Energy Savings
Finessing the Carbon Conundrum
Our energy supply will become increasingly diverse, dispersed, and renewable. In time, centrally located, traditional thermal-power plants will come to be sentimentally admired, like Victorian steamships are for us.
—Amory Lovins
Suburbia, 2012—The microwave beeps nonstop as Eric and Margo Petrovich set the table for dinner. They’re listening to a feature story on National Public Radio about the rising costs of energy, water, and food, a topic much in the news these days. The year 2012 has been a wakeup call for the fifty-something couple whose four-bedroom Colorado home is becoming less affordable every month. They’ve talked about moving to a smaller, more efficient house—closer to their jobs, stores, parks, and theaters—with good solar orientation and insulation. But they really hate to give up their big suburban backyard, and what would they do with all the antiques they refinished themselves?
“It’s true that roughly half of the world’s oil reserves are still in the ground,” an expert explains on the radio, “but the fact is that it’s more expensive to get these low-grade, remotely located supplies. More importantly, we need more oil than we can get, since world oil production has reached its peak and will soon begin to decline. Global demand now exceeds supply, it’s that simple; we want more than we can have. As prices rise for food, fuel, medicine, and consumer products, we are finally seeing how dependent we are on fossil fuels in agriculture, transportation, food processing, and the chemical industry … That’s why oil at a hundred and twenty dollars a barrel is having such a ripple effect on our daily lives …”
“Why didn’t we see this coming?” Margo comments as they sit down.
“Why didn’t we insist on more efficient vehicles and appliances back in the seventies? … New sources of energy and new ways to make chemicals from plants and waste?”
“Well, at least we’re learning to use renewable energy,” says Eric. “Did you know that wind energy now supplies electricity for seventy-five million of the world’s households? That’s about one-thirtieth of the electricity we need, and growing fast …”
They both want to feel secure and upbeat about the future, but instead they feel a little overwhelmed by the lifestyle changes that face them. Since 2006, the cost of gasoline has risen 300 percent, and the price of natural gas has increased sixfold as Canadian supplies became less dependable. Steadily expanding demand for large homes, hot tubs, computers, HDTVs, and an infinite fleet of must-have appliances has been matched by a persistent thirst for fuel. Record-setting weather extremes haven’t helped, either. While there are now many models of hybrids and flexible fuel vehicles on the market, most of America’s 230 million vehicles are still gas guzzlers, and it takes ten or fifteen years to replace that many vehicles. In 2012, Americans drive 25 trillion miles a year (the equivalent of a billion times around the earth), and some households are paying $200 or more a week just for gasoline. Eric and Margo’s household, which accounts for 31,000 of those miles, is one of them.
The typical front lawn is not quite as shamrock-green as it used to be, as the price of water continues to rise, and Eric’s and Margo’s big backyard is becoming an expensive luxury. Last year they spent more than $700 to water, fertilize, and mow it, and they are now considering taking some of the lawn out and planting a few fruit trees in one corner of the yard, and a bed of strawberries in the other. Like the rest of us, they’re feeling the pinch of rising food prices, and they’re reading up on techniques like “biointensive” gardening that supplies cartloads of food from small, well-tended spaces. Says Eric, “I didn’t realize there were so many hidden costs in things like packaging and processed food.” With all the recent media exposure, he’s learned that nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas, that conventional pesticides are made from oil, and that producing a single hamburger patty uses enough energy to drive 20 miles. The water expended to produce that burger could supply half a year’s worth of hot showers.
“Instead of Wheaties or Heart Smart, we may as well call cereal Petro Flakes,” jokes Eric, “because the grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline to manufacture.” As you can see, Eric is beginning to dimly understand how much energy is contained
in standard, energy-hungry products such as aluminum, plastic, cement, computers, drinking water, and cars. For example, that the manufacture of an average desktop computer uses more than ten times its weight in fossil fuels and materials.
Even energy itself “costs” more energy the deeper and more remotely we drill and mine. The oil industry once produced about hundred barrels of oil for each barrel of oil spent to bring the oil to market, but in today’s economy each barrel returns less than ten. Many people are reassured because of the abundance of coal, biomass, tar sands, and hydrogen, overlooking the fact that it takes a lot of energy to convert these materials into transportation fuel.
