“We need to replace the axiom More is Better with the much sounder axiom, Enough is Best.”
– Ecological economist Herman Daly
EVERY JULY A LITTLE VILLAGE near my home holds what it calls the Mile Long Yard Sale, in which families set up trestle tables along the highway and shuffle out to the curb all the stuff that they can no longer imagine using. There is always an astounding amount of junk. Beat-up sofas, old toilet bowls, broken sinks, cracked plastic toys that lasted less than a season before junior got bored and took a brick to them, outgrown sports equipment, kitchen appliances of dubious provenance, electric tools in a sorry state of repair, ancient gearless bicycles, scooters that no longer scoot, mismatched dishes, books with their covers missing, toasters than don’t toast (but could perhaps be made to), figurines, rocking chairs that need a little work, much-used dolls, lawnmowers needing new motors, new blades, new housings, little plastic stands for knick-knacks, pre-Energy Star refrigerators, wire whisks … A whole mountain range of mostly imported techno-junk, sweatshop clothing, and gewgaws. The sight of all those forlorn householders standing behind their tables of cheap gimcrackery, trying to pretend it is all good stuff and hoping that somebody, somewhere, will find a use for it, is a dispiriting one, for these days there are few buyers, only would-be sellers. “Crap, all crap,” as a passing motorist put it, shaking his head. Or, in the vocabulary of marketers, “products.”
Our little village calls it the Mile Long Yard Sale because there are mile-long yard sales all over the country, all over the continent. Mile-long, and longer. It isn’t hard to find communities boasting of the world’s longest yard sale. In 2009 the champion was a Fourth of July yard sale 654 miles long, a shade over 1,000 kilometers, stretching from DeKalb, Alabama, to West Unity, Ohio, a curious way to celebrate the birth of the United States of America.
More than a thousand kilometers is a lot of products. And the point? Every year our global civilization digs up, transports, heats and pummels and shapes and processes and sells half a trillion tons of materials. Only 6 percent of all those tons ends up in products – the rest is used to mine and make and move them. And only 1 percent – a single measly percent – is still a useful product six months later.
That’s why we’re energy hogs.
If the average lifetime of each product could be doubled, if twice as many products could be recycled, if half as much material were gathered to make each product in the first place, it would reduce the “throughput” of materials through the system by a factor of eight. And that, in turn, would dramatically lower the energy consumed, which in its turn would lower our emissions as much as taking all the cars off the roads, forever.1
But it could be bigger, even, than that.
Of the many numbers in this book, one of the most lamentable of all is that only 37 percent of primary energy production is put to any real use. The rest is lost through conversion inefficiencies and sheer waste. We’re never going to be able to capture all this dissipating energy – there will always be losses, because the second law of thermodynamics, an expression of the universal principle of decay observed in nature, tells us so.2 But if we could capture two-thirds of it, instead of a little better than one-third … this would be an enormous change.
The entire eastern seaboard of the United States, from Maine to Florida, plus the entire west coast, from Washington to California, uses just under one-third of all energy consumed in the 50 states. To improve energy efficiency by one-third, then, would be as though both coasts dropped completely off the energy consumption map – suddenly using not a single watt of electricity, turning on not a single light, burning not a single liter of natural gas, filling not one tank in even one car, tweeting not a single tweet.3
That’s enormous.
Amory Lovins coined the word negawatt, meaning the watt we don’t use. In his impatient view, North America could easily be weaned off its dependence on oil by 2050 without any dramatic technological changes or change in living standards. We could redouble the efficiency of using oil, using existing technology, Lovins argues: “We’ve already doubled it since 1976, but we can do it again … Then we can replace the other half of the oil with a mix of natural gas and advanced biofuels, say made from switchgrass and forestry waste.…” The key, he says, is tripling the efficiency of cars, trucks, and airplanes:
And we can do that with current technology and get our money back in two years for the cars, one year for the heavy trucks, five years for the planes. First of all you make cars from aerospace-grade carbon fiber instead of steel – it costs more but weighs less than half, so the car would cost the same because the light weight makes it easier to fabricate. You can already double fuel efficiency by driving a hybrid. You can double it again using a car made of carbon fiber. And double it again if you run it on sustainably grown ethanol. If you then switch to a plug-in electric car, you can save three-quarters of the remaining oil, and end up using only 3 percent of the fuel you started with.4
Few disagree. Efficiency is widely accepted as “the fifth fuel,” after oil, gas, coal, and neutrons, and Lovins’s is hardly a lone voice. William Moomaw, director of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Tufts University, has been making the same points for years. “Energy efficiency is the near-term essential thing to do because we can wake up and start doing it tomorrow morning,” he has said. Many captains of industry have agreed, among them Tadahiko Ishigaki, chief executive for the Americas for Hitachi, which in 2009 sponsored a symposium on energy in Washington. At the same meeting, Hajime Ito, president of Japan External Trade Organization, New York, called energy efficiency “very promising and the cheapest and most efficient way to reduce emissions.”
