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| TABLE OF CONTENTS |
| WELCOME TO EFFICOLOGY |
| INTRODUCTION |
| OVERALL APPRECIATION |
| THE GIFT OF NATURE |
| THE GIFT OF ENERGY |
| THE GIFT OF TIME |
| THE GIFT OF RELATIONSHIPS |
| CONCLUDING REMARKS |
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Vaclav Smil, Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. ISBN 0262194929. Chapter 6, Page 317
Anybody even cursorily familiar with the current state of principal energy conversion techniques appreciates the enormous opportunities for using fuels and electricity more efficiently…. Whatever the future gains may be, the historical evidence is clear: Higher efficiency of energy conversions leads eventually to higher, rather than lower, energy use, and eventually we will have to accept some limits on the global consumption of fuels and electricity.
Energy efficiency regulations have little impact on saving energy, helping the environment or reducing dependency on foreign oil, finds a new CIBC World Markets report
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Per Capita Daily Energy in kcal |
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Type of Society |
Gross Input |
Gross Output |
Approximate aggregate efficiency |
Subsistence agricultural |
5,000 |
500 |
10% |
Advanced agricultural |
20,000 |
3,000 |
15% |
Emerging industrial |
60,000 |
15,000 |
25% |
Advanced industrial |
120,000 |
42,000 |
35% |
Industrial technological |
225,000 |
81,000 |
36% |
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.
Reducing consumption is usually more cost-effective than expanding supply. By increasing efficiency, the same amount of electricity cam serve more users without requiring massive capital investments to expand power plant capacity.
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.
Campbell, Colin J., and Jean H. Laherrere. The End of Cheap Oil. Scientific American, March 1998, Page 81
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://www.hubbertpeak.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3777413.stm
Is the world’s oil running out fast?
By Adam Porter at the Peak Oil conference in Berlin
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
“If we price oil correctly,” Mr Simmons says, “it could give us time to find bridge fuels, fuels to fill the gap between an oil economy and a renewable economy. But I don’t see that happening.” The adherents of the peak oil theory warn the decline of world oil output will force oil prices higher for good, and that the knock on effects could be catastrophic.
“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.
“For the time being there is no spare capacity. But we expect demand to increase by the fourth quarter (of the year) by three million barrels a day.”
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/>
With the return of the highest oil prices since the energy crisis of the early 1980s, there are growing cries of alarm that the world is running out of oil. Some speculate that Saudi Arabia has reached maturity as a producing state and that its production will decline. Others cite the Hubbert curve, which postulates that once more than 50 percent of reserves are produced, output inevitably declines.
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
Experts try to predict when the world will start running low on the natural resource that keeps all the engines running
Verne Kopytoff, Chronicle Staff Writer
<mailto:vkopytoff@sfchronicle.com>
Sunday, March 21, 2004
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.
Or maybe not. A rival school of thought says that oil’s imminent demise is exaggerated and that crude will be plentiful into the near future.
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
Saudi Arabia - 8.54
Russia - 7.65
Mexico - 3.61
Iran - 3.54
China - 3.37
Norway - 3.33
Canada - 2.94
Venezuela - 2.91
United Kingdom - 2.55
United Arab Emirates - 2.38
Nigeria - 2.12
Iraq - 2.04
Kuwait - 2.03
Table (2):. Countries with the biggest oil reserves, 2003 In billions of barrels
Saudi Arabia - 261.8
Canada - 180.02
Iraq - 112.5
United Arab Emirates - 97.8
Kuwait - 96.5
Iran - 89.7
Venezuela - 77.8
Russia - 60
Libya - 29.5
Nigeria - 24
United States - 22.67
China - 18.25
Qatar - 15.2
Mexico - 12.62.
Sources: Energy Information Administration, Oil & Gas Journal, Map: ESRICHART (3):
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:
2002: 66.92 million barrels per day..
When will reserves start to decline?
Studies give a wide array of time frames for when oil production will peak. Following is a sampling of forecasts:
2000-2010: Colin Campbell, retired oil industry geologist
2004-2008: Kenneth Deffeyes, professor emeritus in geoscience,
PrincetonUniversity
2010-2020: International Energy Agency
2010-2025: Jean Laherrere, retired French oil executive and consultant
2021-2112: U.S. Energy Information AdministrationSource: Energy Information AdministrationChronicle Graphic
Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage. New Jersey: Princeton University Press 2001 ISBN 0-691-09086-6, Page 149
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.
This much is certain: no initiative put in place starting today can have a substantial effect on the peak production year. No Caspian Sea exploration, no drilling in the South China Sea, no SUV replacements, no renewable energy projects can be brought on at a sufficient rate to avoid a bidding war for the remaining oil. At least, let’s hope that the war is waged with cash instead of with nuclear warheads.
Romm, Joseph J. Industrial Management. New York: Kodansha America, 1994. ISBN 1568360371, Page 72
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.
Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrialized Societies. Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2003. ISBN 086571482-7. Page 163
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.
James C. Cooper, “The Price of Efficiency.” Business Week magazine, March 22, 2004, Pages 40-41.
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
Horace Herring e-mail : h.herring@open.ac.uk tel: 01908 653335
EERU Report No 074 - July 1998
1. Introduction
It has become an article of faith amongst environmentalists, seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, that improving the efficiency of energy use will lead to a reduction in energy consumption. This proposition has even been adopted by the UK government who is now promoting energy efficiency as the most cost effective solution to global warming.
However in the USA there has been a backlash against energy efficiency as an instrument of energy policy. This has been stimulated partly by disillusionment with the failures of energy conservation programs undertaken by utilities, and partly by the growing influence of the ‘contrarians’ - those hostile to government mandated environmental programs.
The debate as to whether energy efficiency is effective (that is reduces energy consumption) has spread from the pages of obscure energy economic journals in the early 1990s to the pages of newspapers, such as The New York Times in the mid 1990s. It has recently produced such polemics as the US book by Herbert Inhaber entitled Why Energy Conservation Fails, which argues, with the aid of an extensive bibliography, that mandated energy efficiency programs are a waste of time and effort.
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
This paper aims to inform non-economists of this mostly US debate on energy economics. It refers to the views of economists - both classical and environmental - and to the historical evidence on the effect of improving energy efficiency on energy consumption. This paper aims to refer readers to sources of information on this debate rather than rehash the arguments on each side. Hopefully it will stimulate a similar debate in the UK and encourage further research.
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
Economic theory accepts (Brookes 1979, 1990; Khazzoom 1980, 1987; Saunders 1984 and 1992, Sutherland 1994, 1996), and the historical record for most of this century suggests (Schurr 1984, 1990), that increased energy efficiency at the microeconomic level while leading to a reduction of energy use at this level, leads not to a reduction, but instead to an increase in energy use, at the national, or macroeconomic level. This concept has been termed the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate.
From Jevons to Saunders
The name of the Khazzoom-Brookes (KB) postulate was coined by the US economist Harry Saunders in 1992. This followed papers published independently by Daniel Khazzoom and Leonard Brookes in the late seventies and early eighties; although both of them acknowledge a debt to a paper by Stanley Jevons, in his classic work The Coal Question, first published in 1865.
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
The KB postulate may be described as those energy efficiency improvements that, on the broadest considerations, are economically justified at the microlevel lead to higher levels of energy consumption at the macrolevel than in the absence of such improvements. Saunders’ paper claimed to show that postulate was consistent with neo-classical growth theory over a wide range of assumptions. It argues against the views of conservationists - those promoting energy efficiency as a means of reducing energy consumption - that one can identify every little benefit from each individual act of energy efficiency and then aggregate them all to produce a macroeconomic total. In essence it adopts a macroeconomic (top down) approach rather than the microeconomic (bottom up) approach used by conservationists.
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):
Brookes’ key insight is that cost-effective energy efficiency improvements may be viewed as a form of technological progress that improves productivity, promotes capital investment, and enhances economic growth. Since the demand for energy services is driven by consumers’ incomes and by requirements for energy as a factor input, increased growth should, all else equal, lead to increased energy demand. If this growth effect is large enough, it might counter the direct reductions in energy-output coefficients so that improved energy efficiency actually gives rise to increased use
Conservationist Disagree
The KB postulate is vigorously disputed by environmentalists. In the UK the major clashes have been of Michael Grubb (1990, 1992) with Len Brookes (1992, 1993); in the USA Amory Lovins (1988) with Daniel Khazzoom (1987). Grubb and Lovins have argued that the shift towards the service economy and the large technical potential for energy efficiency (see classic works by Lovins 1977; Olivier 1983; Weizsacker 1997) will result in reduced national energy use, if market ‘barriers’ can be overcome.
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:
We conclude that feedback effects are small in mature sectors of mature economies and only potentially large in a few cases; lowering energy intensities almost always leads to lower use than otherwise. Of course, the scale of the system keeps increasing with population, household formation, and the climb of incomes and sectorial output. We may find that over a sufficient period energy use has increased even if energy efficiency has improved. Our thesis...is that the improvement in efficiency per se is only a small part of the reason why total energy use may have increased.
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):
Even more problematic is the claims made by energy conservation enthusiasts (Grubb 1990 and Grubb et al 1991) who insist that global warming can be cured almost costlessly by adopting energy-saving measures claimed to be socially profitable. The argument for conservation in any case is independent of global warming concerns and implausible. The only market failure that distorts energy use is underpricing of electricity by regulators, and deregulation is preferable to the conservation programs into which utilities were force.
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
Not only mainstream economists, but also those working on environmental issues, accept that improving energy efficiency does not lead to reduced energy consumption. David Pearce, the leading British environmental economist, comments succinctly when he writes (Pearce 1998):
“...the point is that energy conservation lowers the real price of energy and thus induces an energy demand expansion...this is a combination of substitution effects (substituting cheaper energy for other things) and income effects (cheaper energy releases income which then gets spent on other energy-consuming things).”
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:
Ironically then, it is precisely the economic gains from improved technical efficiency that increase the rate of resource throughput. Micro-economic reality demands that these efficiency gains be used to short-term economic advantage. Far from conserving natural capital or decreasing ecological footprints, this leads to higher consumption. In a globally interlinked economy, the question then becomes: Can we afford cost-saving energy efficiency
Environmental history
B W Clapp, an economic historian, who is completely outside this debate concurs with Jevons. In his book An Environmental History of Britain (Clapp 1994) he writes in the section entitled ‘The Demand for Energy’ ...it is a regrettable fact that efficiency is never so complete as to lessen consumption. Economists from Jevons onwards have noted with perverse satisfaction that economy cheapens, that cheapness extends the market, and that measures of conservation or economy therefore increase, or at least do not diminish, the consumption of energy.
Empirical Evidence
A number of studies have been done to determine the impact of improved efficiency on energy use. In the USA a major study, for energy processes over the period 1880-1970, was done by Sam Schurr (1960, 1983, 1990). Lee Schipper and his colleagues (Schipper 1987, 1992, 1997; Howarth et al 1991, Greening 1997) have done much pioneering work on energy trends for OECD countries on a sectorial level for the period 1970-1995. However no similar work, to that done in the USA, exists (to my knowledge) for the UK.
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):
To accept the Khazzoom-Brookes hypothesis as an empirical generalisation, one must therefore assert that improvements in energy efficiency were responsible for a full 29% of the increase in gross national product that occurred during this period. Claims of this sort, however seem palpably implausible.
Biophysical economics
Another approach to analysing historic changes in energy intensity is by Robert Kaufman, a biophysical economist writing in the journal Ecological Economics (1992). He argues that the system boundaries used by neoclassical economists cannot be used to translate energy saved at the microlevel to energy saved at the macrolevel. He concludes “substitution and technical change have had relatively little effect on the amount of energy used to produce a unit of real GDP in France, Germany, Japan and the UK during the post war period. Instead, most of the changes are associated with shifts in the types of energies used and the types of goods and services consumed and produced”.