These days, Eric and Margo hear unfamiliar words like benzene, anhydrous ammonia, and polyvinyl chloride more than they really want to. These are all petrochemicals used to produce such familiar products as plastic, shirts, cleaners, adhesives, surgical gloves, safety glass, watchbands, building insulation, electrical insulation, packaging, lubrication, and pipes for plumbing. And every day the couple hears news stories about energy supply glitches that shut down factories, cause airline delays, or cause power outages in hospitals. “When a backup generator failed in a Saint Louis hospital,” writes a New York Times reporter, “donor organs were lost, operations were terminated or completed under flashlights. Temperatures in the hospital hovered near a hundred degrees …”
The Colorado couple is learning that a scarcity of resources means more than rising prices. When there isn’t enough energy to go around, choices need to be made about who will get the energy—commuters, farmers, food processors, residents of trophy homes, surgeons, snow plowers, or vacationers? Answer: whoever pays the highest price. They’re also realizing how energy-hungry their own habits are. For example, many of their friends live across the city, and it costs 2 gallons of gas to go see them. Keeping up with the latest media gadgets requires “buying” all the energy that goes into the manufacture, distribution and packaging of each new toy. Every long-distance vacation they take is filled with energy, and so are the clothes, furniture, and appliances their current lifestyle seems to require.
Earth scientists can’t definitively explain where all the oil we’ve been consuming came from, but their best guess is that most was formed when the algae and plankton that flourished in warm, ancient seas settled in thick deposits on ocean floors, some of which later became dry land. We have a better handle on where it ended up: in the fuels whose emissions are toxic
in any form; and in such products as crayons, ink, bubble gum, dishwashing liquids, deodorant, eyeglasses, tires, ammonia, plastic bags, allergy pills, asphalt, shirts, and heart valves. In today’s market, it’s just the opposite: three-fourths of our consumer goods are made from fossil fuels. In contrast, as recently as 1950, three-fourths of all the consumer goods we used were made from natural materials, such as wood, rubber, and cotton.
An eye-opening article on the Energy Bulletin Web site, called “The Long Fingers of Petroleum,” pictures a Boston lawyer standing in his driveway, next to his Porsche 911 Turbo. As each petroleum-related aspect of his life is considered, we imagine a world without oil, and remove the item from the scene:
John is wearing a nice suit and tie. Unfortunately, the suit is wool and polyester, the buttons are plastic as well as the zipper in the pants. Remove 25% of the material from his suit, all elastic and plastic stays, the buttons and the zipper. Why? Polyester, dacron, rayon, orlon—are all petroleum-based, human-made fibers. All plastic is petroleum based, as is elastic. Better get rid of the waistband on his under shorts too while we are at it. Abruptly, our friend John is rather chilly, as what is left of his suit, pants, shirt and undershorts have fallen around his ankles.1
John’s glasses have polycarbonate lenses, and the frames are also plastic. He stands bewildered, as credit cards, shoe heels, watchband, driver’s license, and the bills in his wallet (printed with petroleum-based ink) all disappear. Then he realizes that his car is useless, without gasoline; its transmission fluid, gear oil, brake fluid, grease, automotive paint, tires, steering wheel, and all the plastic-insulated wires likewise disappear. Now, naked, broke, partially blind, and extremely embarrassed, he turns to go inside to see what’s left of his house!
John’s predicament helps us realize what “peak oil” really means: that the emperor has no clothes. Along with peak oil, we may soon hear phrases like “peak grain production” and “peak water consumption,” because we are reaching supply limits for these basic resources as well. A recent U.S. Department of Agriculture bulletin announced, “World grain supplies are expected to be much tighter in 2006/07, boosting global grain prices. Rising consumption is expected to outstrip production for the second straight year, which would push world grain ending stocks to their lowest levels in more than 25 years.” Put simply, there are too many mouths to feed, and too many of those mouths are eating energy-intensive food (grain-fed meat, heavily packaged, processed, and transported). Grain-based ethanol will
also be in the competition. Especially troubling is China’s rising appetite for grain. As that country’s standard of living continues to rise, their diet contains a larger percentage of grain-fed, energy-intensive livestock products such as pork, poultry, eggs, beef, and milk. The recent opening of a handful of drive-through McDonald’s restaurants in China (among eight hundred mostly sit-down locations, total) is significant; the Chinese automobile market is expanding as fast as is its taste for Big Macs.