Virtually every salvation plan for global warming has built in substantial gains from efficiency. Nicholas Stern, whose report for the British government is among the most widely quoted of such assessments, included a whole chapter on energy efficiency. The International Energy Agency thinks energy efficiency could account for two-thirds of emissions averted. The consultancy company McKinsey believes that efficiency could take us halfway home. The IPCC is similarly bullish, and believes that energy-saving investments could be profitable in the bargain. A 20 percent increase in efficiency would reduce greenhouse gases as much as doubling the proportion of green energy. It can be done easily, within years. In the U.S. alone, increasing efficiency could offset 200 gigawatts of electric use, about one-fifth of the total capacity. Dan Reicher, a former assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy, now director for climate change and energy initiatives at Google, has estimated that an additional investment $170 billion annually over the next 13 years in efficiency opportunities “would be sufficient to cut projected global demand by at least half.”5
If energy efficiency is so easy, and would be so effective, why isn’t it being done? If the only “emissions” from energy efficiency are lower fuel bills and less need to invest in infrastructure, why is anyone hesitating? Sometimes the biggest challenge is not inventing new technologies or devising better ways to use old ones, but persuading large numbers of people to adopt new ways and adapt to change. (Most people believe that others waste energy because of character flaws, but regard their own profligacy as the product of circumstances.)
Investments are being made in energy efficiency. The U.S. is now spending about 7 percent of GDP on energy instead of the 12 percent it used to. The decline is partly illusory, because the biggest energy-hog factories have migrated to China and are doing their consumption there, but it is also real, a consequence of better-built appliances and houses, and the purchase of more foreign cars, which tend to get better mileage. Even globally, energy intensity – the energy attained for every dollar spent – is improving at a little better than 1 percent a year.
It could be better faster, though, and the reasons it isn’t are fourfold: pricing (a market failure), government dilatoriness, consumer resistance, and shoddy manufacturing standards. The latter is the product of the relentless search for cost-cutting, driven by the insatiable desire of consumers for “bargains.”
The market failure is this: in many countries, especially those where energy prices are subsidized, electricity is simply too cheap to bother saving, and consumers are fiercely resistant to price increases. If people are going to spend money on insulation, or for a more efficient heating furnace, or to buy a new and better fridge, they expect these things to pay for themselves within two or three years – a pretty unrealistic 30 to 50 percent return on investment. On the other hand, a consumer who pays for a fridge that will only justify its cost in 10 to 15 years wants to be sure that the appliance will last at least that long, and with manufacturing standards constantly being pared back to make products ever cheaper, that expectation is often no longer being met. Stuff breaks, we all know that, and it breaks faster than it used to.
Less understandably, consumers often ignore voluntary efficiency ratings on cars and appliances, in favor of intangibles like color, appearance, fashion, convenience, and, of course, price. Detroit’s carmakers resisted better fuel-efficient standards for years, on the grounds that consumers should be free to buy bigger or more powerful cars, if that’s what they want. An example of this benighted thinking appeared in the pages of Fine Homebuilding magazine, which has recently been arguing for greener houses, and has drawn furious criticism from some of its readers. One reader fired off a letter to the editors asserting that it was his god-given right to install however many and whatever showers he wanted in his house even if they used up as much water as a fire hydrant, interfering bureaucrats who wanted to stop him be damned. “It’s my water and I’ll use as much as I want to,” he declared.
Governments can intervene. They can nag – Energy Star in North America tries to persuade consumers to buy better appliances by pointing our their energy advantages. But the labeling is voluntary, and only moderately effective. In the European Union, it is no longer voluntary. And in the U.K., if you want to sell a home you must have an energy assessment done, and pass the information on to prospective buyers.
Governments can also use financial incentives, or subsidies, such as offering tax credits to manufacturers of hyper-efficient appliances, subsidizing makers of compact fluorescent light bulbs, and by giving rebates and sales tax abatement for buyers on the other end. They can also just forbid the inefficient. Australia isn’t subsidizing compact fluorescents; rather, it has banned their incandescent competitors. National emissions and fuel efficiency standards for cars can also regulate efficiency.
