It’s worth adding that the U.S. and Canada have already gotten much more efficient in the way we use energy - we only half as much energy per dollar of GDP as we used in the 70’s. New technologies like flat panel screens, R2000 homes and Energy Star appliances have made a big difference.
Well there are other obvious parts of the equation that impact things. The largest, most overshadowing one if the embarrassing topic of population growth. IMO, something I’m not going to debate on this message board, the population of the earth is already double what it ought to be. A 50% (voluntary) reduction in population should overall result in a substantial reduction in energy use.
But I have also heard people argue, on this very message board, that conservation is a dead end since all it does is delay the inevitable growth back up to that energy use level, and beyond. Which of course ignores the fact that at some point, some time, either sanity has to reign and population will top out, or else some external factor will force population growth to stop.
I don’t know. My guesstimate is that 20% constitutes most of the low-hanging fruit. But that’s a very unscientific estimate, with no cites. I do know that Fierra and I use about 1/3 to 1/2 the energy of my co-workers overall and seem to not lack for anything we want. I would be willing to bet a third reduction would be possible without tanking the economy - provided it had a long ramp up period. But with population still being allowed to grow and people still being allowed to have as many children as they want with no penalties…
This sounds like somewhat tortuous logic. We should consume more and faster so we can raise the price of energy to fund more research? That…doesn’t really sound right to me.
There have been lots of population threads on the board in the past. In fact, the Earth is currently heading for either a stable population or a population decline. The U.N. population low estimate for earth’s population in 2100 is 3.6 billion, so you may get your wish. The median estimate is for the population to stabilize at around 8-9 billion. A number which I believe is sustainable.
See above. Fertility rates have been plummeting for a couple of decades now. Many first-world nations are not even breeding at replacement levels, and even third-world nations like Bangladesh and India are seeing substantial reductions in fertility. Population growth is a problem that is fixing itself.
That was exactly my feeling about it. Maybe we’re just applying the 80/20 rule in commonsense fashion. The number may be significantly different, though. I suspect we’ll find out pretty soon. For example, Bob Lutz has said of the new CAFE standard that the low-hanging fruit is already gone, and from now on mileage gains will be ‘the expensive kind’. Either iin money, or safety, or utility.
I’d be interested in the details. What exactly are you doing? How do you know that you use 1/3 to 1/2 of your peers’ use of energy?
Here’s the thing, though: The amount of wasted energy in the west is a function of the generally low price of energy, both as a percentage of GDP and as a percentage of average income. Economics generally rules these things. Most people are more wasteful of energy than you because most people can afford it, and the amount of extra cost they absorb is worth less than the amount of effort and capital it would cost to reduce it.
Take gasoline for cars. I drive a mid-sized SUV, and live in Canada where gas is more expensive than in the U.S. Today I filled up for about $50. I do that roughly once every two weeks. So it costs me roughly $100-$150/mo for gas. Compare that to the $300 a month I’m paying in depreciation, the $200/mo for insurance, $100/mo in cost of money, $150/mo for parking, plus the cost of maintenance, tires, washes, etc. I’m not going to change the fundamental way I drive to save $50 of the $800/mo a car costs me. The economics of conservation result in the levels of conservation we have today. We don’t drive 5mpg behemoths, and we don’t use inefficient heating and we spend reasonable money to insulate our homes and buy efficient appliances.
As the cost of energy goes up, you will see more conservation. You’re already seeing it - smaller cars and hybrids are gaining market share, and people are starting to consider energy use in their day-to-day buying decisions of everything from computers to lightbulbs. CFL bulbs have clearly crossed a cost/benefit tipping point, and are being rapidly absorbed into everyday life.
The only thing lacking in this equation is the cost of the externalities from energy use. If it were all accounted for in prices, there would be no problem whatsoever. But it’s not. So the question is how to pay for those externalities and tranfer the costs back to energy consumers.
There are two ways: One is to ultimately tax the energy to recover the costs and stimulate efficicent use. The other is to find another energy source which is cheaper and doesn’t have those externalities. If you can do that, the entire market for energy will move to the new, clean sources. If you have to rely on taxes, you have the problem that not all countries are willing to play ball.
Far from being tortuous logic, it’s basic economics. If we consume energy really fast, the added demand will spike prices and cause alternatives to gain market share. If we conserve, we’ll use it slower, but there will be less incentive to replace it.
And in a fungible market like oil, if one consumer reduces demand, the price will drop, causing demand by everyone else to rise until the price of oil rises to whatever the new equilibrium price is. That may result in overall reduction in world demand, but it may also have the effect of increasing consumption in other countries which do not have the same environmental controls on their energy production facilities. By reducing our own demand for oil, we could wind up increasing the amount of pollution created by oil.
The bottom line is that no matter what you do, every drop of oil is going to come out of the ground until it’s uneconomical to bring up more. Unless you can enforce a worldwide ban on it, or cut it off at the source, all you can do by changing local laws is to change the worldwide pattern of energy use - not necessarily to reduce it, or at least not by as much as you thought you could.
