted to an unfortunate self-reinforcing feedback loop of delusion. Clinton Democrats regarded any upticks in oil prices as being a conspiracy between the Republicans and their donor-sponsors in the oil industry. Meanwhile, Democrats have tried to compensate for their purblind irresponsibility on energy issues by assuming a position of moral superiority on environmental issues. Yet many yuppie progressive "greens" are the ones who drove their SUVs to environmental rallies and, even worse, made their homes at the far exurban fringe, requiring massive car dependence in their daily lives. The epitome of this attitude was Amory B. Lovins, head of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who devoted his organization's time and energy in the 1990s to the development of a high mileage "hypercar" that would have only promoted the unhelpful idea that Americans can continue to lead urban lives in the rural setting. Lovins also built the organization's headquarters in a remote part of the Colorado backcountry, which employees could get to only by car. Pages 122-23 You don't have to go to extremes to gain value from passive solar design. I once built a small post-and-beam house designed to soak up some light during the day and store it in a concrete slab. It was not a robust engineering effort in terms of energy efficiency. Yet I was able to keep the whole building comfortably warm on a winter day by firing up a small wood stove in the morning. It wasn't necessary to refire the stove until evening time. The heating bill was remarkably low. Running the house required very little work -- seven minutes a day to cut kindling and another five to light fires in the stove. You might even figure in the one afternoon a year I had to spend stacking firewood delivered in a heap by dump truck. The house didn't even look weird, as more hyperengineered passive solar houses of that era did. In contrast the stock products of the home-building industry in recent years have been ludicrous in terms of even minimally utilizing passive solar energy. The typical "McMansion," or super-sized tract house on a half-acre lot, with its "lawyer-foyer" and great room, is an energy hog and many of them may be uninhabitable in the coming age of energy austerity. They were designed under the assumption that natural gas would be cheap and plentiful forever. In fact, the single-family stand-alone house may have a tragic destiny in the years ahead. For several generations this way of living has been the norm in America, but it hasn’t always been so. The single-family house in the suburban subdivision owes everything to cheap energy and to the broad middle class that cheap energy has made possible. Until the 20th century, stand-alone houses in the rural setting were either farmhouses, villas or peasant hovels. People who lived in a rural setting practiced rural lifeways, generally having to do with food production. People involved in trade, services, and labor lived in town, and proportionally far fewer of them were homeowners. I believe we will be heading back to that prior state. The 20th century single-family suburban home alienated from the surrounding landscape may soon be obsolete. The norms for housing in the coming year of energy austerity will have to be much more traditional and integral with their surroundings. Because we will have to grow more of our own food closer to home, land will be valued more for agriculture than for commuter houses. This profound shift in values will reestablish the distinction between country living and town living, with appropriate building typologies, and they will certainly require a return to passive solar building techniques. Pages 187-88 Under the banner of free-market globalism, the chief side effect of oligarchial corporatism making its money piles bigger was the systematic destruction of local economies and therefore local communities. Thus, the richest nation in the world in the early 21st century had become an amazing panorama of ruined towns and cities with broken institutions and demoralized populations -- surrounded by a Wal-Marts and Target stores. The free-market part of the equation referred to the putative benefit of unrestrained economic competition between individuals, and because corporations enjoyed the legal status of persons, they were assumed to be on an equal footing with other persons and a given locality. Thus, Wal-Mart was considered the theoretical equal of Bob the appliance store owner, and if Bob happened to lose the retail competition because he couldn't order 50,000 coffee-makers at a crack from a factory 12,000 miles away in Hangzhou, and receive a deep discount for being such an important customer, well, it wasn't as though he hadn't been given the chance. The free-market also referred to an extreme version of the old idea of comparative advantage, which had meant originally that every locality has something special it is good at producing, or some raw material and ready supply, that a larger macro economy is made up of such specialist trading partners. Under globalism, this was modified to mean that for the sake of "efficiency" such trading partners ought to forget everything else and pump out as much of their specialty is possible (using the money received to buy goods and services from other specialists). There were a number of problems with this simplistic idea. One