Government can also oblige utilities to spend money on energy efficiency. The Canadian province in which I live does this, though in this case the “costs” are passed straight through to the consumer. (The utility had the effrontery to then suggest that customers pay for business “lost” through increased efficiency, effectively obliging them to pay for electricity they didn’t use. This bizarre notion has, so far, been rejected by the regulators.) France requires utilities to invest enough over three years to reduce projected demand by 54 terawatt hours a year. Japan has gone further, setting up competitive efficiency standards. The top 13,000 energy users are obliged to reduce their consumption 1 percent a year, and are fined if they don’t.6
Buildings consume 40 percent of global energy, and in turn emit about the same percentage of greenhouse gas emissions. About half the demand is for heating and cooling and for hot water; the rest is for lighting, appliances, office equipment, and general services like elevators. Reducing demand here is the low-hanging fruit of the conservation issue. Reducing demand to one-quarter of current values would be simple. It would come at a cost, of course, but not only does the technology exist, it is uncomplicated, applicable to any building. Yet few buildings, even new ones, are super-insulated or mega-efficient. Why not? Because of regulatory inertia, lack of planning, lack of urgency, resistance by entrenched interests, skepticism by consumers, and cost.
It can be easily done, and we don’t need to invent any new technologies to do it. Many sophisticated foam insulators are available, but wall cavities can be filled with almost anything, even old blue jeans or newspapers, or old soda bottles. Making buildings more efficient, on its own, would enable many countries to shut down existing coal-fired generating plants. Some have calculated that a $21 billion investment in building efficiency could shut more than 20 plants.
Making it all work is simple. First, change the building codes. Improve insulation and make the building’s envelope tight, then tackle heating and cooling.
Most people, at least in the northern hemisphere, live in houses and work in buildings that require heat during the winter months, and many live in places that require cooling in summer. If we do nothing but replace our fossil-fuel heaters with electric-powered heat pumps, we can reduce the energy required by 75 percent. Heat pumps are efficient because they don’t have to work to generate their heat in the first place; they just move existing heat from one place to another. An efficient residential furnace running on natural gas can retain perhaps 90 percent of the energy it produces, with the rest escaping as hot air. But heat pumps can do even better – they can routinely deliver three to four times more usable heat than electricity consumed, and some exceed this amount. This means they can be five times more efficient than conventional baseboard heaters. Wholesale switching to heat pumps would require more electricity, but even if it came from conventional power stations, it would still be better than just setting fire to gas to heat a house. Heat pumps are also future-proof – they can use electricity from any source.7
There has been some progress on building codes. Britain has mandated that all new homes built after 2016 and all new commercial buildings after 2019 must be “zero-carbon” – that is, a building’s energy consumption must be offset by clean, onsite energy generation, such as from solar photovoltaic modules or small-scale wind turbines, which can sometimes be roof-mounted. Germany has developed a standard for something it calls “the passive house,” which dramatically lowers energy requirements, and the European Union will make it a building standard by 2012.8
The private sector is also active, promoting construction practices that include sustainable sites, water efficiency, efficient energy use, sustainable materials and resources, indoor environmental quality standards, and innovation in design. A NetZero home has been built in Edmonton, Alberta, where winter temperatures routinely drop to minus 30 and 40 degrees Celsius. Even at those temperatures, the house needs the equivalent of only four toasters to keep the inhabitants warm, and over the year gives back to the grid as much as it consumes.9 A house in Cape Cod produces all its own power, but otherwise looks entirely traditional. It uses two-thirds less water, a geothermal heat pump heats and cools the house, photovoltaic panels on the roof sit next to an array of hot-water heating tubes, its lights are LEDs, its roof shingles made of recycled plastic and sawdust.10 Another example is a luxury apartment building in New York, the Solaire Apartments, which filters wastewater and reuses it for toilet flushing and the building’s cooling tower, reducing water use by one-third.
If these standards are widely adopted, the picture by 2030 would be dramatically different. Currently only 2 percent of new buildings are in any way “green.” Legislation would change everything. There are some 28 billion square meters of floor space in the U.S. alone. In the normal course of events, builders will demolish about 4.9 billion square meters over the next 30 years, renovate another 14 billion square meters, and add 14 billion square meters more, which means that by 2035, more than three-quarters of all buildings will either be new or renovated. If they were all done to new standards, that alone would make a substantial difference.
It’s not really possible to separate green buildings from the land that surrounds them, and the communities into which they are embedded.
Some of the eco-advantages of landscaping are utterly conventional – creating drywells to minimize storm runoff, using water barrels in drier regions, using trees as windbreaks (trees are a house’s best friend in a windstorm – unless, course, they fall on the house) or for shade in summer, using native plants, and so on. Scaled up, these devices can make a big difference. A study by the University of California at Davis calculated that increasing urban tree cover by 50 million trees could even change ambient temperatures by one degree or more. Minneapolis has taken this notion further than most cities, encouraging green roofs, tree planting, storm water management, encouraging gray-water management, demanding permeable paving for parking lots, and more. Minneapolis homeowners can actually reduce their real estate taxes to zero by taking a wide range of such initiatives.