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
Energy analysts, who had previously ignored the macroeconomic effects of energy efficiency policies are now beginning to consider them. This is in contrast to the long and acrimonious debate about the extent of microeconomic effects - the consumer “rebound” effect - notably between Amory Lovins and Daniel Khazzoom in the pages of The Energy Journal.
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:
...gains in the efficiency of energy consumption will result in the effective reduction in the per unit price of energy consumption for both firms and consumers. As a result, consumption of energy should increase, partially offsetting the impact of the efficiency gains on fuel use. However after looking at extensive evidence on the microlevel and highly uncertain evidence at the macrolevel, they conclude (p44) that:
“...most or all of any reductions in energy use or carbon emissions are not lost to changes in behaviour. This leads us to the conclusion that the rebound is not high enough to mitigate the importance of energy efficiency as a way of reducing carbon emissions. However, climate policies that rely only on energy efficiency technologies may need reinforcement by market instruments such as fuel taxes and other incentive mechanisms. Without such mechanisms, a significant portion of the technological achievable carbon and energy savings could be lost to the rebound”.
3. British Policy Debate
There was a heated debate in the 1980s about the role of energy efficiency in national energy policy, firstly as a means of ensuring national energy security in times of high oil prices, and more recently as a means to combat global warming.
In the early 1980s Andrew Warren from the lobby groups ACE, argued that energy efficiency was the ‘fifth fuel’, but this concept was denounced by Nigel Lawson when Secretary for Energy. At the 1982 BIEE/IAEE Conference he said (Tempest 1983):
“There is a tendency to talk of conservation as an alternative to supply. But this is misleading. Conservation is in no sense a source of energy. Rather it is a lever on demand - a way for the consumer to cut his costs.”
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
Regulatory policies have been based on a mix of classical economic theory on externalities (use of taxes) adjusted to pragmatic solutions (tradeable permits). Pigou, a pioneer of welfare economics, argued that externalities should be internalised by taxes where the relevant activity caused external (e.g. environmental) damage and by subsidies when an external benefit was conferred (e.g. when public transport relieves road congestion).
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 Third Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change met in Kyoto, Japan, on 1-12 December 1997. This Kyoto Conference was the latest in a series of international conferences at which national governments put forward policies to reduce national emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide (CO2).
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?
This is the question posed by the ecological economists Mathias Wackernagel and William Rees. They write (1997):
“The answer is ‘yes’ only if efficiency gains are taxed away or otherwise removed from further economic circulation. Preferably they should be captured for reinvestment in natural capital rehabilitation.”
In other words they propose an environmental tax, which they extend to all resource use (see below).
Natural capital rehabilitation
There has been much work done by ecological economists on investing in natural capital as a prerequisite to ‘sustainable development’ (Jansson et al 1994). Wackernagel and Rees have played a leading part in this work with their development of the ‘Ecological Footprint’ method of estimating the natural capital requirements of a sustainable economy. They do not give much detail on policies to achieve natural capital rehabilitation, except to say in their paper (1997).
“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
Many economists of all persuasions, whether pro environmentalist or otherwise, seem united in their conviction that improving energy efficiency through technological means, could by lowering the implicit price, result in increased, not decreased, energy use, an effect called the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate (or hypothesis). This conviction is the result of over a century - since Jevons in the 1860s - of theoretical discussion on resource use, and empirical evidence from historic analysis of energy use in economies.
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
This paper presents arguments that energy is only one factor of production. Thus there are no economic grounds for favouring energy productivity over labour or capital productivity. There are a number of ways to reduce consumption of fuels likely to cause long term environmental damage, if that is our goal. We could ban or regulate use of forms of energy we find objectionable, like high sulphur, coal or orimulsion. We could ration some types of fuel either directly or through the use of tradeable permits - as is proposed for achieving greenhouse gas reduction targets between nations. Or we could impose fuel or carbon taxes.
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:
It is only at the level of individual consumers - including intermediate consumers producing energy-dependent goods and services - that valid decisions can be taken on how best to reallocate resources following a constraint imposed to serve an environmental end. The constraint might take the form of a physical limit on the use of carboniferous fuels or a tax on them....it would then be up to individual consumers to re-optimise their affairs subject to the new constraint and any other they were experiencing. They might well decide that the best response would be one in which compensating savings were made in unit costs of labour and capital perhaps by raising the productivity of those factors.
Schipper and Grubb (1998) think that the emphasis given to energy efficiency policies may be mistaken. They conclude:
More generally, our observations, suggest that the whole rebound debate may have overestimated the importance of energy in determining the mix of human and economic activities in an economy...
If energy and climate matters, it seems better to internalise our concerns, however difficult they are to express as prices, in carbon and other green taxes.....
An alternative approach
The British government is committed to ‘sustainable development’. Ecological economists have for some years been working on this approach, and have identified the requirement for the maintenance of natural capital. This could be done through resource depletion taxes with the proceeds invested in natural capital rehabilitation.
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
Many economists have argued that there are no economic grounds for favouring energy productivity over labour or capital productivity. Consumers may not make the optimal investment choices due to ignorance or miscalculation, or due to regulatory or institutional obstacles. Here the government, in its role as promoter of economic efficiency, has a role to provide information and to remove market barriers, so consumers can best allocate their resources. They can also legitimately foster technical progress, in the absence of private sector funding, by running national research institutes or funding University research.
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
The question I posed in the Introduction ‘does the promotion of energy efficiency (at the microlevel) reduce energy consumption (at the macrolevel)’?, is like most economic questions, impossible to prove either way. Economists are divided over whether this is true on theoretical grounds, and in their interpretation of the historic data.
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’.
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Dan Charles “Leaping the Efficiency Gap” from Science, 14 AUGUST 2009 VOL 325, pages 804 – 811
Experience 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
Center (PEEC) recently calculated that the state’s energy policies can take credit for only a quarter of California’s lower per capita electricity use. The rest is due to “structural factors” such as mild weather, increasing urbanization, larger numbers of people in each household, and high prices for energy and land that drove heavy industry out of the state.
For Sanstad, there’s a clear lesson: Meeting the more ambitious goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require more aggressive measures that cause some economic pain. “The real potential of energy efficiency is not going to be realized until we get away from the idea that it has to pay for itself,” he says.
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
opportunity to which we have to rise,” says Ashok Gadgil, an energy technology researcher at LBNL. “We were preparing for this for 20 years; now come under the spotlight and sing!”
The human dimension
Rosenfeld and Edward Vine had a friendly, long-running argument during their 2 decades as colleagues at LBNL. Rosenfeld believed in technology. When he testified before the U.S. Congress, as he did frequently in the early 1980s, he always came with props in hand: compact fluorescent light bulbs, heat-shielding windows, or computer programs for predicting the energy use of new buildings. But Vine, whose Ph.D. is in human ecology, wasn’t convinced of technology’s power. “We can’t assume, if we have a great technology, that people will rush to stores and buy it,” Vine says. “We need to find out how people behave, how they make decisions, how they use energy, and we need to work with them.”
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.
Yet many researchers are now coming around to Vine’s point of view. Consumers don’t seem to act like fully informed, rational decision-makers when they make energy choices. Many avoid making choices at all. Give them a programmable thermostat, and they won’t program it. Offer them an efficient light bulb that pays for itself in 2 years, and they won’t buy it. Builders don’t take full advantage of the cheapest source of lighting, the sun. Even profit-seeking businesses sometimes make little effort to control their energy use, says Ernst Worrell, who teaches at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and studies companies all over the world. “There are companies that spend 20% of their operating cost on energy, but upper management doesn’t know where that money is going,” Worrell says. “They see energy costs as an act of God….”
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
don’t like the feeling of being in the minority.
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
require them to change anything or that seems most popular. Right now, that tendency
works against efficiency. In appliance stores, says LBNL’s Jonathan Koomey, who also works as a consultant for companies, the most efficient “Energy Star” machines are usually aimed at high-end customers. They’re manufactured in low volumes and come with additional features that drive up the price. The marketing strategy sends a clear signal that these are not appliances that the store expects most customers to buy….
Frustratingly, “green” buildings often don’t deliver what their designers promised
because of mistakes in design, shoddy construction, or poor maintenance. “No one
measures building performance,” says Stephen Selkowitz, head of the Building
Technologies Division at LBNL. “I’ll ask 100 architects, ‘How many of you design
energy-efficient buildings?’ Almost all of them. Then I’ll ask, ‘How many of you know
the measured performance of your last building?’ Not a soul! If you don’t know how well
you did, how will you ever do any better?….”
Paying the cost
Lee Schipper of Stanford’s PEEC is a grizzled veteran of campaigns to save energy around the world. And after many years in the trenches, he’s changed his mind. In the early 1970s, when Schipper was studying astrophysics at Berkeley (where he shared a graduate student office with Chu), he started teaching classes and giving lectures on the physics of energy. When the energy crisis hit, he quickly earned a reputation as an efficiency enthusiast of the most irrepressible sort. He eventually joined Rosenfeld’s research team at LBNL. Schipper couldn’t restrain himself when, in 1977, President
Jimmy Carter urged Americans to conserve energy using arguments that Schipper considered unfounded. Carter said that conserving energy “will demand that we
make sacrifices and changes in our lives. To some degree, the sacrifices will be painful.” Schipper wrote an angry letter to Representative John Dingell (D–MI), arguing that conserving energy did not, in fact, require painful sacrifices. He explained that new
energy-saving lights, windows, and car engines allowed consumers to live just as they always had yet burn less oil and coal. “You know what?” Schipper says today. “I was wrong. Carter was right….”
Schipper’s views are shaped by his own particular specialty: transportation, including
cars. Since 1980, new cars have doubled the amount of mass they move with a gallon
of gasoline, but U.S. car manufacturers used most of that efficiency gain to make cars
bigger and more powerful, not more fuel conserving. The simplest and cheapest way to reduce energy use in transportation, Schipper says, is simply to require cars that are lighter, smaller, and less powerful. But because of fierce resistance to that idea,
“we get all these interesting technological fixes, like plug-in hybrids, that are actually
quite expensive.”
So Schipper has come around to the idea that conserving energy really does demand that
people change their attitudes and the way they live. The single most important step in that
direction, he says, is to make energy more expensive. “We’re still playing 1970s games,
thinking that we don’t have to confront consumers and industries with the real price of energy and carbon,” he says….
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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).
· annual effects (programs launched/participants acquired prior to 2001) total effects.
· electricity savings as a percentage of electricity sales.
· dollars spent per MWh saved.
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.
· Southern California Edison's efforts to reach small business owners with energy efficiency programs.
· Florida Power & Light's innovative energy efficiency advertising campaign.
· Plumas-Sierra Electric Cooperative's geothermal heat pump program.
· Anaheim Public Utilities' community outreach-based energy efficiency efforts.
“Energy bind, but no cardigan-sweater ethic” from the May 27, 2004 edition – Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0527/p03s01-ussc.html By Kris Axtman Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
US is far more efficient than in ‘70s - but also more determined to consume.
HOUSTON - Reminiscent of the 1970s, the line of cars stretched down the street at a west side gas station last week. Customers were waiting for 10 free gallons, compliments of a local radio station.
Because the promotion would go to the first 200 cars only, people began queuing up at 9 the night before. One woman burned up an entire tank of gas waiting for a free half tank. “People are confused about why prices are rising so rapidly,” says Tim Sutherland of KHMX 96.5, the Houston station giving away 2,000 gallons of gas. “They say it’s absurd to be paying $2 a gallon for regular. But nobody wants to stop driving.”
While there are signs that today’s record high gasoline prices are causing some consumers to reevaluate their energy use (witness the slowdown in SUV sales), for the most part people continue to burn fuel at the same rate they did last year.
In fact, AAA, the nation’s largest organization for motorists, predicts drivers will hit the road in record numbers this summer. After more than a decade of prosperity, it seems the concept of energy conservation has vanished from the nation’s consciousness - Jimmy Carter donning a sweater instead of turning up the thermostat a distant, almost amusing, memory.