was that cheap oil subsidized the whole system, and the system would have been impossible without it. Cheap oil had allowed populations to explode in precisely those parts of the world that had had, for millennia, a high infant mortality rate and modest life expectancy. Cheap oil was behind the "green revolution" that increased the food supply in the nonindustrial world. Oil was also behind many of the medicines and preventives that had neutralized tropical diseases. Now, suddenly, most of those children actually survived, grew up, and produced more children who survived and grew up, and over the course of the 20th century, the global populations hurtled in two extreme numerical overshoot. Populations were, in effect, eating oil, notably in food exports from the United States, where agribusiness had completely taken over from agriculture. Local farmers in Africa, Asia, or South America couldn't compete with corporate Archer Daniels Midland's oil-and-gas-based grain crops and U.S. government subsidies. There was no point in even bringing their hardscrabble crops to market when sacks of cheap American wheat sat on the docks of Pusan or Colombo. Farmers in those places felt that they had no choice but to migrate to the city and find some other way to get by. The only comparative advantage that these people possessed was their willingness to work for next to nothing. Cheap oil and free-market globalism turned comparative advantage into a new kind of feudalism, with the corporations as the lords and the overabundant locals as the serfs. And then, when the comparative advantage of cheap labor ($5 a day) of one place, such as Mexico, was superseded by the cheaper labor (99 cents a day) of another place, such as Sri Lanka, the corporations just moved their operations. James Howard Kunstler. The Long the Emergency: surviving the converging catastrophes of the 21st century. New York: 2005, Atlantic Monthly Press ISBN 0871138883. Pages 191-92 The reason that everything in the real world does not fall apart at once is that the flow of entropy faces obstructions or constraints. The more complex the system, the more constraints. A given system will automatically select the paths or drains to get the system to a final state -- exhaust its potential -- at the greatest possible rate given the constraints. Simple, ordered flows drain entropy at a faster rate than complexly disordered flows. Hence, the creation of ever more efficient ordered flows in American society, the removal of constraints, has accelerated the winding down of American potential, which is exactly why a Wal-Mart economy will bring us to grief more rapidly than a national a collaboration of diverse independent small-town economies. Efficiency is the straightest path to hell. Inefficient economies are much more complex than efficient ones. Complexity itself can be deceiving. Biogenic complexity constrains entropy flows with checks and balances. What we take to be man-made artificial complexity (technology) is, paradoxically, a simple application process that increases flows by editing away inefficiencies. The ecology of a prairie will keep the soil active and healthy indefinitely, while the ecology of a fossil-fuel-subsidized cornfield will leach the soil of useful nutrients and physically erode it in less than a human lifetime. The ecology of a pond, with its diverse hierarchies of life and multitude of biological nitches and food chains, is much more complex than the Crown Point, New York, trout hatchery with its monoculture of fish, its inputs of manufactured fish food, and its staff of attendants cleaning waste out of the cement hatchery impoundments. The natural pond also has more chance of continuing indefinitely into the future. The built-in constraints of inefficient biogenic economies reduce the flow of potential, often to the point where systems based on inefficient economies last for geological epochs, not just a few decades in the case of a fish hatchery. Everything that we identify with nature takes the form of inefficient systems. Biogenic or living systems are self-stabilizing. They are self-buffered. Small differences are dampened out. Entropy is stalled within them. They exhibit negative feedback tending toward long-term stability. Call this condition "negative entropy." Everything we identify with the man-made substitutes for natural bioeconomics, that is, technologies, tends toward positive feedback which is self-amplifying, self-reinforcing, and destabilizing, featuring the removal of constraints to entropy flows and leading to the certain eventual destruction of that system. Call this condition "positive entropy." Pages 210-211 An ecological view of history could interpret the rise of totalitarian government as yet another bi-product of high entropy. Both Nazism and Soviet-style communism might he described as politics "polluted" by insane ideology -- a consensus disorder, often characterized as mass psychosis. Both systems grew out of social distress provoked by industrialism. Both systems undertook the extreme regimentation of their citizens as a defense against disorder -- against entropy. The logic of the machine was overlaid on whole social relations at a scale identical to that mass production of factory goods, and by similar methods. In the process, these systems achieved unprecedented industrial efficiencies in killing