Europeans use approximately 50% less energy per capita than Americans, while maintaining the same standard of living.1 Europeans are cognizant of energy use and conservation: a light turned on in a European hotel hallway is automatically extinguished within three minutes. Yet, with American advertising saturating global TV networks, the U.S. lifestyle has become the model for millions of people in China, India, Africa, and Indonesia, and even the Inuit in the Arctic.2 If Americans change the way they live and decide to take responsibility to clean up the polluted planet, millions will follow.3
An aggressive U.S. agenda must be established by state and federal governments mandating reduced energy use at the consumption end of the equation, not just the production end. And individuals must urgently take responsibility for the way they live. While global warming is upon us, the earth is getting hotter; hurricanes and cyclones abound; and droughts, wildfires, and flooding rains destroy property, kill people, and devastate broad tracts of land.4 Still, we drive SUVs, leave lights burning all over our houses, leave computers and VCRs on incessantly, and live at a constant temperature the whole year in heated and air-conditioned buildings.
Energy-efficient technologies have been available for many years, and they become more sophisticated daily.5 Enough cost-effective energy-efficient measures and technologies are currently available to reduce electricity demand between 11% and 23% over the next five years and between 21% and 35% by 2020.
Aggressive, concerted, long-term public policy initiatives will be required to implement efficiency-related decisions in the market and to alter the way that people buy and use electricity appliances.6 These decisions will be made only if state and federal governments take collective responsibility and conduct massive educational campaigns to inspire commercial enterprises and the public about the importance of conserving energy and how to do it.
Laws mandating responsible living must be enacted with urgency; for example, all new buildings should be constructed to be passive and active solar collectors, all extraneous lights must be extinguished at night in commercial buildings and in the home, and all electrical outlets that supply computers and other electronic equipment and all electrical fittings must be switched off at night except those that are absolutely necessary.
Home appliances are a very important facet of energy conservation. They are easy to install and use. Minimally, Americans and others should:
• use energy efficient light bulbs and light fixtures.
• use energy classified refrigerators and washing machines.
• use energy efficient dishwashers. (Or, better yet, discard your dishwasher and wash your dishes by hand in one sink full of water; that’s what I do!)
• cease using clothes driers, which account for 6% of residential electricity use. Hang clothes out in the sun to dry in the summer and by the furnace in the winter.
• use solar hot-water systems. These are extremely efficient and readily available.
• lower the home temperature in the winter and turn off air-conditioning in the summer. In most but not all U.S. climates, air-conditioning is unnecessary for survival.
• completely weatherize houses with effective wall, ceiling, and floor insulation.
• build domestic dwellings to face south, acting as passive solar collectors.
• build overhanging eaves and plant deciduous trees to shade houses in the summer and provide sunlight in the winter.
• install a subsidized solar electricity generator on the roof.7
Commercial enterprises can use efficient lamps and ballasts (a part of an electrical circuit that regulates the current automatically under changing circumstances of voltage), adequate windows using sunlight instead of consistent artificial light, energy-efficient exit lamps and street and traffic lights, efficient heating and cooling systems, efficient office equipment, and energy management systems.8 Industrial facilities should utilize efficient motors and motor drives, improved industrial processes, decent heating, ventilation, and cooling systems, efficient lighting and ballasts, and efficient energy management systems.9
Most energy-efficiency measures cost far less than the initial generation of electricity and its transmission and inefficient distribution over long distances. Other significant benefits accrue from their implementation as well.
• Energy-efficiency programs save huge amounts of money in statewide electricity costs and substantially reduce energy bills of customers.
• Energy efficiency significantly improves the environment, because for each kilowatt saved there is less electricity generation and less pollution from coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear power.
• Energy efficiency promotes local economic development, creating jobs and increasing the disposable income of local citizens and businesses.
• Energy efficiency increases the independence of utilities because they don’t need to import fuels—coal, gas, oil, or uranium—from other regions or countries. They therefore need to generate less electricity, and they can become smaller, more autonomous, and more efficient.10
Cities themselves are now instigating energy-saving initiatives. The city of Portland, Oregon, is an outstanding example. Portland managed to reduce CO2 emissions below those of 1990 by encouraging a major increase in public transport, constructing 750 miles of new bicycle tracks and increasing the number of people commuting by foot or bike by 10%. All city employees were offered a $25 per month bus pass or car pool parking, and city lights have been replaced with energy-saving diodes. Financial incentives and technical assistance are provided to people who construct green buildings with built-in energy efficiency and who weatherize homes. The population is very proud and enthusiastic about these developments because they are cheap, they reduce traffic congestion, and the tax dollars saved on conservation are free to be spent on more constructive activities. Mayor Tom Potter, who drives a Prius hybrid, is excited and says that Portland is thriving economically.11
A study performed in 2004 by Synapse Energy Economics, titled “A Responsible Electricity Future,” compared an analysis performed by the U.S. Energy Information Administration under the Department of Energy, which they call the “Reference Case” with Synapse’s own “Balanced Case” analysis. Where the government’s Reference Case extrapolated an increase in U.S. electricity consumption of more than 50% by 2025, the Balanced Case, if adequately applied, incorporates the use of energy efficiency, cogeneration, renewables, and natural gas, over a similar period of time to save an amount of electricity equivalent to that generated by more than 600 large, new power plants.12
The Synapse results are remarkable in their simplicity, ease of implementation, and positive effects upon climate change, whereas the Reference Case mandates enormous investment in expensive centralized fossil-fuelled generation, necessitating costly upgrades to the national electrical grid. Whereas the Reference Case forecasts that CO2 emissions by 2025 will increase by 82% over 1990 CO2 emissions, Balanced Case emissions will be 3% below 1990 emissions and 23% below 2000 emissions.13 Furthermore, the Balanced Case would save $36 billion over twenty-four years.14
Here is Synapse’s pragmatic plan to save the environment:
• Energy efficiency can reduce U.S. electricity demand by almost 28% by 2025 (compared with increased electricity use forecast by the Reference Case).