Says Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, “No one seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won’t involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium.” He argues that human reactions are often based on morals and emotions, not facts. “When people feel insulted or disgusted, they generally do something about it, such as whacking each other over the head, or voting … If climate change were caused by a brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming would be this nation’s top priority … Or if it were caused by gay sex, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets.”2
No, it isn’t a brutal dictator that causes global warming, it’s Pop-Tarts, chilly movie theaters on hot days, and Hummers. In a frenzy of consumption, we’ve mined geologically massive quantities of carbon from below the ground and redistributed it above the ground. In the planet’s atmosphere, it creates a translucent blanket that holds heat in (another example of putting something in the wrong place). It’s that simple. The maddening, slow motion debate over the human role in global warming continues, but really, it doesn’t matter whose “fault” it is. The Earth is heating up, in direct proportion to the blanket of carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases building up in the atmosphere—just as Nobel Prize-winning scientist Svante Arhenius predicted back in 1896. Without further “fiddling,” we need to control the emissions that are in our power—literally—to control.
Anyone who’s ever climbed into a sweltering car on a hot summer day has experienced the greenhouse effect that causes global warming. The rolled-up car windows are the greenhouse gases, and the broiling person—or panting, dehydrated dog—is the Earth. Those who insist this effect could never occur on a planetary scale need only view photographs of cloud-covered Venus, where the temperature today will be about 850 degrees Fahrenheit. Or else read a detailed Earth science textbook that relates
the history of anaerobic bacteria. Many eons ago, these oxygen-hating microbes were the planet’s headliner species, and when they began to run out of hydrogen—an essential element for building cellular structure—they improvised a way to tear apart water molecules to get it. They made use of the hydrogen but brainlessly dumped massive quantities of oxygen into the biosphere. Oops. Their minute but ubiquitous actions began to render the Earth’s surface unfit for their own habitation, except in stinky (to us), oxygen-starved places like swamp slimes. Then evolution’s greatest innovation, photosynthesis, made matters even worse for the anaerobes, since plants and photosynthesizing microbes take up carbon dioxide but “exhale” oxygen.
The lesson is this: When you mess with the bio-geological cycles of elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, Mother Nature comes unglued. So, to avoid further wrath, let’s quickly absorb the carbon back out of the atmosphere by farming organically (which sequesters carbon dioxide in the soil and crops), by planting and maintaining billions of CO2-utilizing trees, by reducing the planetary herd of livestock (now about fifteen to twenty billion methane-emitting animals), and by reducing the amount of greenhouse gases our technologies and activities emit. As I write this, more than three hundred U.S. cities have declared their intent to operate under the agreements of the Kyoto Protocol. Why can’t individuals accept a similar challenge? What steps can the above-average American take to cut his or her resource use (and emissions) roughly in half, without reducing quality of life? Can YOU accept the challenge of cutting your resource use in half in the next ten years?
By generating energy at or close to the point of use, we can reduce the loss of energy in transmission lines, and also meet some of our own energy needs. Credit: Eric Wahl
Ten Ways to Cut Individual Energy Consumption in Half
• Tune up your house (see suggestions that follow).
• Downsize your house and car—and your expenses.
• Eat one-third less meat.
• Use carbohydrate fuel (food) rather than fossil fuels, by being more active.
• Live in a neighborhood that requires less driving.
• Use highly efficient public transportation.
• Reduce the amount of energy-intensive packaging you use.
• Replace part of your lawn with something you can eat.
• Buy durable, high-quality products and learn how to maintain them.
• Learn to enjoy forms of entertainment other than fuel-hungry, mind-numbing media.
Energy use in the United States is roughly divided into three sectors: industrial, residential/commercial, and transportation. The products, infrastructure, and services Americans consume add up to the highest per capita use of energy in the world. American consumers are directly responsible for half the energy and materials used in this country’s economy, largely in the residential and transportation sectors. Designers, architects, engineers, and politicians directly affect much of the rest because the use of land, the design/operation of technology, and the implementation of policies are all major factors in how much energy we use.
Energy consumption per capita is calculated by dividing the total amount of energy consumed in a country by that country’s population. We each have a share in the relative efficiency of the whole economy, and our informed participation in policy making can and must improve that overall efficiency (For example, we can vote for transportation choices like light rail and high speed rail that are more efficient than cars). An important reason why Europeans consume less energy per person than Americans is that EU populations are denser, their homes and yards are smaller, and public transportation is readily available, all of which result in greater efficiencies. The average car in the United States
travels 10 percent farther per year than a British car and 50 percent more than a German car.3 In addition, Europeans are more likely to value public amenities. In Denmark, for example, where bike and rail infrastructure is well used, 30 percent of all households don’t even own a car. West Europeans in general use public transit for 10 percent of all urban trips—and Canadians for 7 percent—whereas, in the U.S., transit use is only 2 percent.