off those citizens unsuitable for regimentation. Stalin's terror and Hitler's holocaust were regimented die-offs. Adjustments to ecological carrying capacity were carried out with the remorseless logic of Taylorism. World War II was an additional industrially organized die-off, with accompanying massive environmental destruction and social disorder. When it was over, the European principles were battered and entropically wasted. America had participated in the military die off of World War II to the extent of 295,000 killed in action, but its industrial engines of production and entropy creation remained intact, along with its reserves of oil and the infrastructure for producing it. After the war, the United States embarked on the high-entropy projects of building a suburban drive-in utopia and a nuclear arsenal. The first was a living arrangement with no future, and the second was the ultimate expression of entropy --an industrial means for sterilizing the planned earth of all life
Pages 221-22 The outfitting of corporate America with computer networks and systems for bookkeeping, inventory, shipping, and tracking certainly generated a lot of business and sales activity for the computer industry itself, and the boom of the 1990s was, of course, largely based on this tremendous installation of digital infrastructure and its regular updating every two or three years as the computers got more powerful. But that too was fraught with diminishing returns, and on anticipated consequences -- another manifestation of entropy. The computerization of corporate America promoted the hemorrhaging of jobs and whole industries to offshore locations and "outsourcing" of whole departments to other countries. Additional diminishing returns associated with a victory of national chain retail were the wholesale destruction of American communities, including both the "hardware" of towns and the "software" of social roles and networks associated with them. Computers only assisted predatory corporations in more successfully parasitizing existing value and victimized localities. There were most efficient and sucking the life blood out of complex communities. They helped "convert" complexity into simple this (to seize one big box instead of twenty-seven local businesses) and entropizing society. Ultimately, the computer revolution led to the "dot-com economy" of the late 1990s, which amounted to a classic bubble over the perceived (or misperceived) moneymaking potential of the Internet. A few gigantic successes were scored in Web-based businesses. Soon, investment banks were backing stock offerings on hundreds of businesses, many of which amounted only to a dream or a wish on paper. Vast amounts of money were raised in initial public offerings for laughable ventures, but the public had lost its critical faculties. Many investors knew nothing about computers anyway, or were intimidated by them. They had seen the immense fortunes made by Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and the like. They even used Web-based businesses such as Google and eBay, and they assumed that some of the bright young dudes in black outfits and stylish eyeglasses behind the public offerings would be the next Bill Gates or Larry Ellison. Hundreds of other ventures were capitalized and geared up, and a stunning percentage of them failed. The diminishing returns of overinvestment had struck again. Entropy expressed itself in the form of mass delusion. Pages 222-23 The dirty secret of the American economy in the 1990s was that it was no longer about anything except the creation of suburban sprawl and the furnishing, accessorizing, and financing of it. It resembled the efficiency of cancer. Nothing else really mattered except building suburban houses, trading away the mortgages, selling the multiple cars needed by the inhabitants, upgrading the roads into commercial strip highways with all the necessary shopping infrastructure, and moving vast supplies of merchandise made in China for next to nothing to fill up those houses. The economy of suburban sprawl was a systemic self-organizing response to the availability of inordinately cheap oil with ever-increasing entropy expressed in an ever-increasing variety of manifestations from the distruction of farmland to the decay of the cities, to widespread psychological depression, to the rash of school shooting sprees, to epidemic obesity. Americans didn't question the validity of the suburban sprawl economy. They accepted it at face value as the obvious logical outcome of their hopes and dreams and defended it viciously against criticism. They steadfastly ignored its salient characteristic: that it had no future either as an economy or as a living arrangement. Each further elaboration of the suburban system made it less likely to survive any change in conditions, most particularly any change in the equations of cheap oil. In Europe, expatriates have a leg up on gas prices, by Michael Woods, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Monday, May 31, 2004. (Michael Woods can be reached at mwoods@nationalpress.com or 1-202-413-0294.) Jeremy Sinek, “The Joy of (not always) Driving” from the Shifting Gears Column in World of Wheels: Canada’s Auto Magazine July 2002, Pages 1 - 2 This Guy Can Get 59 MPG in a Plain Old Accord. Beat That, Punk
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