I don’t totally know. We have new appliances, water heater, etc. that are low-energy use. We got a programmable thermostat. We have a decently insulated house. We only have lights on in the rooms where we are, and no where else. But when we compare electric and gas use with others, ours is routinely half of theirs.
“Basic economics” doesn’t work 100% in real life. You have to bet that you can tech or replace your way out of whatever crisis you speed towards by the time you run out. And what I contend is that the magnitude of energy consumption is such that I sincerely doubt that we can continue to burn as fast as we want and just hope that someone will come up with something about it. It’s a very high-risk game, and I say we stack the odds more in our favour.
Second, this ignores the issue of subsidies, breaks, etc. encouraging further consumption of a non-renewable resource. Free market is one thing, but when government subsidies are pushing the use of the non-renewable resource, surely you must admit that represents a corruption of the “basic economics?”
Third, there are economies of scale and throttling influences. OPEC, for one, acts as a throttle (with variable effectiveness, but nonetheless it exists).
I reject that hypothesis - we should burn it first because we can burn it better? This ignores a whole, vast excluded middle of options.
These are all “could happen” and “might do this” options. We don’t know that we will beat the curve of ramping up a liquid fuel replacement for gasoline before it gets too expensive. We don’t know how to replace natural gas if some of the low resource estimates are reality, and suddenly there’s tens of millions of homes with little to no affordable gas for heat or water heat. We don’t know that even if oil becomes hideously expensive that countries like China and India and Indonesia won’t just subsidize the hell out of it and disrupt the market further.
What we do know for an undeniable fact is that using less energy uses less energy. Setting your heat lower by 2 degrees in the winter will use less energy. Driving less will use less energy. And what I believe (“knowing” requires some cites) is that American homes and Americans, including as a group the “smartest folks in the room” here, are the most energy wasteful and inefficient as a group in the first world. I believe that the huge amounts of oil imports need to stop, and that we need to consider that to be a national security measure. We need to reduce the amount of money that goes to fundamentalist religious societies that degrade and debase women as second-class citizens, and to crazed military strongmen like Chavez. America needs a new direction, a Marshall Plan for Energy and Efficiency.
You can, and I am sure will argue your points in return, but I think that both of us are going to be short on hard facts to back our positions. This is a contest of philosophies: to my conservative view of energy policy, burning the candle at both ends to give us the extra light to find the next one sounds attractive, but is fraught with the risk that you don’t find that next candle. And with resources being finite (AFAWK), burning fast now to ultimately raise costs and slow down consumption later on is a risky strategy, and one which in the end could yield the same result, only sooner. My conservative view of energy policy demands energy independence - no more than 10% imports of any energy source. My view is that we are poised to be the ones to do things like put a gas tax which is used to fund research and have us develop the technology for cheaper, renewable energy and we can be the environmentally-sound energy suppliers to the whole damn world. So that by 2100 the rest of the world will be bitching and moaning about the “monopoly” that America has on near-zero-emissions renewable energy.
That’s because you’re no doubt upper-middle class, and either live in a fairly new building with new appliances or have had the money to retrofit. I’m in the same category, with similar amounts of efficiency.
The problem is that most houses are not new, and that middle class and lower middle class people cannot afford to upgrade their furnaces, appliances, and homes. Once the low-hanging fruit is gone (auto thermostats and CFL bulbs fall in that category), the cost of efficiency gains goes way up.
I didn’t say ‘free market’ economics. I said economics - the way people respond to economic incentives. Of course the amount of energy we use is partially dictated by price ceilings, subsidies, tariffs, the OPEC cartel, and other interventions in the marketplace, but the result is a cost of energy and the rational response of consumers to that cost. The overall efficiency of our energy consumption is largely the result of the relative cost of energy compared to the cost of ways to reduce consumption of it. Make it really expensive, and people will expend more effort on conservation. Leave it inexpensive, and no amount of cajoling or public service advertising will substantially change the way in which people use energy.
You are the energy equivalent of an ‘early adopter’ - people who have values other than pure money which affect their decision-making. Most people do not fall in that category, even when they say they will.
That’s not a corruption of basic economics - the laws of economics still apply. It’s just artificially manipulating one side of the equation. Similarly, price controls do not corrupt basic economics - the rules of economics can still be applied to determine the effects of the price control. They are interventions in the market, but still subject to the same laws of economics as anything else.
I didn’t say we “should” consume more. I’m saying that there are unintended consequences to these decisions that you have to be aware of when making intelligent choices.
All true. In my opinion, however, the markets are very good at analyzing this and figuring out the best course of action - provided all information is incorporated into prices. The primary problem in the energy markets is the distortion caused by both government policy (subsidies and tax breaks) and by honest-to-god market failures due to externalities like pollution and CO2 emissions. Sane energy policy would seek to make sure that the price of energy reflects the true cost of it. Then you’d have things like futures prices to guide industry into seeking alternatives. Today, that mechanism is largely broken because futures often reflect not the true cost of energy, but the perception of the market into things like how powerful OPEC will be in 10 years or whether politicians will subsidize prices.