At the same time, green communities are being inserted into existing cities, and there are attempts to green existing buildings by intensifying their usage. For example, throughout North America, schools are empty at night and in the summers; some communities have started to use their school cafeterias as restaurants, their assembly halls as theaters, and even their buses, those fleets of yellow painted transporters, as informal transit systems out of school hours.
One of the poster children for the new eco-community is the German city of Freiburg, which was flattened by Allied bombers in the Second World War and has been rebuilt. The town has no cars (they are restricted to the outskirts, and are generally owned by “car-sharing clubs”). People share some appliances too, and many homes generate more power than they actually consume. A house called the Heliotrope, by the architect Rolf Disch, produces twice as much power as the average German family consumes. Disch remains baffled why such houses are not simply the norm. The technology they use is utterly conventional, and not expensive. Meinhard Hansen is Freiburg’s chief architect and a world authority on passive houses; his own house is kept at an almost constant temperature, even in the chilly Black Forest winters, without the need for heating – because warmth is provided by cooking, lighting, even warm-blooded mammals. “My wife and I produce 100W of energy each, the dog another 20W,” Hansen says. They have to open windows if they give a dinner party; the entire residence can be heated by 30 candles. The economics are as simple as the systems: A passive house costs 10 percent more to build, but reduces energy loss – and utility bills – by a staggering 90 percent.11
So buildings, suburbs, and towns can be made carbon neutral or zero-carbon easily, with existing technology, at fairly modest cost, with hardly any loss of amenity and none in comfort.
Fossil-fuel power plants typically have an efficiency factor of about 33 percent, which means that they are venting massive amounts of waste heat up their stacks to create electricity that, elsewhere, is turned back into heat, an appalling amount of waste. It doesn’t need to be so. Even Thomas Edison’s 1882 plant in Manhattan used its waste heat to keep the district’s buildings warm in winter. In Denmark, about one-quarter of power comes from wind, but half still comes from combined heat and power plants, often coal fired, buttressed by thousands of smaller decentralized plants burning natural gas. Some smaller units burn wood chips, biomass, and straw. They can typically achieve almost 90 percent combined electricity and useful heat.
A Boston investment firm has an ingenious way of recycling both heat and combustion by-products. A new wood-burning power plant near Concord, New Hampshire, vents both the CO2 and waste heat to eight hectares of greenhouses, kept warm all winter in this way, the CO2 absorbed by the fruits and vegetables, which then provide another revenue stream.12
It has always puzzled environmentalists that refineries and other “energy producers” simply burn off a potent stream of energy. Anyone who has ever driven at night through refinery landscapes, such as the Gulf of Mexico’s notorious Cancer Alley in Louisiana, will have seen flare gas plumes luridly lighting the sky. Surely actually using that waste stream would be better than just … wasting it? U.S. factories typically still operate at about 13 percent efficiency. (Japan is slightly better, about 20 percent, Europe somewhere in between.)
Changes are being made in some industrial locations, resulting in capture and reuse of waste heat, a process sometimes called energy recycling. A company called Recycled Energy Development in Illinois has contracted to convert waste heat into electricity. West Virginia Alloys, which makes high-grade silicon for chips and solar panels, and is the state’s third-largest consumer of electricity, using some 120 megawatts for its five arc furnaces, is a RED customer, cutting their cost by one-third.13 The world’s largest steelmaker, ArcelorMittal, began capturing waste heat from a plant in Indiana by intercepting escaping hot gases and using them to drive a steam turbine. A U.S. Steel plant in the same area is doing the same thing, and between the two of them, they generate 190 megawatts of carbon-free energy from their waste, considerably more than the entire U.S. production of energy from solar panels.14
That’s just two plants, in one state. If all fossil-fuel plants did the same, we would gain the time to develop and scale up alternative energies.
Most waste, however, is not heat but stuff, the things we throw out every week. Nobody seems to have added up the tonnage of waste the world generates, or seems to know exactly what happens to it. Except hazardous waste; best estimates are that the world’s biggest economies produce some 150 million tons of hazardous waste. Nobody wants this stuff – which is, after all, why it is waste in the first place. There is an awful lot of it – the aptly named Fresh Kills landfill in New York State is supposed to be the planet’s largest manmade “structure.” What we do know is that the developed countries spend $120 billion a year getting rid of municipal waste alone, and another $150 billion getting rid of industrial waste.