“The same urgency that was given to fuel conservation in the ‘70s is not apparent in our society anymore, even with these high prices,” says Geoff Sundstrom, AAA spokesman. “Some of the drastic steps taken 30 years ago are not even being discussed right now.”
Lowering the national speed limit to 55 miles per hour and tightening the fuel-economy standards are two examples of laws enacted after gas shortages shocked the nation. Some believe steps like these will occur only if gas shortages return.
Indeed, many economists contend that gasoline as a percentage of household expenditure is less today than it was 25 years ago, and people simply haven’t been inconvenienced to the same degree.
But others say the nation has continued to make progress on energy conservation, primarily on the technology side. While gains were faster in the 1970s and ‘80s, spurred on by persistently high energy prices, everything from automobiles to light bulbs is more efficient today than they were even 10 years ago, says Christopher Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington.
By 1990, for instance, the average American car got 40 percent more miles per gallon than it did in 1973. In the past decade, the country has saved $50 billion from the dozen or more products that have been subject to stricter federal standards. “In the 1970s, there was a limited number of choices when it came to energy efficiency,” says Bill Prindle of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy in
Washington. “We were so accustomed to cheap energy, there was no need to find alternatives. Now there are a lot more choices.”
But efficiency by itself may not be enough. Research shows that if the cost of driving or running an air conditioner is cheap enough, people will simply use more energy. The size of homes has doubled in the past century, commutes have quadrupled, and electronic gadgets have proliferated. “The general ethic of consumption has increased over the last 30 years,” says Mr. Prindle. But that does not mean consumers do not want to conserve energy, he adds. They simply expect manufacturers to give them the best and most efficient product.
It also does not mean that consumers aren’t willing to cut back when it’s necessary. The most recent example was the 2000 California energy crisis when residents lowered their electricity use by almost 10 percent in one year.
“When push comes to shove, people show they can conserve and get into that conservation mind-set,” says Jeff Deyette, an energy analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass. “But it’s got to really hit them in the wallet before they’re willing to make some lifestyle changes.”
Prices may be reaching the point where consumers are starting to make at least some adjustments. A new USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll found that 59 percent of Americans said the high pump prices will cause them to drive less this summer than they normally would.
One reason consumers don’t conserve more, some suggest, is that they don’t have enough choices. American car manufacturers tell consumers that they must choose between fuel efficiency and size - when the technology allows for both, says David Friedman, research director for the clean-vehicles program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “You can’t blame the consumer until the consumer really has a role to play,” says Mr. Friedman. He adds that the current energy bill does nothing to cut the country’s oil dependency and to improve fuel economy.
Experts speculate that part of the skepticism about energy conservation has to do with the constant barrage of gloom-and-doom news about the environment in the 1970s.
“Back then, the newspapers and academic press were full of accounts that the world was running out of oil and that we couldn’t count on this energy source for much longer,” says Mr. Sundstrom with AAA. “Well, that didn’t happen and many of the older population are somewhat skeptical about anybody ringing alarm bells today.”
Others go even further. “I don’t think the culture has ever really embraced the true conservation ethic promoted in the 1970s,” says Michael Marsden, a professor of American studies at St. Norbert College
in Wisconsin. “Sure, a lot of us learned to recycle, but we won’t go out and buy a smaller hybrid car. We’re not that committed.”
While short-term attitudes may have changed in the 1970s, it often takes much longer for cultural shifts. “It takes about a century to see real change,” says Dr. Marsden. “We’ve still got a ways to go.
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.
A fascination with efficiency has a long history in American life, announced early on, for example, in Benjamin Franklin’s maxims about the virtue of economizing on time, effort, and money. During the progressive era of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, efficiency became something of an obsession among the well-educated in the United States. Understood to be a criterion applicable to personal and social life as well as to mechanical and economic systems, efficiency was upheld as a goal valuable in its own right, one strongly linked to the progress of science, the development of industry, the rise of professionalism, and the conservation of natural resources.
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.
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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.
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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.
The latter is what is found most frequently. For instance, in the Northgate Apartments in Burlington, VT the low-income occupants kept their apartment at 14.5 0 C - 15.5 0 C (58-60 F) in order to keep their high utility bills within bounds. After extensive retrofitting of the very leaky and poorly maintained buildings, they raised their thermostat setting to the more comfortable 20 0 C 21 0 C (68-70 F) to make up for the years of discomfort. Of course, this decreased the predicted energy savings because this take-back effect had not been taken into account during the energy analysis.
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
Efficiency improved greatly. Between 1920 and 1959 the coal needed to produce a kilowatt-hour declined by 70 percent, which made possible price reductions. While consumers increased their use of electricity by 500 percent, their costs rose only 150 percent.
“Forecasting Follies.” Power Engineering June 1998, Page 76
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
Watkins-Miller, Elaine. “Mobil Corp. Fuels Energy Efficiency.” Buildings magazine November 1998. Page 88
Early successes have fueled a pervasive enthusiasm for voluntary energy-efficiency activities at Fairfax, VA-based Mobil Corp. The company’s energy programs from 1995 through 1997 alone have resulted in savings of $77.1 million. About $20 million more is expected this year. In 1992, the company joined the EPA’s Green Lights Program.
Gersh, Jeff. “Capitalism Goes Green?” The Amicus Journal Spring 1999, Page 38
Between 1979 and 1995, according to the San Francisco-based think tank Redefining Progress, the manufacturing labor force in the United States shrank by 12 percent—even as manufacturing output rose a startling 43 percent. Interestingly, industrial energy use rose by nearly the same percentage as the labor force declined. And industrial and commercial energy use as a whole has gone up 37 percent since 1983.
Frankel, Carl. In Earth's Company. Gabriola Island, BC VOR 1XO, ISBN 0865713804, Page XIV
Efficiency is one of the hallmarks of the well-run business, and the gratuitous exploitation of natural resources is wildly inefficient. The modern industrial system is no more than one percent efficient when all material and energy inputs are considered.
Given that industrial growth further removes the capacity of the Earth to support human welfare, future economic progress must be measured by a different relationship, the pursuit of resource productivity as opposed to labor productivity.
The question is no longer how much timber, soil, minerals, or water are required to create one unit of well-being in society. The new question is: how much prosperity can we create with each board foot of timber, each liter of pure water, each square meter of topsoil, each pound of copper?
Shuman, Michael. Going Local. New York: 1998. ISBN 0684830124, Page 49
A guaranteed way to ensure that a car does not pollute is to stick the exhaust pipe into the passenger section. Similarly, a community committed to self-reliance will be mindful not to foul its own nest.
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.
As ecologist and energy analyst Bruce Hannon explains, “... the (environmentally conscious) traveler who (switches) from urban bus to bicycle would save energy (and dollars) at the rate of 51,000 BTU per dollar. If he were not careful to spend his dollar savings on an item of personal consumption which had an energy intensity greater than 51,000 BTU per dollar then his shift to bicycle would have been in vain...”
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.
Energy analyst Robert Kaufmann concludes that substitution and technical change have had relatively little effect on the amount of energy used to produce one dollar of inflation-adjusted GNP in France, Germany, Japan and the U.K. since the Second World War. this implies that the link between economic activity (measured in GNP) and energy use is stronger than believed by most neoclassical economists.
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.
Ironically the, it is precisely the economic gains from improved technical efficiency that increase the rate of resource throughput. Micro-economic reality demands that these efficiency gains be used to short-term economic advantage. Far from conserving natural capital or decreasing Ecological Footprints, this leads to competitively accelerated increases in consumption.
In a globally interlinked economy, the question then becomes: Can we afford cost-saving energy efficiency? The answer is “yes” only if efficiency gains are removed at source from further economic circulation.
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
Purity is half the Soft Green battle; efficiency is the other half. How much more efficient it must be to eat soft. How much less energy and material it must take to live simply, naturally, and close to the earth. How much more efficient it must be to brow crops without the vast, costly, ruinous, destructive excesses of fertilizer and pesticide.
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.
The best thing of all about efficiency is that it entails no pain. Accused of peddling a policy of painful privation, Lovins responds that he “explicitly assume(s) no significant change in where we live, how we live or how we run our society,” and that he “goes to a hell of a lot of trouble to make the phrasing accurate.”
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.
Come to think of it, we made comparable improvements in the efficiency of our diets during this same period, too. We zealously “conserved” calories. We favored “efficient” foods, foods that deliver extra miles of repletion on fewer gallons of calories: low-fat milk, diet sodas, and fat-free potato chips. Between 1970 and 1990 the average Americans has added the sugar equivalent of about a pound a year of artificial sweetener to his diet. We recently added the marvelous olestra to our larder of caloric efficiency. It has the “mouth feel” of pure oil yet is indigestible by the human gut.
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
So long as only a few people owned cars, the individual motorist was highly satisfied, but since most people have now become motorized the advantages of being quicker and able to travel further than everyone else have shrunk. As soon as speed is a general expectation, gaining time is frequently no longer a pleasure because it becomes an obligation. The power over space and time made possible by mass mobilization is in process of becoming a duty rather than a privilege, to the fascination of utopia vanishes with its triumph. More of the same also offers little hope. It is true that higher speed leads to saving time, but a look at the history of transportation shows that such gains are quickly converted into longer distances and/or an increase in what has to be done. And then greater distances and more tasks in turn demand greater speeds which allows further increases in distance and work-load. Out of the logic of acceleration there thus develops for many people a feeling of futility: every expansion increases effort but seems to achieve less and less.
Architecture Magazine December, 1999
Suburbanites drive 110 more hours each year than city dwellers.
Average driving speed on the Washington, D.C., Beltway in 1981: 47 mph
Average Beltway speed in 1991: 23 mph
Number of parking spaces per car in the U.S.: 8
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)
USEA is the United Stated member of the World Energy Council (WEC). It coordinates United States participation in the WEC, and organizes the United States delegation to the triennial Congresses. USEA also sponsors programs on domestic energy issues. The World Energy council is an international non-governmental organization composed of energy experts from approximately 90 countries.
Michael Silverstein, How Business Will Thrive The Environmental Economic Revolution, New York: 1993 ISBN 0312097972 Page 178, 179
What’s wrong with this much acclaimed free market approach to pollution reduction? In the real world, practically everything. At a time when so many Americans believe that those with enough money and connections can buy their way out of anything, emissions trading seems to prove this is exactly the case when it comes to polluting. If it is inconvenient for you, Mr. Polluter, to comply with the law, hire someone else to do it for you. Surely this is not a message today’s American government wishes to convey. The “average air quality” that emissions trading is designed to improve when it comes to pollutants like sulfur dioxide is itself just a bureaucratic fiction. There is no such thing as “average air quality.” No one breathes averages. One breathes the air where one does his or her breathing. If a utility in Tennessee sells an emissions credit to a utility in Minnesota, people living near the latter are going to continue breathing bad air. This may be fine for some bureaucrat in Washington who can point to a chart and speak of average improvements in air quality. But how about the asthmatic in Minneapolis living next to the utility that bought its way out of compliance? To see the absurdity of this theory in practice, one need only image that the same averaging principle used in emissions credit trading were applied to fire safety. Imagine living in a city where half the buildings did not have fire escapes, because their owners had purchased “fire safety credits” from other building owners who not only met fire escape standards but also installed sprinkler systems. Would such a system improve the overall fire safety in this city? In purely environmental terms, the prime drawback of emissions credit trading is that the companies selling them are not, in fact, goaded into more prolific improvements of their own emissions record by the lure of creating saleable credits. There are countless actions that could generate tradable credits which have nothing to do with a conscious effort to reduce pollution below legally mandated standards. A company could, for example, install a new piece of equipment purely to boost production, and if that equipment just happens to be more efficient in its operations and therefore less polluting, a credit is produced. A company could even generate a credit by closing down one of its plants - a splendid way for incompetent management to recoup some of its losses through the creation of ersatz assets. Virtually all pollution credits, in fact, will be sold by companies getting an artificial return for things they would have done anyway, a return paid for by companies that find it inconvenient to comply with pollution control laws and regulations. The net effect of this process on this country’s environment will of course be negative. The net economic effect will be even more negative.