Per capita consumption by selected countries
(million BTU)
Source: U.S. Energy Information Agency (2005)
Personal consumption is less of an obsession in Europe, where more time is spent on energy-neutral activities such as lively conversation, reading, gourmet cooking, civic celebrations, and direct participation in sports. Europeans have a stronger environmental ethic; there’s less food waste and much higher recycling rates. Manufacturers are more conscious of designing regional systems that conserve resources. It simply takes less energy and fewer materials to live a good life in many parts of Europe.
Americans are at a disadvantage in several critical ways concerning personal consumption. We’ve become accustomed to the luxury of extra-large everything; convenience, comfort, and lack of responsibility are perceived necessities; we’ve lost many of our maintenance and craft skills; we don’t know how to entertain ourselves; and we’ve built a car-and-suburb culture that can’t just be quickly rearranged. (So much energy and effort has been sunk into roads, energy grids, building materials, and construction that it will take at least a generation to reshape it.) To symbolically comply as individuals with the Kyoto Protocol and reduce personal consumption to half our current levels, we’ll have to try a bit harder than EU citizens, but why not make it an “energy Olympics” that can spin off millions of jobs and ultimately save trillions of dollars? Are we Americans so out of shape that we can’t compete?
Prioritized, Street-Smart Remedies for Auto-Dependency
1. Stay out of your car. Live where you can meet more needs on foot and by sharing rides. The greenest vehicle of all is the one that doesn’t get driven much. Even an SUV is far greener when it has multiple riders. When you do drive, combine errands. Shop on the Internet when it makes sense; telecommute or consider becoming self-employed. Investigate home delivery of groceries from the whole foods store. Start a food co-op. Promote teleconferencing and high-speed rail. Challenge yourself to try car-free vacations!
2. Purchase a high-efficiency hybrid or a conventional high-performer like Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, Saturn Ion, or Chevy Cobalt.
3. If buying a new car isn’t in the budget, buy a used, highly efficient vehicle. Consider retrofitting your car to a natural gas-fueled or electricity-powered car. Visit the offices of your political representatives with a small group of friends and neighbors to advocate much higher fuel efficiency standards: 44 mpg for cars, 35 mpg for trucks.
4. Get back on the old (or new) bike: Cycling is the most efficient form of transportation yet invented. In Davis, California, 80 percent of the streets have bike lanes, and 20 to 25 percent of all local trips are by bike. Imagine a world designed for bicycles, with safe bike lanes, bikes with trailers, electric bikes, and folding bikes that are easy to take on a bus or train. In the past twenty years, Germany has tripled the length of its nationwide bikeways, and the Netherlands has doubled its network. All over the Netherlands, parking for bicycles far exceeds spaces for cars at railway stations as a result of customer demand.
5. Learn to love public transit. After a few years of taking a comfortable regional bus to work, I was hooked. No more hunting for a parking place; extra time for reading, sleeping, and conversing. Now I’m very excited about light rail coming to my town! When Boulder, Colorado, reorganized its transit system, substituting minibuses for the big old dinosaur buses, and introducing a citywide Eco Pass that buys a year’s travel for just $50, the share of trips made by transit increased from 1.6 percent to 4.6 percent.
6. Try a car-sharing program, if you live in one of the more than forty American cities that now has a car-sharing organization. These European-inspired, rent-by-the-hour businesses enable a household to eliminate one or all cars
in the household fleet. This not only saves payment, maintenance, insurance, and other costs, but equally as important, teaches participants how to avoid making unnecessary trips, how to break the cycle of auto-dependent behavior.
7. Keep your vehicle well tuned and tires inflated. Regular oil changes, air-filter changes, and spark plug replacements improve fuel economy. Buy low-rolling-resistance (LRR) replacement tires. Minimize evaporation of fuel and keep your car cooler in the summer by parking in the shade.
8. Lose weight! A study at the University of Illinois found that Americans are pumping about a billion more gallons of gas annually today than four decades ago because extra body weight brings down fuel economy. About 1.7 million cars could be filled with gas for an entire year with that “extra” fuel.
Sources: Sierra Club Web site (wwwsierraclub.org); Worldwatch Institute, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/1480; “Getting There on Less” by Guy Dauncey, in Yes! Magazine, Summer 2004; Jon Hilkevitch, Chicago Tribune, October 25, 2006, Chicagotribune.com.