• Nonhydro renewable energy, including geothermal, landfill gas, biomass, solar thermal, solar power generation, and especially wind power, will provide 15% of U.S. electricity use by 2025 in the balanced case. (In the Reference Case, renewables account for only 1%, even less than the minuscule 2%, exclusive of hydropower, that these technologies currently account for.)15
• Combined heat and power generation will produce 10% (compared to 5% in the Reference Case).
• Oil-, coal-, and gas-fired generators are assumed to have been retired after fifty operating years. Some new coal plants will be incrementally constructed as the old ones are retired, but no new nuclear reactors will be built when all the old ones retire after forty-five years of operation.16
The Balanced Case not only saves $36 billion dollars but also considerably reduces the demands and constraints upon the overtaxed and inadequate U.S. transmission grid. First, by reducing the overall demand for electricity, it eases the demands on the grid. Second, by relying on cogeneration and renewable energy facilities, the Balanced Case advocates construction of smaller units situated near the end user, rather than massive nuclear power and coal plants, which are usually located hundreds of miles away.
The transmission and distribution (T&D) of centralized generated electricity is inefficient and very expensive. Typically, 10% of the electricity generated by large power plants is lost during transmission.17 Currently the cost of T&D is $95 billion a year; by 2025 it will rise to $127 billion—a 34% increase according to the Reference Case. But in the Balanced Case, significantly lower costs will be incurred because the increase in load growth is so slow—a mere 4.7% by 2025—so the T&D costs are proportionally reduced.18
The reduction in CO2 emissions in the Balanced Plan not only reduces global warming, but it will also lower the cost of electricity generation because there will be no need to comply with expensive regulations imposed upon energy corporations to minimize climate change.19
By comparison, physicist Dr. Tom Cochran extrapolated from the nuclear industry calculations for its future and found that by adding 1,000 megawatts of nuclear electricity to the world, which would account for double today’s nuclear capacity—for the fifty years from 2050 to 2100, this would entail:
•adding about 1,200 new nuclear plants—provided they last forty years and there are no meltdowns;
• adding fifteen new uranium enrichment plants;
• generating 0.97 million tons of high-level nuclear waste containing enough plutonium for hundreds of thousands of nuclear weapons;
• outfitting fourteen Yucca mountains to store the waste;
• adding fifty new reprocessing plants to extract plutonium if the Generation IV reactors were to proceed;
• investing $1 trillion to $2 trillion.
Far from decreasing gloabal warming, as the nuclear industry touts, the effect on the environment of this scenario would be to cut the global average temperature rise by just 0.2%.
Cost savings and benefits of the Balanced Case beyond those specifically enumerated include:
• lower carbon emission costs;
• lower economic and environmental costs associated with the decreased production of mercury, nitrous oxides, and particulate emissions;
• the benefits of decreased price volatility associated with the decreased use of fossil fuel;
• the environmental and health benefits accruing from decreased emissions, decreased land use for generators and for electricity transmission, and less water for power generation;
• environmental benefits associated with decreased mining for fossil fuel;
• increased jobs and economic benefits associated with renewable technologies.20
It is up to individuals throughout the world to choose a better approach to energy in the future. The nuclear option is neither desirable nor viable. But, as the Balanced Case makes clear, other options exist, and it is up to governments and citizens to implement them with urgency.
Global governments are under intense pressure to behave irresponsibly. Worried about the shortage of natural gas from Russia, the British government in January 2006 is considering proposals by British Nuclear Fuels to fast track the planning process by prelicensing nuclear reactors before sites have even been selected, closing the process to public input.21 However the Sustainable Development Commission in March 2006 concluded that a new British nuclear program would fail to answer the twin challenges of climate change and security of supply. It stated that a doubling of the United Kingdom’s existing nuclear capacity would provide an 8% reduction in 1990 CO2 levels, but zero CO2 renewables would supply 68-87% of the United Kingdom’s needs if fully exploited.22
I have found it very difficult to get Americans in particular to understand the urgency of the global warming situation, to comprehend the extraordinary dangers of nuclear power, and to develop the motivation and altruism to take personal and individual responsibility to protect the future for their children and descendents. There exists a deep sense of entitlement, a feeling that people can do anything and have anything they want, as long as they earn enough money.
But the world cannot be treated like that any longer. Global resources are finite and the misapplication of science and industry has seriously damaged the ecosystems of this unique planet, threatening the ongoing existence of many millions of species, including ourselves.
It is time, indeed beyond time, for Americans to step up to the true moral and spiritual responsibilities of belonging to the richest, most powerful nation on earth. American religious feeling, in its true sense—entailing responsibility for all creatures great and small—must be invoked. The democracy that Americans are so privileged and proud to share must be worked voraciously. Politicians, the people’s representatives, must be educated and pursued with vigor to ensure that they do the right thing for the planet and not be manipulated and orchestrated by avaricious corporations.
Finally, living a moral life is a personal decision—to turn off the lights when you leave a room, to turn off the computer at night, to insulate the house, to wear more sweaters and turn down the heat in the winter, to practice using the sweat glands in the summer and not a global warming–air conditioner.
Self-sacrifice and responsibility are noble traits to which most people aspire. These are the qualities that will lead the world toward sanity and survival.