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.”
Over 20,000 32W T8 fluorescent lamps, served by over 7000 electronic ballasts, are used in offices, kitchens, service corridors, etc. In addition, 13W compact fluorescent are mounted in appealing fixtures along the quest room wing corridors.
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.
Another dominant component of the entrance plaza is a more sophisticated interpretation of MGM's famous lion: a glorious new bronze statue ("We believe it's the largest bronze statue in the world," said Dougall), which rises, like Venus on a shell, from a pedestal amid balletic sprays of an illuminated fountain, choreographed to change to various movie soundtracks. Oscillating, 7 kW sky beams, set within massive Atlas bowls crowning freestanding columns and pilasters, penetrate the sky with roving four-mile-long shafts of light, adding more theatrical punch to the composition. The bronzed bowls are set aglow from below with recessed 50W quartz uplights concealed within the landscape or louvered in the tops of the columns. A series of narrow-beam recessed ceramic metal halide uplights illuminates 110-ft.-tall palm trees, and multicolored PAR uplights and robotic fixtures sweep the cyclorama wall on one side of the facade with a rainbow of light. Low-voltage striplights along the treads on the steps leading to the fountain round out the exterior lighting scheme. "The experience outside is like arriving at the grand opening of a great premiere, such as Oscar night," said George Kurczyn, project designer at Dougall Design.
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.
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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
...in a 50-mile-per-gallon-car, you could continue normal driving for weeks just on the gas in its own tank....
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-96
In 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.]
Coal Consumption per Horsepower Hour
Year Lbs. of Coal
1769 30.0
1772 17.6
1825 10.0
1850 5.9
1875 2.5
1900 1.0
Descker, Douglas A., and Alan Berolzheimer. Policy Evolution: Energy conservation to Energy Efficiency. Georgia: 1997. ISBN 0881732745, Page xi
As the forum expanded, as the political climate in Washington fluctuated, and as concern about federal agency budgets intensified, the ethic of conservation at the root of the original campaign gave way to a more diversified conceptualization of energy efficiency.
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.
Where “conservation” suggested stagnation, the concept of “efficiency” was dynamic.
The concept of efficiency encompassed a wide range of ideas and actions designed to use energy effectively in the pursuit of human progress. In 1994, this reorientation was formalized through a change in the name of the conference: it became the Annual Energy Efficiency Forum.
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In 1990, the big questions centered on how to encourage a conservation ethic among Americans and promote energy efficiency within the government apparatus.
By 1996, the big questions centered on how to preserve and enhance the delivery of energy efficiency to residential, commercial, and industrial consumers under new and rapidly changing market conditions, to ensure that the social, economic, and environmental benefits of wise energy use continue to be realized.
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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.
At least lip-service. Even those who sell energy, who are somewhat ambivalent on the subject of energy conservation for reasons that I need not dwell on, continue to pay their respects to energy conservation.
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Energy for Tomorrow’s World
Message one would be: sustainable development calls for more, not less, energy....
Message two: The global energy mix will change only gradually and only over time....
Message three: CO2 emissions are bound to increase far into the next century...
Message four: Environmental concerns with local and regional impacts for countries have a higher priority than possible CO2 effects....
Message five: The key for reconciling the need for more energy with the need for protecting the environment is improving energy efficiency....
Message six: Energy will continue to be a major factor in geopolitics....
Message seven: The real risks and chances lie beyond 2020.
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
continue to dominate energy markets through the next century.
* 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
detriment of oil and gas technologies but to the benefit of nuclear, coal, and renewable energy.
* 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
economy at most) and almost certainly less than the costs of restricting greenhouse gas emissions.
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.
Historically, energy efficiency has been a source of growth, not contradiction, in the energy industry. A situation in which the per capita supply and demand for commercial energy remain low in developing countries is one in which billions of people remain dependent on fuel wood and dung for cooking and are without electricity for lighting , motive power, and many other purposes. Such a situation would be environmentally unsustainable, socially indefensible, and ultimately self-defeating because it would be associated with high population growth and a failure of developing countries to eliminate poverty and attain prosperity.
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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.
Anderson, Dennis, and William Cavendish. 1992. Efficiency and Substitution in Pollution Prevention: Three Case Studies. World Bank Discussion Paper no. 180. Washington, D.C.: World Bank
Cottrell, William Frederick, Energy and Society, New York, 1955: ISBN 0837136792, Page 8
Usually the engineer simply assumes the social objective of the system in which he is working and measures in terms of it without further concern. If he is designing a light bulb he seeks to minimize heat; in a heating element he
reduces to the lowest possible point the proportion of light rays being generated. But without a knowledge of the forms of energy being sought he has no means of determining efficiency.
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.
Because such heavy materials had to be raised to the top of the 37.5m tall Ginza San-Ai building over the busy intersection, the work was done between 2 and 6 am. Thanks to good weather, installation was completed on schedule.
Barbarba Ward, The Rich Nations And The Poor Nations New York, 1962: ISBN 6211387, Page 95
What is not always so obvious is that technology in all its forms is expensive. The cost of a fully developed technology is formidable. Let us take one example—the building of a large power station to open up a new region to electrification. The preliminaries—leveling the site, constructing roads to it, putting in possibly a branch line to bring in fuel, assembling materials, machines, and generators—are all expensive. Then follows the costly construction period, but if the electricity is to have its full effect, the consequences are more expensive still. Power-lines have to built, consumer industries developed, trade schools are needed to train both electricians and skilled workers for the new factories. The magnet of more work draws in migrant workers needing housing and urban services. And so it goes, on, every step swallowing up capital and setting in motion new demands for still more capital. In other words, if technology is the key to producing more output with less use of resources—productivity—then capital—or saving—is the only key to technology. Without saving, there is no economic growth.
Moreover, as we have already remarked, the saving has to be on a fairly massive scale. Under Western colonial control, the poor countries did not see the beginnings of technology—the first roads and ports, some light industries, some development of production for export, a start in education; but the capital involved was not enough to change the whole nature of the economy.
Harrington Emerson, The Twelve Principles Of Efficiency The Engineering Magazine Co., New York, 1919, Page 352
We are like a young man until recently on scant allowance who has suddenly inherited an immense fortune. In the United States the uncarnate energy used is thirty times as great as was the incarnate energy sixty years ago; it is as if each head of a family had inherited thirty slaves forced for him without pay beyond the obligation to maintain. It is increasingly less the hard muscular labor of the hands and body that counts, it is more and more the intelligence
to direct mechanical slaves that counts. The man who smashes a machine because he fears it will take his job, the man who refuses the promotion due him for efficient control, misses the richest gift that any generation has ever been offered.
Lamech, Ranjit. "When Energy Conservation Doesn't Work." Viewpoint, The World Bank, FPD Note Number 3. April 1994 , Pages 3 and 4
Energy conservation services get bundled with electricity supply services. Yet the characteristics of these two markets are very distinct. While there are natural monopoly characteristics in electricity supply services, energy conservation services can be delivered competitively. In other sectors, such as telephone services, anti-trust authorities have prevented the cross-subsidization of a competitive sector (such as long distance services) by the "natural" monopoly sector (local exchange services). When conservation services and electricity supply are provided by the same utility, there is clear potential for cross-subsidization. This can act as a barrier to competitive entry both for alternative low cost suppliers of electricity and for efficient providers of energy conservation services.
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 make no allowances for the differing environmental impacts of hydro, gas, coal, oil, wind or solar electricity. They affect all sources of generation and do not necessarily result in environmentally benign decisions.
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.
Financial stumbling blocks include scarcity of capital, high interest rates, and lack of simple, accessible forms of medium-term financing for energy-saving equipment. Common economic obstacles are energy prices that are below opportunity costs, distortions in the relative prices of competing energy products, and cost-plus pricing of products. Many of these constraints are more serious in developing countries than in industrial countries. For example, in developing countries the technical skills needed are not as readily available as in more advanced countries; promotion techniques to inform industrialists of the potential for and economics of energy-saving investments are less common; and distortions in relative prices and disincentives form cost-plus pricing are generally more serious.
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.
At this time, little attention has been given to just how numerically overwhelming will be the CO-2 emitted by the non-participating countries, and how futile will be the efforts of the industrialized nations to cut back on CO-2.
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.
Meanwhile, China has begun a massive program of building coal-burning power plants to generate electricity for its 1.2 billion people. Over about 40 years of construction, China hopes to come up to parity with most other industrialized nations, which implies power use of 0.6 kW = 600 W per person. A typical major coal-burner generates about 1 billion watts = 1 GW. How many of these will China need?
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.
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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.
How much can the United States curtail realistically? 10 percent? 20 percent? The term "half measure" comes to mind. Even if the entire industrialized world completely shut down, still it wouldn't be enough to offset the new CO-2 coming from China. There is simply going to be more CO-2 in the years ahead. Period.
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.
It may seem weird to try to think "from a plant's point of view," but the average tree is basically starving. The CO-2 concentration in air is only about 350 parts per million and water is around 1.5 percent -- that's all the food trees have. Meanwhile, the waste product of their photosynthesis, oxygen, comprises 21 percent of the air. If a little extra CO-2 comes along, some tree will grab it and grow a bit stronger.
To rely on plant life to save us from the CO-2 problem makes most human beings very uncomfortable. We feel we should "do something." But there is no chemical solution. Perhaps if we try again with a new generation of nuclear reactors, or some breakthrough in materials science research leads to more efficient solar cells that are finally worth their cost, then someday in the future fossil fuels may diminish from widespread use. But for the foreseeable future, the amount of CO-2 in air is going to increase, and through biological processes a new equilibrium point will be reached between plants and animals. The best scientific evidence suggests the new state of the planet will differ very little from what we experience today.
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.
How else could they get a glass of cold milk?
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.
While securing a more broadly-based legitimacy for the movement, this turn also served to direct attention away from the comparative consumptiveness of various lifestyles and social structures, the issue of equity ... and the influences of corporations and governments upon public and private sector consumption and conservation.
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.
For example, 'current' spending necessary to keep things going (e.g. energy running costs) may be seen as fairly unavoidable, but 'capital' spending (which can include investment in energy efficiency) may be seen as an optional extra to be afforded only when additional funds are available.
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.
Government policies to deal with these difficulties may cause other economic problems as a result, such as increases in involuntary unemployment, which can therefore in practice be another subsidy for energy consumption.
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
smog. Visibility increased by as much as 20 miles, the researchers said, as the concentration of light-scattering particles, primarily a function of sulfur dioxide emissions, was reduced by 70 percent. These findings are to be published in the next issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
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.
EFFICIENCY EXPERT
by LLOYD STONE
Through dreamy eyes she gazed into the night
And murmured this, "Some day I'll buy an isle
Out there...." (The sweeping gesture of her arm
Took in a generous portion of the world.)
"Some place that you and I can call Our Paradise;
Where life will be as simple as
In Eden; where all things will be --"
"But, dear,"
He spoke with genuine concern, "Now who'll
Deliver all our groceries? And what
About a Frigidaire? And as for lights
We could resort to lamps, I guess, but who
Would fill them up with oil and trim the wicks;
And ... Dear, in short, why I foresee all sorts
Of difficulties!"
"So do I," she muttered.
"Shall we dance?"
Smil, Vaclav. Energy: A Beginner’s Guide One World Publications, Oxford, 2006. ISBN 3:9781851684526
Pages 161-2
High-efficiency conversions clearly benefit economies and the environment, but they reduce overall energy use only on an individual or household level, of for a single company, particular industrial process, or entire production sector.
On national and global levels, the record shows the very opposite; there is no doubt that higher efficiencies of energy conversion have led to steadily greater consumption of fuels and electricity. This paradox was noted for the first time by Stanley Jevons (1835-1882), a prominent English economist, in 1865. In his words, “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuels is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.” Jevons illustrated the phenomenon by contrasting the huge efficiency improvements of eighteenth-century steam engines (from Savery and Newcomen’s extremely wasteful machines to Watt’s improved design) with the large increases in British coal consumption.