“I get about nine miles per potato,” environmentalist Lester Brown told me recently. I knew exactly what he meant—that a potato’s 300 calories fuels nine miles of bicycling (or three miles of walking, since bikes are three times as energy-efficient). Fossil fuels contain calories, too: Each barrel of oil contains the calorie equivalent of twenty-three thousand hours of human labor! No wonder our era has been the most productive—as well as wasteful—in human history; we’ve been coasting on solar energy stored as compressed fossil fuel, which it took nature up to one hundred million years to manufacture.
Now, forty thousand years after humans learned to domesticate livestock—which also store the solar energy contained in grass as meat and milk—two trends are emerging in our world: Inactive lifestyles are negatively affecting our health and vitality, and the supplies of carbon-rich energy that built our civilization are beginning to decline. These trends are two sides of the same carbonaceous coin, because clearly, we need to use our bodies more and fossil fuels less. (There’s an energy crisis in our bodies, too.) We’re evolving from a hydrocarbon economy, in which stored fuels are burned to release power, into a “carbohydrate economy,” in which solar
energy is used directly both by advanced technologies and our bodies. The high cost of energy will soon provide a renaissance of human-powered crafts and creativity—an enjoyable, productive way to spend calories!
Not since the Second World War, when we patriotically salvaged everything from bones to baling wire, have we had to focus so precisely on the real value of our resources, products, and processes. In recent decades, we’ve been far more preoccupied with quantity, speed, and size than with quality, appropriate scale, or resource efficiency. It’s easy to see why: Variables such as quantity and speed that keep the assembly lines and semi trucks rolling often yield higher profits in a world engineered and legislated for excess. In an era of energy abundance, utilities routinely gave discounts for the consumption of electricity and fuels. The more a large customer consumed, the lower its cost per unit of energy. What has resulted is a society made of cheap energy.
In the emerging economy, calories stored in plant material will be supplemented by other renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal power—flows that are already here. Energy guru Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute calls the ingenious substitution of renewable energy for combustion “the undiscovery of fire,” an anthropological tipping point that will help put the monster of global warming back in its cage. “The good news about global warming,” says Lovins, “is that it’s far cheaper to fix than to ignore.” For four decades, Lovins has asserted that the best way to generate energy is with efficiency—what he calls “negawatts.” He and his colleagues find hidden treasure in fatter pipes that have less friction so they deliver liquids more efficiently; lighter cars made of carbon fiber rather than steel, so they burn less fuel; and smaller, less expensive heating and cooling systems made possible by adding extra insulation to a building. The cheapest form of energy, he demonstrates, will always be information—in other words, great design and engineering that reduce the need for energy. If each device, method, or building is designed for peak efficiency, then renewable energy—what he calls the “soft path”—will be sufficient to meet human needs.
I believe this methodical way of thinking can be applied in many other aspects of our lives, from what we eat to what we buy and where we live. If we meet each need precisely—for example, by living in an energy-smart house, or eating food that gives us energy but not obesity, we won’t be constantly craving “more.” A very useful component of Lovin’s soft-path strategy is to use the right amount and the right kind of energy for the job. He’s famous for the analogy that using nuclear-generated electricity to heat a house is like “using a chainsaw to cut butter,” because so much energy is wasted in the fission of atoms, transmission of electricity from the power
plant, and reconversion of electricity back to heat. Certainly, the 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit of heat that a nuclear plant generates is overkill; why not use precisely what a given task requires? Passive solar energy, efficient windows, thick insulation, and a superefficient, backup natural gas-powered furnace meet the need for heat much more appropriately.
Similarly, since conventional lightbulbs (invented back in 1879) produce far more heat than light, they add to a building’s air conditioning load and a utility bill’s bottom line. A global switch to state-of-the-art lighting will trim the world’s electricity bill by one-tenth, says the International Energy Agency (IEA). The energy for lighting releases about three-fourths as much carbon dioxide as the world’s passenger vehicles—a great opportunity for immediate results. The IEA advocates stricter lighting standards in building codes to prohibit lighting such as the halogen uplighter (torchiere), which spotlights the ceiling rather than directly lighting a living room or lounge.4 (Similarly, a person working late at the office often lights a tennis-court-size area with a whole bank of lights when he really needs to light just a desk-size area. And the light coming out of many large homes on a given night can be seen from the window seat of an airplane.