A very simplistic way to look at it. If the price of oil reflects demand, and your demand for it goes down, the price will go down. This will increase demand elsewhere.
Now, this may have the effect of creating a new equilibrium that results in lower aggregate energy use on the planet, but will not be a reduction equal to your own. The overall reduction will be somewhat less. Guaranteed.
There are confounding factors - one being the demand elasticity of oil. So it’s not a simple thing to calculate. But it’s an effect you must keep in mind when evaluating macro effects of demand changes for energy.
This is not correct. Canada uses more energy per capita on residential energy. So does Finland. And many other 1st world countries are within 10% of the U.S.'s per-capita residential energy consumption: Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, France, etc.
Residential use is just one measure of energy efficiency. Maybe a better one is to look at the amount of energy consumed to create a dollar of GDP. Here is a chart of energy efficiency of the top 48 economies in the world. The U.S. is more energy efficient than Canada, and less energy efficient than the G7 nations. One of the patterns you might see emerge is that energy efficiency has a lot to do with how big your country is and probably how much agriculture you have. Not so much with how wasteful you are, although. My guess is that the U.S. is only marginally different than other 1st world countries in this regard.
Energy independence may be a good thing from a national security standpoint, but it will do nothing to stop money flowing to the bad guys. Unfortunately, these countries have the cheapest energy sources on the planet. So anything that reduces the price of energy will have the perverse effect of increasing their market share and power. If you reduced demand so much that oil dropped back to $25/bbl, it won’t reduce the demand for middle-east oil one bit. What it will do is kill the Alberta Tar Sands, wind and solar projects, nuclear power, and other sources of higher-cost energy. This will give the bad guys more control - one of the reasons OPEC has lost power is because at $80/bbl, the world price of oil is now partly driven by many non-OPEC sources.
I’d rather just set the price of energy properly (which means increasing it), and let the market figure out what to do about it. Any giant government plan will necessarily involve the idiots in Washington making technological decisions they are not competent to make. For example, the look at the huge subsidies they are throwing at corn growers - a pretty poor energy source, but one that has powerful political constituencies behind it.
That’s a nice dream, but I don’t think it matches reality. By refusing to use low-cost energy from abroad, all you’re doing is increased the cost of energy for the U.S. and lowering it for everyone else. This will put American industry at a disadvantage and hurt the American economy. And if the U.S. were to develop cheaper renewable energy, it almost certainly wouldn’t be the kind of thing the U.S. could export - rather, it would be a technology that the world would just adopt.
But they’re not even doing programmable thermostats en masse, something which would have a proven payback period that could be as short as a year. And some of the people using them (possibly a lot, according to the DoE) still persist in believing the myth that if they set their thermostat too low or too high, it somehow takes more energy.
But when we look at total energy use:
From: http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tablee1c.xls
Per capita energy use, MBtu
Canada: 436.2
US: 340.5
Switzerland: 169.7
Sweden: 259.9
Germany: 176.0
France: 181.5
Average Europe: 146.4
The environment and energy pools do not really care about how much GDP we produce. It’s great that we produce decently well on a GDP basis. We can keep on doing so until we get into a serious crisis. Maybe we develop the next big thing, maybe we don’t. I think the risk is high, and I want to mitigate that risk by having some fairly strong conservation measures.
Nothing whatsoever? You make it sound like we’re honor-bound to keep sending them money. I really don’t even want to argue it, because it’s ridiculous on its face. A smaller market means less money to go to them. It is not proven that somehow the other countries of the world are all going to start ramping up their consumption to replace ours. And with large parts of the developed world signing onto and promising new GHG restriction goals and efficiency targets, it’s not clear that consumption really could increase that much.
Are you contending that the price of oil would change the propensity of developing nuclear power? The two don’t exactly compete…for reasons I really do not want to explain. And hybrid/electric cars are so far down the road from making a serious dent in electric power that they do not enter into the equation here. And solar? Where’s the competition, for nuclear and solar, with so little electricity produced from oil?
You have not shown any factual information that says it would reduce the cost of energy for everyone else. You have presented a well-argued opinion, but I do not share it. I further contend that the move to energy independence pays off in other ways - such as the investment into internal companies and resources (keeping the money here, not exporting it to Muslim fundamentalists) - and by preventing the need, in part, for more $1 trillion Iraqs.
“We” developed reactor, boiler, turbine, gas turbine, emissions controls, etc. all as part of our power industry and all which are readily imported to other countries. Sure the technology gets developed elsewhere eventually, but that’s the way technology works. Plus when we’re talking about the future, we can also be talking about things such as specific enzymes for cellulosic ethanol production, GM fuel crops, nano-tech solar cells, etc. I reject the claim that it almost certainly wouldn’t be technology we could export. For goodness sake, we’re building GE ABWRs in Taiwan - if we can export a nuclear plant (in effect), we can export an awful lot.