Two examples illustrate this common phenomenon for modern energy-consuming activities. First, in 2006, the average American passenger vehicle (including SUVs) consumed about forty percent less fuel per kilometer than in 1960, but more widespread ownership of automobiles (two people per vehicle in 2005, compared to nearly three in 1970) and the higher annual average distance driven (roughly 20,000 km, compared to 15,000 km in 1960) resulted in average per caput consumption some thirty percent higher. Second, during the twentieth century, the efficiency of British street lighting rose about twenty-fold, but the intensity of this illumination (MWh per km of road) rose about twenty-five times, again more than eliminating all the efficiency gains.
So higher efficiencies have not resulted in lower overall demand for energy. Its growth has continued, albeit at a slower pace (as expected), even in mature, post industrial economies. In the 1990s, despite deep economic problems and the stagnation of its GDP, Japan’s average per caput energy consumption grew by fifteen percent; in the same period the already extraordinarily high US and Canadian rates grew by about 2.5 percent. Between 1980 and 2000 China, despite the unprecedented achievement of halving the energy intensity of its economy, more than doubled its per caput energy consumption. Replicating similar achievements in the coming decades would be challenging under any circumstances, but now we face the entirely new constraint of global warming.
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.
Phase II, to go into effect at a later date, set higher targets. The penalty for non-compliance with Phase II was to be even more severe—a cutoff of service. But the city never needed to institute Phase II, because Phase I was so successful; moreover, penalties for Phase I were never even applied (although, of course, neither officials or consumers knew at the beginning that this would be the case.)
The response to the targets of Phase I, to everyone’s surprise, went far beyond the targets themselves.
Target |
Actual Reduction |
|
Residential |
10% |
18% |
Industrial |
10% |
11% |
Commercial |
20% |
28% |
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.
Juneau Saves Electricity in a Hurry
July-August 2008 Editorial, Home Energy Magazine
By Alan Meier, Editor
What do you do when the price of 
electricity suddenly jumps fivefold? This was the dilemma faced by the residents of Juneau, Alaska, when an avalanche suddenly cut the transmission line to their source of cheap hydropower. The answer is conserve, conserve, and (in case you weren’t paying attention), conserve. In only a few weeks, Juneau’s electricity consumption fell 30% (see Figure 1). This represents the largest and fastest regional reduction in electricity consumption without blackouts in recent history. Juneau easily surpassed the 2001 record held by Brazil—20% in a few months—and California’s 15% reduction in response to Enron and its friends.
But how exactly did the citizens of Juneau cut their electricity use? No careful study has been undertaken, but there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence. They focused first on saving what they could see and feel. The avalanche hit at the tail end of the heating season, so lower thermostats were the first target for action in the approximately 20% of homes that relied on electric heating.
Lighting was a target for conservation in homes, stores, and offices. Juneau became much more vigilant, switching off lights in unoccupied rooms and lowering light levels in rooms that were occupied. There’s also nothing like 55¢/kWh electricity to increase interest in CFLs. Indeed, the hardware stores quickly sold out (and couldn’t restock until the next barge arrived from Seattle).
Many homes in Juneau rely on electricity to heat water, so conserving hot water became popular. People took shorter showers and washed clothes at colder settings. Many discovered that their water heaters had thermostats that could be lowered, resulting in further savings.
Juneau had an unexpected introduction to the pervasive nature of standby power use in homes as people surveyed the number of appliances—from TVs, computers, and speakers to microwave ovens, digital picture frames, and set-top boxes—that constantly drew power. Sales of power strips soared as Juneau devised more convenient ways to unplug these devices.
And of course, people undertook some measures that backfired or didn’t save energy, such as raising the temperature settings of refrigerators (health risk); washing dishes by hand (much less efficient than running a full dishwasher); and frequently unplugging set-top boxes (delays in rebooting).
More important than any single measure, the citizens of Juneau put electricity conservation front and center in their daily life. They swapped tips and experiences at the grocery store, in the schools, and on talk shows. Conservation became not just acceptable, but popular.
Juneau will have celebrated its own kind of early Independence Day this June with the repair of the transmission line. Already people are asking how much conservation will persist after the rates drop. I am confident that demand will increase as people abandon the most inconvenient belt-tightening measures. But I predict that demand will never return to preavalanche levels. People won’t remove their CFLs or turn up the thermostat on their water heaters, and some of those conserving habits—well—seem like a good idea in any event.
From The Onion – 2003 The New Energy Bill
Congress is reworking legislation that addresses the nation's electricity transmission problems. What's in the new energy plan?
- Blackouts outlawed
- Reddy Kilowatt to come out of retirement to address crisis
- Improvements in power grid to more efficiently divert blame for electricity outages to Canada
- Americans asked to no longer pour electricity directly down drain
- Total deregulation of industry to free up companies to invest profits in updating the power grid
- Turning off blender when leaving the house now enforced by law
- Rolling blackouts to be renamed "Qlde Tyme Nights"
- Have some sub-committee check into solar panels and wind machines and all that crap
- "Back-up" power plants to be built on every fourth city-block
- U.S. citizen will be issued case of Sterno and a pistol
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
recklessly destructive of real places, real experiences, real relationships with real people, and real notions of purposeful, decent behavior.
One of the most popular beliefs of the computer era has been that virtual places are every bit as okay as real places. This idea gained popularity in direct proportion to the spread of immersively ugly, monotonous, dysfunctional suburban environments through the 1980s and 90s. The more our nation came to be composed of crappy housing subdivisions, highway strips, Big Box fiefdoms, and parking wastelands, the more appealing the idea of virtual reality became.
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
– or the relegation of it to mere decorative berms between zoning categories – was compensated for by the exorbitant internal luxury of new private houses, with their home theaters, “great rooms,” and three-car garages.
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”
By Elm Street Writers Group 7/1/2003
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.)
BARCELONA, Spain—The gas pump whirled at the filling station along the A9 highway in France and stopped at a figure that meant ... $60?!
Actually, that wasn’t bad. The compact Ford Focus rental took only three quarters of a tank. Of regular. It’s that each gallon cost the equivalent of $5. High gas prices got you down? Trying to drive less? Wish you could ditch the whole four-wheel lifestyle—the gas bills, the car payments, the insurance premiums, and that jerk tailgating you on Interstate 279?
Welcome to Europe, where sticker-shock gas prices have been part of the landscape for a long time, and where most people have adjusted by simply giving up on cars.
Europe has only 45 cars for every 100 people, compared to 85 in the United States (although ownership is rising, especially in the increasingly prosperous and formerly communist countries of eastern Europe). Americans not only own one-quarter of the world’s 535 million cars, they also drive them a lot, racking up twice as many miles per year as Europeans.
For expatriate Americans living in Europe, stories about high gas prices often lead to the inevitable question.
“You don’t have a what?” mortgage broker Michael Geire asked during a holiday gathering in the Washington, D.C. suburbs last December. “How can you possibly live without a car?”
A man named Dom Nozzi provided an explanation for the furrowed brows and dubious looks that always seem to accompany such questions from Americans. An urban planner for the city of Gainesville, Fla., Nozzi wrote the 2003 book, “The Road to Ruin,” which concludes that America’s car obsession makes cities less livable.
“Without a car in America today,” he said in an interview, “one is looked upon as a weirdo. A bizarre anachronism. Sadly, it is now nearly impossible to live a fulfilling life in America without a car. Without a car, too many sacrifices have to be made. Loss of independence. Loss of time. Loss of ability to get to certain places, do certain things, or work in certain jobs.”
Life in Falls Church, Va., just outside Washington, used to seem barely survivable with four cars. When one went down, life fell apart, with parents and kids forced to double up and rejigger schedules to get to work, school, shopping, soccer games and other activities.
But when the rubber hits the road in Europe, it usually involves shoes landing on pavement. And most American transplants feel like Larry Steck.
“Miss owning a car?” he asked in amazement, citing the pleasure of not worrying about gas prices or traffic hassles. “Absolutely not.”
Steck is a retired U. S. Army colonel from Michigan who moved here three years ago with his wife, Linda.
“Some afternoons in the U.S., the 20-mile drive home took an hour and a half,” noted Chris Beeler, who moved here last August from Portland, Ore., with wife, Natasha. “By the time I got home, I was wound up and stressed out.”
Commuting home now means 15 to 20 minutes by foot and train, and Beeler uses the time to wind down from his job as a 6th grade language arts teacher.
Christine Scharf found a world of difference between going car-less in the United States and Europe. She’s a computer specialist from Flanders, N.J., who has lived here for years and has never owned a car.
“In the U.S., I felt like you cannot get anywhere without a car,” she said. “Nothing is located conveniently for walking because the world expects you to have a car.”
Most people in Europe don’t need cars because most cities here were built before cars became popular, Nozzi said. In-town areas are compact, designed for walking and mass transit. They are densely populated with mixed-use residential and commercial multi-story buildings. Daily destinations like work, school, shopping, cultural activities and health care are close together. Streets are modest in size with little space devoted to roads or surface parking.
“The design was intended to make people happy, instead of cars,” Nozzi said. “This explains why these European communities remain such fantastic places that millions of non-Europeans love to visit as tourists.”
Here’s a brief neighborhood tour from an apartment near the intersection of Passeig Manuel Girona and Capita Arenas, two miles from the center of Barcelona:
Walk out the front door, and there’s a bus stop, with others just around both corners. A Metro station is a three-minute walk down Capita Arenas. The equivalent of 75 cents takes you anywhere in the city. Sants Estacio, the main railroad station, a gateway to anywhere in Spain, Europe or the world, is a four-minute Metro ride away. Trains from Sants Estacio stop right inside the terminal at Barcelona’s international airport.
Taxis are cheap and on patrol day and night. Nobody hesitates to hail one for hauling big purchases. Chairs or carpets are tied to the roof.
All of life’s necessities, however, can be reached by foot. That’s why Europeans make about 45 percent of their daily trips by walking and biking, according to the European Conference of Ministers of Transport, compared to 7 percent in the United States.
SA Champion supermarket is a minute’s walk and a competing Caprabo market beckons five minutes up the street. A huge El Corte Ingles department store, three minutes by foot, has a complete supermarket, as well. Most will deliver a shopping cart of food to a home or apartment within an hour for a nominal fee.
In or bordering on this single city block are a half dozen restaurants and cafes, three bakeries, several small grocery stores, a 24-hour pharmacy, two churches, a health club, medical and dental offices, two hardware shops, two news stands, two florists, a travel agent, a palm-tree lined municipal park with a playground, automatic teller machines that also sell tickets to concerts and other events, three banks, a barber shop and beauty parlor, adult and children’s clothing stores, an optician, a dry cleaners, even a clothing shop for cats and dogs.
Linda Steck said the people-oriented urban design of Barcelona made for a smooth transition to life without a car.
“I buy a 50-trip bus-Metro-train pass once a month for about $30, which is less than it would cost to fill up my car for one week,” she said. “We walk extensively, which is very healthy for us.”
Better health—physical and mental—is a common theme of the car-less crowd in Europe.
“Walking incorporates exercise, naturally and almost effortlessly, and it is delightful to stop by the markets and enjoy the beauty of the city without ever having the frustration of being stuck in traffic,” Scarf said. “When my mother visited, she was fascinated with the idea of walking from place to place.”
Chris and Natasha Beeler each lost about 10 pounds within a few months after switching from tires to shoe leather. The librarian at their school shed “two dress sizes”— about 20 pounds—and has nightmares of gaining it all back when she eventually returns to a drive-everywhere life in the United States.
“I’ve lost weight, I feel better, and I’m saving hundreds of dollars that went to the car,” said Candace Crites, who has traveled by foot and bicycle since moving last year to Rotterdam in the Netherlands from suburban Washington, D.C.
Ex-pats also marvel at the amount of human contact that takes place when cars are removed from their lives.