The compact fluorescent bulb (CFL), now available at a fraction of its original cost and offering a warm-toned light, is a great example of meeting lighting needs precisely. Replacing a 100-watt incandescent bulb with a 32-watt CFL can save $30 in energy costs over the life of the bulb, because CFLs use two-thirds less energy than incandescent bulbs to deliver the same amount of light, and last up to ten times longer. If every household replaces just three 60-watt incandescent light bulbs with CFLs, we will eliminate as much pollution as is generated by 3.5 million cars, according to the nonprofit group Environmental Defense.
Wal-Mart’s commitment to sell at least one CFL to every one of its 100 million customers sprang from a back-of-the-envelope calculation: Its stores could save $6 million a year just by replacing the display lightbulbs for its ceiling fans with CFLs. Even if each American home bought just one compact fluorescent to replace a 60-watt incandescent, the energy saved would be enough to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island.
Writes Charles Fishman in Fast Company magazine, “For two decades, CFLs lacked precisely what we expect from lightbulbs: strong, unwavering light; quiet; not to mention shapes that actually fit in the places we use bulbs. Now every one of those problems has been conquered. Since 1985, CFLs have changed as much as cell phones and portable music players.”5
Even more appropriate than efficient bulbs for daytime lighting in houses and offices is natural daylight, which makes good use of our solar system’s most efficient bulb, the Sun. To use the Sun most efficiently, invisible
space-age window coatings, about 70 atoms thick, are precisely designed to let light in but filter out heat in the summer; and let light in but prevent heat from getting out in the winter. There’s more to it than a sunny ambience: various studies have proven that well-designed natural daylight results in higher quality and reliability in factories, 6 to 16 percent higher labor productivity in offices, and 40 percent higher sales in stores with atriums and skylights.6 Lovins summarizes, “If properly done, measures to protect global climate actually reduce costs, not raise them.” He points to results already achieved by mega-companies such as DuPont, BP, and Wal-Mart, all financial beneficiaries of company-wide efficiency measures. While boosting production by 30 percent in the last decade, DuPont also cut energy use by 7 percent and reduced CO2 emissions by 72 percent, saving $2 billion in energy costs so far. Oil giant BP cut its energy bills $650 million over ten years, and reduced CO2 emissions 10 percent below the company’s 1990 levels.
Wal-Mart’s recent declaration of efficiency—that the corporation will reduce its carbon footprint by 20 percent in seven years—will create ripples throughout the U.S. economy. Methodically examining how they meet retailing needs, the company has come up with a long list of measures. They became the largest purchaser of organic cotton, eliminating huge volumes of pesticides (and the energy in them) that are used on the most widely sprayed agricultural product. They “right-sized” the boxes on toys, making them just large enough for the contents and saving $3.5 million in trucking costs; and they replaced standard oil-derived plastic wrap with corn-derived wrap on four kinds of produce, saving the equivalent of 800,000 gallons of gasoline.7
Green design and efficiency pay for themselves many times over. In fact, efficiency has boosted the entire U.S. economy in the last thirty years, reducing energy costs by $1 billion a day. The nation now uses 47 percent less energy per dollar of economic output than it did in the mid-1970s, says Amory Lovins. “These savings act like a huge universal tax cut that also reduces the federal deficit.” What if each business, large and small, were to follow the lead of these mega-companies? What if city governments, churches, unions, and individuals, too, continue to focus on efficiency, basing decisions on how well a given action or device meets the need? With less waste and fewer social side effects dragging us down, our whole way of life will become less burdensome.8
Lovins makes a strong distinction between efficiency based on great design/engineering, and conservation, based on “doing without.” When Jimmy Carter urged Americans to wear sweaters to stay warm in the 1970s, it felt to some like deprivation. But when Lovins suggests that our economy
can save hundreds of billions of dollars every year with efficiency and better engineering, it sounds far sexier. The truth is, we’ll need to use both approaches. Behavioral changes like wearing a sweater inside on the coldest days will seem like less of an imposition as energy costs continue to climb. At the same time, efficiency improvements that substitute ingenuity for resources without significant differences in behavior are a breath of fresh air. When you think about it, the two approaches to using less energy are variations on the same theme—mindfulness. The same tool that enables good use of resources, our brain, can design things more ingeniously and also figure out what daily actions to take. Every time we double up on errands to save gas and time, give a tool we’ve never used to a neighbor who needs it, or tune up the car to get better gas mileage, we rediscover what a good thing it is to have a brain.9