After a few months commuting by foot and bike, Robert Overson realized that he had been locked in a steel-and-glass isolation capsule while driving everywhere in his native Santa Cruz, Calif.
“While walking you have a tendency to slow down and see things around you, really see them, instead of zooming by,” said Overson, a special education teacher.
“I think the biggest advantage is the sense of community that walking builds” Linda Steck said. “There are 1.5 million people in Barcelona and we have never gone out without seeing somebody we know. Our home is in St. Joseph, Mich., which has 12,000 people, and in two months last summer we saw two people we knew in the supermarket. Why? Everybody drives.”
American transplants in Europe occasionally do miss their wheels when they take those rare weekend trips to places that are not easily accessible by train or bus. Then it’s time to rent a vehicle, and to head back out on the road to ruin.
Aside from the high-priced gas, Europe features expressway tolls nearly six times those of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and parking lots that cost $18 a day. Not to mention the occasional jerk tailgating on the A9.
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
www.wheels.ca/Stories.cfm
Since you’re reading this magazine, I’m going to make a giant leap of logic and assume that you love cars and you enjoy driving.
Not for you the notion of a motor vehicle as merely an appliance or “tool, personal transportation, for the use of.” Cars, to you, are intrinsically interesting driving is an act of emotion, not mere motion.
That being the case, I have proposal that may shock you.
Drive less.
Am I nuts? The editor of a car magazine telling people to cut back on the driving: No, I’m serious: if you’re serious about how much you like to drive, do it less.
What this planet needs more than anything is fewer cars on the road. We need fewer cars crashing into each other, cleaner air in our cities, less carbon dioxide heating up the planet. We need to reduce our dependence on the foreign sources of ail over which future wars may be fought….
Let’s face it, this whole concept of personal mobility that the automobile represents is a wondrous privilege and luxury that we abuse and misuse shamefully. And I don’t mean misuse in the sense of driving badly, thought Lord knows there’s enough of that going around. I mean it in the sense of driving inappropriately; driving when you really should not be driving.
This Guy Can Get 59 MPG in a Plain Old Accord. Beat That, Punk
Dennis Gaffney
January/February 2007 Issue MotherJones.com / News / Feature
Drafting 18-wheelers with the engine off, taking death turns at 52 miles an hour, and other lessons learned while riding shotgun with the king of the hypermilers on a midsummer Saturday in a sprawling Wisconsin parking lot, about a dozen people are milling about a candy-apple red Honda Insight. They're watching Wayne Gerdes prepare for his run in Hybridfest's mpg Challenge, a 20-mile race through the streets of Madison. Wayne is the odds-on favorite to win the challenge, in which drivers compete to push the automotive limits not of speed and power—a desire those gathered here consider old-fashioned and wasteful—but for the unsexy title of Most Fuel-Efficient Driver in the World.
Wayne is believed to be that driver, but he's nervous, because all day long the hypermilers—the term Wayne invented to describe the band of brothers who push the limits of fuel efficiency—have been getting crazy-high miles-per-gallon readings, as much as 100 mpg. For the race, he's borrowed a buddy's Insight and, in order to decrease the car's mass, jettisoned everything that's not screwed down. Car detritus—a pillow, towels, cleaning supplies, a tool kit—sits neatly on a blanket on the macadam.
What can't be jettisoned is Wayne himself, who at 6 feet 1 inch and 210 pounds looks too big to fit into this tin can two-seater. ("I would love to lose 60 pounds," he tells me, "because it would help my mileage.") In Wayne's world, fuel efficiency is not about the car. It's about the driver. Wayne doesn't get high mpg marks by tinkering with engines or using funky fuels or even, most days, by driving a hybrid. He gets them by driving consciously—hyperconsciously. He takes out his wallet and his keys. Then he removes his sneakers. "We'll put them on eBay," cracks one of the onlookers. "He's speeding," someone says as Wayne exits the parking lot. "Look at him go." Wayne is doing no more than 15 miles per hour. Before he's out of sight, though, he turns a full loop on the exit road to slow himself down, so he doesn't have to brake at a traffic jam ahead. Wayne hates braking.
Forty-five minutes later, Wayne is still driving the bucolic 20-mile course when raindrops as big as marbles begin falling and winds send trash hurtling across the parking lot. Everyone runs for cover, and I jump into a Toyota Prius owned by one of Wayne's hypermiling buddies, Dave Bassage. Puddles and high winds are a hypermiler's nightmare. "Nature's putting on its own energy show," says Bassage, watching the blasts of lightning through his water-splattered windshield. "This pretty much screws Wayne."
Two nights earlier, on a clammy 80-degree Chicago evening, I wait for Wayne at the curb at O'Hare International Airport. I first see his technique as the car he's driving, a 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid, pulls over to pick me up. Drifts over, actually, like a jellyfish. Around Wayne is madness in motion: Drivers in four lanes are accelerating hard, weaving erratically, or grinding to a halt. To Wayne, these are the driving habits of the ignorant and the wasteful—which is to say, nearly all of us. Wayne's car glides to a stop as if it has run out of gas. Wayne has stopped without braking.
The car is owned by his friend Terry Honaker, who, with his wife, Cathy, is along for the ride. Inside it's hotter and even more humid than outside. As we take off—or, more accurately, as the vehicle rolls forward really slowly—I notice that all four windows are closed and the AC is off. I'm sitting in one of the most technologically advanced cars in the world, and it feels like I'm trapped in a fanless tollbooth in Biloxi, Mississippi, in August. We take the interstate to Wayne's house. The speed limit is 55, and most of the traffic is zipping past at 75 or so, but Wayne hovers around 50 mph. He's riding the white line on the right side of the right-hand lane.
"Why are you doing that?" I ask from the backseat. "It's called ridge-riding," he explains, using another term he's invented. He ridge-rides to let people behind him know that he is moving slowly. I imagine it's also a way to avoid dying plastered to the grill of a semi. Ridge-riding, Wayne explains, saves gas in the rain, as it gets the wheels out of the puddly grooves in the road created by more, let's say, traditional drivers. "People are burning fuel to throw water in the air," he says, adding that you can hear if you're driving in the road's grooves or out of them. That's interesting, but I'm having a hard time concentrating, because my back and butt are beginning to stick to the seat. "Is anybody a little warm in here?" I ask.
I don't think Wayne hears me, because, as a Chevy Tahoe whizzes by, he notes, "I imagine that it's getting 10 to 13 miles per gallon climbing this hill. We're getting about 80. It'll drive you crazy." I'm thinking that hypermiling consists of driving like a 90-year-old in a mobile sweat lodge, but I'm about to find out I'm wrong. Really, really wrong.
"Buckle up tight, because this is the death turn," says Wayne. Death turn? We're moving at 50 mph. Wayne turns off the engine. He's bearing down on the exit, and as he turns the wheel sharply to the right, the tires squeal—which is what happens when you take a 25 mph turn going 50. Cathy, Terry's wife, who is sitting next to me in the backseat, grabs my leg. I grab the door handle. As we come out of the 270-degree turn, Cathy says, "I hope you have upholstery cleaner."
We glide for over a mile with the engine off, past a gas station, right at a green light, through another green light—Wayne is always timing his speed to land green lights—and around a mall, using momentum in a way that would have made Isaac Newton proud. "Are we going to attempt that at home?" Cathy asks Terry, a talkative man who has been stone silent since Wayne executed the death turn in his car. "Not in this lifetime," he shoots back.
Wayne is paying attention to the road, not the banter. He's had to turn the engine back on earlier than he usually does after taking the death turn. "I hit the turn at 50, 51," he says. "I should have hit it at 52."
I stay at Wayne's home, part of a modern suburban development between Chicago and Milwaukee on Lake Michigan's western shore. It's not the kind of place where people drive compact cars, much less hybrids. "There's a Hummer over there," Wayne says after we step inside, pointing to a neighbor's house beyond his microwave. "And there's a Hummer over there," he says, pointing past his TV, the largest flat-screen I've ever seen outside of a sports bar. In the kitchen with us is Hobbit—he prefers that to his real name—another visitor who is staying at Wayne's house while attending Hybridfest. Hobbit has a patchy beard and a braided ponytail and travels in bare feet. He looks and thinks like the ecoradical you might expect a hypermiler to be and confesses he's surprised by Wayne's home and lifestyle. "I thought you'd be living like a college student," he says.
Unlike most hypermilers, the most fuel-efficient driver on the planet doesn't own a hybrid. He sold his Honda Insight two years ago and bought a 2005 Accord for the luxury of power mirrors, heated leather seats, and a state-of-the-art navigation system. He uses the Accord for a hellacious two-hour commute to the Braidwood Nuclear Power Station, where he works as an operator. His wife drives a 2003 Acura mdx, a seven-seater with a 3.5-liter V-6 engine that advertises itself as "the suv benchmark." Wayne also owns a 2003 Ford Ranger, which he used to haul 5,000 pounds of lawn care equipment when he had a landscaping business on the side. He's also proud of his Exmark Laser Z sit-down mower. "I can mow an acre a gallon," he says.
The morning after I arrive, Hobbit and I squeeze into the front seat of the Ranger to join Wayne on a milk run. He starts the truck—well, gets it rolling—by releasing the emergency brake and putting the gearshift in neutral before jumping out and pushing the 3,330-pound vehicle down his sloping driveway with the engine off. He jumps in and, without braking, turns right, swerves around a dead skunk in the road, and then takes a left turn—again without braking—to a stop sign. Ahead, the light is red. "This is a long light," he says. "I'm screwed. We have to throw it away." "Throw it away" is the phrase Wayne uses to describe what most of us do with gasoline. We throw gas away when we accelerate fast, when we turn on the air conditioning, when we leave heavy stuff in the trunk, when we drive with a roof rack, when we don't change the oil, when we underinflate our tires, when we roll down the windows, when we speed, when we brake, or when we idle. Wayne might seem a radical at times, but he's really a conservative: He doesn't want to throw anything away.
Even parking is not a routine matter with Wayne, as I learn when he chooses an isolated spot in the strip mall lot. "This is potential parking with a face-out," he says. Potential parking, Wayne explains, is when you park at the highest spot in a parking lot. That way, you rely on gravity to get going rather than on the ice—the acronym Wayne uses for the internal combustion engine. A face-out is like it sounds: facing out into the open lot, allowing a driver to avoid backing up, braking, and then moving forward. "Nobody uses it," he says, "but they darn well should. It's a nearly empty parking lot, and you see people jammed in nose to nose. It's screwed up."
As we're driving out of the parking lot, Wayne comes to the top of a small hill and tells me he's doing a fas. "What?" I ask. "That's a forced auto stop," he says, which is putting the car in neutral, turning off the engine, and gliding. It's illegal in some states—with the engine off, you can lose your power brakes after a few pumps, and with older cars, you can lose your power steering—but it's a favorite driving tool of many hypermilers.
Wayne loves acronyms almost as much as he loves FE (that's fuel economy). d-fas is a "draft-assisted fas," which means fasing while you're tailgating an 18-wheeler to reduce air resistance. dwb means "driving without brakes," which is not really driving without brakes—even Wayne doesn't do that—but driving as if you don't have brakes. P&G is a pulse and glide, which I still don't understand, but Wayne defines it in his notes for his Hybridfest presentation this way: "In a nutshell, it includes a fas in many hybrid and non-hybrid automobiles to a lower target speed (some hybrids can be influenced into this mode of operation with the right application of multiple accelerator pedal inputs), reigniting the ice, re-engagement of the tranny with the rev match, and re-acceleration to a higher target speed, repeat." Got it?
On the way home, a woman in a generic gray sedan zips around Wayne trying to catch a green light, but she's too late. The light turns red and she slams on the brakes. "That made no sense," Wayne says. "Now she's all pissed off too," Hobbit says. "She's sitting there with the car running and she's going to tear out of here," adds Wayne, who is sitting up the hill a bit from the light, with the engine off. Of course, that's just what she does. (One study found that jackrabbit starts and hard brake stops reduce travel time by only about 4 percent—that's 75 seconds on a 30-minute trip.) As we approach the right turn back into his subdivision, Wayne, in a fas, coasts down to 30 mph, then to 25 mph, letting inertia do the job of his brakes. Three cars are bunched behind him, and a guy in a Ford Explorer honks. "They can honk all day," Wayne says. "My turn signal's been on for the last eighth of a mile." The guy in the Explorer passes, shooting Wayne an exasperated look.
Although Hobbit has great respect for Wayne, he attempts to distance himself from what Wayne is now doing. "I don't consider myself a hypermiler in this sense, because, um… " Hobbit struggles to express himself delicately. "I try to conform to the traffic much more than he does. There's a big difference there. I'm sure it will show in the mileage numbers." As Wayne pisses another driver off, Hobbit gives up on diplomacy. "At some point, the survival instinct and trying to be courteous on the road comes into play, too."
Wayne finally makes the turn. It's not the death turn of the previous night; it's a mini-death turn. "Because you guys are in the cab, and I've got milk in the back," Wayne explains, "I can't take the corner very fast."
Wayne's driving obsession began after 9/11. Before then, he drove "75 miles per hour in the left-hand lane," but in the wake of the attacks he vowed to minimize his personal consumption of Mideast oil. As he sees it, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda received their operating funds from all the U.S. consumers who bought Saudi oil. That money paid for the construction work that made bin Laden's family rich. "If Osama bin Laden didn't have the money to burn," Wayne says, "he wouldn't have been able to do what he did. There was a direct relationship between our addiction to oil and the World Trade Center coming down."
Less consumption of Mideast oil would also make our economy less susceptible to spikes in the price of opec oil, which have triggered U.S. recessions. More than half the gas we pour into our vehicles in America is imported, and we send more than $4 billion a week abroad to buy oil. If we all got a 25 percent improvement in fuel economy (far less than the 50 percent improvement that Wayne and his hypermilers routinely get), we could reduce by half the oil we import from the Mideast for our cars. And then there's global warming. "I'm not just doing this for myself," Wayne told me before we met. "I'm doing this for my country and the world."
But driving with Wayne, you get the feeling it's not just about politics, and that's confirmed when he tells me about his father. For 50 years, Robert Gerdes has been writing down the mileage he gets from each tank of gas. Wayne remembers the vacation his family took from Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, to Florida when he was eight. His father drove the family car, a Buick LeSabre, and hauled an 18-foot travel trailer loaded with camping gear. The Buick got seven miles per gallon on the trip. "Every time we hit a steep hill it was, 'Whooooshhhh,' like the flushing of a toilet," says Wayne, "but it was flushing fuel. I'll never forget that sucking sound of the four-barrel carburetor. We visited Disney World, but I don't remember it."
In 2002, wayne bought a Toyota Corolla to replace the 1999 Nissan truck he had been using for his daily commute to the power plant. Online, he saw that "guys in Priuses were bragging about 44 mpg, and I was doing better in a Corolla." But it was driving his wife's Acura mdx that moved Wayne up to the next rung of hypermiler driving. That's because the suv came with a fuel consumption display (fcd), which shows mpg in real time. As he drove, he began to see how little things—slight movements of his foot, accelerations up hills, even a cold day—influenced his fuel efficiency. He learned to wring as many as 638 miles from a single 19-gallon tank in the mdx; he rarely gets less than 30 mpg when he drives it. "Most people get 18 in them," he says. The fcd changed the driving game for Wayne. "It's a running joke," he says, "but instead of a fuel consumption display, a lot of us call them 'game gauges'"—a reference to the running score posted on video games—"because we're trying to beat our last score—our miles per gallon."
If people could see how much fuel they guzzled while driving, Wayne believes they'd quickly learn to drive more efficiently. "If the epa would mandate fcds in every car, this country would save 20 percent on fuel overnight," he says. "They're not expensive for the manufacturers to put in—10 to 20 bucks—and it would save more fuel than all the laws passed in the last 25 years. All from a simple display."
Since early in 2005, when gas prices rose past $2 a gallon, drivers all over the country have become more attentive to fuel efficiency. But the hypermilers set themselves apart in an event they refer to as the Prius Marathon, which took place in Pittsburgh in August 2005. It was undertaken by five men: Wayne; Dan Kroushl, an electrical engineer from Wexford, Pennsylvania; Dave Bassage, a West Virginian who until recently worked for the Department of Environmental Protection; Rick Reece, a geospatial analyst from South Carolina; and Bob Barlow, a Virginia attorney. They had all met online.
Kroushl got the idea after driving his Prius earlier that spring on a 15-mile portion of Route 65 near his home, when he was able to sustain 99.9 mpg, the highest reading that a Prius fcd can record. He posted what he had done online and asked if anyone had a device that could record higher mpgs. But nobody believed he had even reached 99.9. The car has a combined city/highway epa mpg estimate of 55, and even hypermilers with Priuses were only posting mpgs in the 60s and 70s. Kroushl wanted to prove the doubters wrong, so he invited other hypermilers to Pittsburgh to run the same stretch of Route 65—15 miles up and 15 miles back. Their goal was to break the record for most miles on a tank of gasoline in a Prius, which was 1,316 miles, recorded by a Japanese driver, at 85.85 mpg. But the American version of the car has a 12.8-gallon tank rather than the 15.9-gallon tank in the Japanese Prius. That meant the five men would have to top the Japanese mpg by about 20 percent, which would mean they'd have to sustain 100 mpg over 48 hours. Bassage described the event this way: "We're coming from all points of the compass to have fun going nowhere for a whole weekend in Pittsburgh."
The hypermilers cracked 100 mpg in their first four four-hour shifts. Back at their hotel, they posted fuzzy digital photographs of the Prius' fcds on greenhybrid.com.
On their first round, the men posted mpgs in the low hundreds, but as they drove, they talked on the phone, sharing fuel-saving tips with each other. On Saturday, Reece got 114.7, and Kroushl reached 115. On Sunday, Wayne beat 120. "I'd be getting 105 miles per gallon," Bassage told me, "and thinking I let down the team." By Sunday night, Kroushl, who had launched the endeavor, was getting sick of driving, and his wife had made it clear she wanted him to stop the nonsense and get home, so he began turning on the air conditioner and the defroster, to drink up gas faster. "The 'low fuel' light flashed for over nine hours," Bassage says. When the Prius, with Kroushl driving, finally ran out of gas and rolled to a stop, the five men had clocked 1,397 miles from just one 12.8-gallon tank of gas—a new record. They had averaged 109 miles per gallon.
In order to reacquaint himself with the car he'll be driving the next day in the mpg Challenge, Wayne borrows an Insight for the 120-mile drive to Hybridfest. While Wayne drives, he reminisces about one of his sweetest—meaning most fuel efficient—drives of all time, in his Honda Accord last summer. "I was going about 70 miles per hour catching up with a truck, in the late evening, and I had a tail wind. I went into a d-fas, down the bowl over the top of a hill, and I coasted almost three and a half miles. It ended at 40 miles per hour.... It was a once-in-a-lifetime. I'll probably never experience it again. The hypermiling gods were with me."
I ask him what the equivalent feat would be for a baseball player. "Three grand slams in a game," he says. A great home run hitter needs sharp eyes, strong wrists, and exquisite timing. And a great hypermiler? "Foot control, hand-eye coordination, and anticipation," he says. "It's like a moving chess game, where the pieces aren't stationary." Like all transcendent athletes, Wayne anticipates the action on the field—in his case, the road—before it unfolds. "I'm making micro-adjustments on a continual basis," he says.
Fearlessness might be another trait that Wayne neglects to mention. At one point in our drive, Wayne approaches a truck to ride its draft. The wind whipping around the semi buffets the Insight, which weighs just 1,800 pounds. I offer Wayne some cashews, and as he takes a handful, his foot comes off the pedal slightly and the Insight drifts a few car lengths back. A black Infiniti suv squeezes between us and the truck. Wayne rides its butt. The Infiniti moves back into the left lane and zips away. "We pressured him so we could get our target back." I offer him more cashews, but he declines. "I have to pay attention," he says. He creeps back toward the truck. We're at two car lengths.... Wayne takes a call from some friends in another car.... One car length.... I thump an imaginary brake pedal with my foot, just like my mother used to do while riding with me. Wayne, not a touchy-feely guy, puts his hand on my leg to reassure me.
A few minutes later, he slaps the wheel. "Damn. I forgot my ice vest." The vest, which he uses at the nuclear plant when he has to work in really hot rooms, "is kind of my secret weapon," he says. "You can drive at 95 degrees with an ice vest, and it doesn't feel like 95." Wayne expects his car will be extremely toasty during the mpg Challenge. "No electricity, no air, no fans," he says. "No nothin'."
The three dozen men—no women sign up to compete—begin driving the 20-mile course of the Hybridfest mpg Challenge at about 9 a.m. Wayne is the favorite—"I have a target on my back," he says—and the star of the show. "It's like he's a member of Kiss," says Tony Schaefer, a Hybridfest fan. Wayne expects that his most serious contender in the mpg Challenge will be Randall Burkhalter, the only driver to ever break one of Wayne's mpg records. This summer he passed Wayne's 92.8 mpg lifetime average for the Honda Insight, and his mark is now up to 95.4 mpg. Like many hypermilers, the two met online at websites such as cleanmpg.com, greenhybrid.com, and priuschat.com. Wayne finds Burkhalter in the hot midday sun after Burkhalter has just finished his run, the best of the day: a 108.5 mpg average in his Insight. Wayne slaps him on the back to congratulate him, calling him "the top dog." Burkhalter thanks Wayne for all he's taught him, adding, "We're the head-butters. We're the rams butting horns in the mountains."
A few minutes later, a shout comes from the finish line that there's a new front-runner. His name is Justin Fons, and he's just 17 years old. He clocks 117.2 mpg in an Insight. Afterward, Justin explains that his father taught him how to drive, but that "the person I learned to drive efficiently from is Wayne Gerdes." By mid-afternoon, Mike Dabrowski, an inventor, tops Justin's mark, finishing the course at 121.9 mpg. But Dabrowski has the advantage of an extra battery in his Insight that connects to a fifth wheel he lowers to the ground hydraulically from the rear axle—which is why the other hypermilers call him "Mr. Fifth Wheel." Wayne doubts that it's possible to beat 121.9 mpg with four wheels. As he's about to take the course for the last run of the day, he tells the woman who signs him in that she should write "Mike Dabrowski" in the winner's slot.
By the time Wayne enters the lot from his run, it's past 5 p.m., and the other hypermilers have retreated from the storm and are off to Hybridfest's happy hour. Wayne's cap is off and his head, soaking wet, is sticking out the window because his breath has fogged up the windshield, and he refuses to turn on the defroster. Wayne honks to get a judge to run through the rain to record his fcd. It reads as high as the Insight can record: 150 mpg. Afterward, the Insight's owner hits a switch that shows Wayne's mark in kilometers per liter, which has a higher limit. It reads 1.3 L/100 km. That's 180.91 mpg. Later, at the awards dinner, Wayne is presented with a one-year subscription to Green Car Journal and a $25 gas card. For all we know, Wayne's still using it.
ridge-ride vb to drive an automobile with one's right wheels touching the right white line. Used to avoid puddles and excess friction and to alert approaching vehicles that one is moving slowly.
d-fas: draft-as·sis·ted forced au·to stop
n a fuel-saving driving technique in which one turns off the engine and tailgates a large truck in order to lower one's wind resistance.
From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
Without Contraries there is no Progression.
Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate,
are necessary to Human existence.
From these Contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil
Good is the passive that obeys Reason.
Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven, Evil is Hell.
From The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly
It is more important, in fact, to be good than to do good things because being, rather than doing, is the state which keeps us in tune with the order of things. Hence Pascal’s reflection that all the evil of the world comes from men not being able to sit quietly in a room. Good is the retention of energy; evil a waste of it, energy which is taken away from growth. Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
US Department of Energy, National Association of Manufacturers. Energy Efficiency: The Competitive Edge, December 1990, Page 3
While some fear they must start by buying their way to energy efficiency, the fact is that many can begin by managing their way to savings. At a General Motors plant, employees received monthly reports which visually demonstrated through computer generated graphics the cost of neglecting to turn off lights and equipment. The awareness campaign resulted in 50 percent less energy wasted on lighting and 86 percent energy wasted on major equipment, saving more than $309,500 a year.
Rodes, Barbara K., and Rice Odell. A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations. New York: 1992. ISBN 0801857384, Page 275
Do not plan long journeys because whatever you believe in you have already seen. When a thing is everywhere, then the way to find it is not to travel but to love it.
--AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO (354 - 430), City of God
Fernando, Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet. New York: 1991. ISBN 1852422041, Page 76
The only traveler with real soul I’ve ever met was an office boy who worked in a company where I was at one time employed. This young lad collected brochures on different cities, countries and travel companies; he had maps, some torn out of newspapers, others begged from one place or another; he cut out pictures of landscapes, engravings of exotic costumes, painting of boats and ships from various journals and magazines. He would visit travel agencies on behalf of some real or hypothetical company, possibly the actual one in which he worked, and ask for brochures on Italy or India, brochures giving details of sailings between Portugal and Australia.
He was only the greatest traveler I’ve ever known (because he was the truest), he was also one of the happiest people I have had the good fortune to meet. I’m sorry not to know what has become of him, though, to be honest, I’m not really sorry, I only feel that I should be. I’m not really sorry because today, ten or more years on from that brief period in which I knew him, he must be a grown man, stolid, reliably fulfilling his duties, married perhaps, someone’s breadwinner—in other words, one of the living dead. By now he may even have traveled in body, he who knew so well how to travel in his soul.
Kunstler, James Howard Home from Nowhere New York, 1996: Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0684811960, Page 25
Much of what makes European cities tolerable are remnants of the pre-industrial ages, particularly the public spaces associated with history—the ancient civic plazas, the market and cathedral squares, the military parade grounds, the palaces and playgrounds of the aristocracy—and the agreeable human scale of all these old things. The streets of these cities often have the intimacy and meandering character of ancient cow paths, which many once were.
Kidd, Chip. Fast Company, October 1999 Page 129
TAKE THE AVERAGE PARKING LOT WHERE EVERY DAY you come across a clever device: the speed bump -- that elongated, bread loaf-shaped piece of macadam lying across the pavement.
What makes the speed bump a good design? It's a simple but highly functional object that's foolproof. It's not what you would call decorative -- but it doesn't need to be. There's a purity of design to it, based on plain common sense. Often, the simplest and the most effective solutions aren't dictated by style. In fact, the only real piece of dogma that I was ever taught in school was that form is strictly determined by the function it needs to perform. Accordingly, the generic parking-lot speed bump is a supremely elegant solution to the problem of getting people to slow down.
Take an alternative solution to achieving that same goal: posting a sign that reads, "Slow down." With a sign, you're faced with a bunch of decisions: What color should you use for the lettering and for the background? What shape should you make the sign? How big should it be? The beauty of the simple speed bump is that you don't have to worry about any of those decisions.
Still, when we're out driving around, and we come up against a speed bump, it can be a jolting surprise. Which suggests another important point: Design isn't always a pleasing part of our lives. But as the speed bump teaches us, design is necessary -- and it can be extremely practical
Frost, Robert. “The Literate Farmers and the Planet Venus”.
Here come more stars to character the skies,
And they in the estimation of the wise
Are more divine than any bulb or arc,
Because their purpose is to flash and spark.
Allen, Steve. Dumbth: The Lost Art of Thinking. New York: ISBN 1573992237, Page 361
Darkness
When I was very young I feared the dark,
But now I see it’s the more natural state.
We come from an eternity of it,
Blink briefly in the light, and then return.
Most of the earth’s best work is done in darkness.
And only surface things can know the sun.
The oil, the diamonds, the coal, the iron
Come from the undercrusts eternal night.
The sea’s work is done equally by night.
And all beneath the wave is lightless gloom.
The sun has never penetrated seeds;
It touches but the outer skin of fruits.
And you, the part of you is a stranger
That light nor I will ever know.
It’s dark beneath your dress (facetiously)
And darker still beneath your skin. The bones.
The heart works blindly, and the cells
Grope sightlessly among the veins for food.
The blood indeed’s so fearful of the light
That at the very sight it starts and freezes.
The Bible tells us that the dark came first.
And also that it shall come last
And when it does the cause may be
That of a sudden there was too much light.
Wright, Steven. The Wisdom of Steven Wright. Downloaded from his web site.
Power outage at a department store yesterday; twenty people were trapped on the escalators.
Nye, David E. Consuming Power. United States: 1998. ISBN 0262140632, Pages 4 and 179
In their daily rounds, Americans have come to depend on more heat, light, and power than any other people, including those with equal levels of development. The Processes of capitalism and industrialization alone do not explain this rapid development or this national difference. Culture does....
In the decentralized world of automotive distances, most of the life of the street disappeared, including vendors, delivery boys, the casual walk, the accidental encounter, the corner drugstore, the local cafe, the neighborhood store, sidewalk displays, and the sidewalks themselves. For those who chose to remain in the central city, the street was transformed form a social space of encounter into a transportation artery.
Sachs, Wolfgang. Greening the North. New York: 1998. ISBN 1856495078 Page 118
The specific amount of electricity used is not the only magnitude determining consumption. The facilities involved and user habits can also result in increased energy-efficiency being cancelled out or not fully utilized. More dishwashers, dryers, microwave ovens, or innumerable smaller appliances can easily nullify savings. Nothing is as efficient as appliances which are not purchased. In addition people are inclined to use eco-efficient equipment more thoughtlessly. The link between more technology and increasing demands is notorious. With a vacuum cleaner, washing machine, etc., demands for cleanliness, hygiene, and freshness easily mount. For that reason it is not enough to establish potential for savings; implementing them also demands a modest life-style. Here too efficiency must be stabilized by sufficiency. Prudent behaviour opens up additional possibilities of saving.
Scott, Stephan and Pellman, Kenneth Living Without Electricity. Intercourse,PA: Good Books, 1990, Page 4
Early in this century, the large majority of Amish leaders agreed that connecting to power lines would not be in the best interest of their communities. They did not make this decision because they thought electricity was evil in itself, but because easy access to it could lead to many temptations and the deterioration of church and amily life. For similar reasons, the Amish refuse to own cars.
Bowman, Sarah. The Advantages of Driving a Buggy. Personal correspondence. April, 1997.
What I would do if I had the option of owning a car or horse and buggy, I can’t tell, but I know what I would do if I had the option of riding to work with a person who owns a car, or driving with my own horse and buggy. I choose my buggy for several reasons.
(1) I love being out in the open, being part of the elements whether rain or shine or severely cold. Some weather is considerably more pleasant than others, but after coming home on a miserably muddy and rainy day I have asked myself whether I wouldn’t prefer riding in a car. The answer is no. The reason is probably a sentimental one. I am reminded of other times when I was out in similar weather and felt the contentment and security of nestling behind an umbrella and getting to my destination in spite of the unfavourable weather. In cold weather there is a sense of victory in being able to “tough it.” And who needs to stop and think about the advantages of riding in the open buggy in pleasant weather? One can see and smell all the countryside sights and smells as the scenes pass in slow motion.
(2) Another reason I choose my buggy is that the slow, and therefore lengthy ride affords me lots of time to think and ponder life’s complexities. Meditate. To observe and learn about nature as the seasons pass. I often take my binoculars along and stop to watch the ducks and geese on the river, or to gaze at a bird up high in a tree that I noticed because of its beautiful song; or to look at the distant scenery from a hilltop.
(3) Another reason I choose to rather drive myself than to ride with a motorist is that I am more independent, but this would not be the case if I owned a car.
(4) Here is one other reason: If I forget to watch where I am going, the horse will know where to make the usual turns. If I fail to see a parked vehicle at the side of the road, or other obstacles such as a hole, etc., my horse sees. He may not know enough to turn aside far enough to allow for the buggy to pass safely, but by hesitating, or changing the rhythm of his running, I am alerted and see the problem. No car would do this.
(5) Oh yes, I must not forget to mention that when motorists feel frightened and powerless because of ice, or snow storms, I have little to worry. My horse will not slide on ice, or lose the way in snow. Nor will the buggy get stuck as soon as a car. Once I was behind a windshield in a snow flurry, and then I understood why motorists have such a fear of flying snow. The snow against the windshield was like a white wall. When you’re out in the flying snow, for some reason visibility is better. I have been frightened of swirling snow when driving in the dark and there was nothing to mark the edge of the road even though there was a deep ditch. There have also been one or two days in my life as a buggy driver that I was afraid to be out because of the cold, but those days are rare if one learns how to bundle up well. (I can give tips on this if so desired.)
Those are all the reasons I can think of at the moment, but they are enough to keep me cheerfully driving a horse on an open buggy. I have found that poor health makes it more difficult to enjoy, and endure, the exposure. Oh yes! I also enjoy the challenge of handling a horse, which doubtlessly adds to my enjoyment of driving a horse and buggy. So I don’t know if any of my reasons will convince anyone else, but those are my “good points” associated with this
type of transportation.
Peter F. Drucker, The Dimensions of Management, New York: 1977 ISBN0061664006, Page 33
No amount of efficiency would have enabled the manufacturer of buggy whips to survive.
Ford is Conceding S.U.V. Drawbacks By KEITH BRADSHER Robin Nelson for The New York Times
May 12, 2000
ATLANTA, May 11 -- The Ford Motor Company, which depends on sport utility vehicles for much of its profit, acknowledged today that they cause serious safety and environmental problems.
In its first "corporate citizenship report," issued at the company's annual shareholders' meeting here, Ford said that the vehicles contributed more than cars to global warming, emitted more smog-causing pollution and endangered other motorists. The automaker said that it would keep building them because they provide needed profit, but would seek technological solutions to the problems and look for alternatives to the big vehicles.
Ford Motor's voluntary admission that it faces an awkward situation because its most profitable products do not meet its goals for social responsibility has few parallels, according to Business for Social Responsibility, a corporate group in San Francisco.
In an interview, William C. Ford Jr., 43, the company's chairman and a great-grandson of Henry Ford, depicted the company's statements as a combination of altruism and long-term business planning. He said that he worried that automakers could wind up with reputations like those of big tobacco companies if they ignored sport utilities' problems….
Newsletter of the Conservation Law Foundation, Boston. Richard Howard, Preventing Pollution Radio’s Road Scholars, Page 5
CLF: What can people do to make their cars as environmentally sound as possible?
Tom: The first and best thing you can do is don’t drive the stupid thing. Most people drive way too much.
Ray: One way to minimize your driving is to have a car that doesn’t run particularly well.
Tom: Yeah, like mine.
Ray: If it’s a joy to drive the car you’ll be out there driving all the time.
You want something that’s unpleasant.
Tom: You don’t want something that starts all the time. That’s one of the problems with Japanese cars. You get into a Japanese car and that SOB starts up winter, summer, it doesn’t matter. Let’s get back to American cars, because half the time in the winter they won’t start and that way you can reduce pollution.
Chenn, Donald D. T. “If you Build It, They Will Come.” STPP Progress March 1998, Page 4 and 7
Studies on induced traffic in the U.S. have been conducted since the 1940s, and it is now widely acknowledged that building more roads does not relieve congestion. If they had considered such evidence they would have found stories such as the West Side Highway in New York City. In 1973, one section of the highway collapsed, resulting in the closure of most of the route. In 1976 NYDOT did a study of the remaining portion of highway. Traffic counts taken three years before the closure and two years after revealed that 53 percent of the trips disappeared, and of those trips, 93 percent did not reappear else where—only seven percent of the lost traffic was diverted onto parallel roads.