Conventionally, there were only three things you could do with waste: bury it, burn it, or recycle it. More recently, we’ve added a fourth: don’t produce it in the first place. But once you’ve got it, you have to deal with it somehow.
Historically, burying, or simply dumping, waste has been the disposal method of choice. Most small municipalities in North America set aside a secluded place for garbage, and many still don’t do much more than that. But things have been changing. It wasn’t long ago that I and my neighbors used to drive to “the dump” once a week, to fling our bags of garbage onto the pile, being careful to dodge the bears that infested the place. Once a month someone with a bulldozer was hired to heap the whole thing up into a bigger pile, dig a hole, and push it in. Now our dump is called a “waste resource management facility,” a name that sounds ridiculous but isn’t, because it’s accurately descriptive: the detritus is sorted into compostables, recyclables, hazardous waste, electronic waste, and others, and the landfill part of it is carefully monitored and tapped for methane, among other emissions. This separation is critical. Traditional landfills didn’t decompose as they were supposed to. The Garbage Project at the University of Arizona found 15-year-old steak, with fat and meat intact, and 30-year-old newspapers, still readable, when it examined the contents of excavated landfills. Generally, only vegetables and garden clippings rot in such places. My local dump – call it that for short – has experimented with techniques for speeding up decomposition, such as injections of air and liquids. The Arizona people have found that old soda drinks and unsold (past its best-before date) beer work best. You can also speed up decomposition (composting) by anaerobic digestion in sealed tanks, capturing the resulting methane as the organic materials decompose, then using the resulting slurry as fertilizer.
Incineration is the other traditional choice for disposing of waste. Societies have burned garbage almost as long as humans have had fire; burned middens have been found at many prehistoric sites. Today incineration plants are as likely to be called “waste-to-energy plants.” The one in Fairfax County, Virginia, the world’s largest, now generates 80 megawatts for the local utility, equivalent to the output of a large wind farm, and the resulting ash takes up a fraction of the space unburned garbage does. The flue gases at such plants are scrubbed – incinerators in the U.S. are now estimated to produce no more than 80 grams of dioxins and the equally toxic furans a year, down from 8,900 grams a decade earlier.
Recycling is familiar to householders in the developed world, where the biggest issue is persuading urban homeowners to recycle better. Tests have shown that where garbage pickup has gone from every week to every other week, recycling has increased by an average of 10 percent. In addition, where collection fees have been imposed, pay-as-you-throw schemes have reduced garbage by almost 25 percent. Taiwan even obliges “customers” to throw the stuff onto the trucks themselves. Unfortunately, in rural or semirural areas, people have taken to dumping their garbage in secluded woods, and these freelance dumps are becoming a problem.
Corporations also pay by volume, and many have reduced their waste as a result. Walmart says it now saves itself $3.5 million a year just by recycling loose plastic and selling it to processors, and more by obliging suppliers to use less packaging. Britain’s largest supermarket chain, Tesco, has reduced its packaging by one-quarter in two years. Hewlett-Packard’s laptops are now 90 percent recyclable. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) bureaucrats have found that member countries reduced waste by 2.5 percent a year between 1980 and 2000.
The European Union has adopted a variant of what is known as “cradle-to-cradle” manufacturing. Consumers don’t have to put the stuff out in the yard sale when they are done with it, but can take it back to its makers, who must accept it without charge. European carmakers must not only take their cars back, but must guarantee to recycle or reuse at least 80 percent by weight, rising to 85 percent by 2015.15 Some Canadian provinces and Japan now have EPR (Extended Product Responsibility) laws on the books, and so do 31 U.S. states, though most of them apply only to a narrow range of products, usually electronics. Only Maine, as of 2010, had a blanket EPR law on the books. The cradle-to-cradle theory was developed by Swiss economist Walter Stahel, whose research in the 1970s proved that every extension of product life saved massive amounts of both energy and resources. More than three-quarters of industrial energy was used up in mining and manufacturing and only a few percentage points ended up in products.
But recycling, especially subsidized recycling, isn’t a panacea. You can only recycle if there is too much stuff already, and so recycling could also be defined as a license to manufacturers to do harm. It’s true that you can turn a percentage of garbage into energy, but you’re still producing garbage. And if you recycle more and more, you end up at a point of diminishing returns, where the energy expended on the recycling process is itself ruinous. For example, it would be possible to rebuild the entire U.S. commercial air fleet every three months with the aluminum cans that don’t make it into the recycling process; but if we recycle ever more cans, that would require more trucks to collect the extra cans, as well as more energy to run the trucks, and more trucks require more glass, steel, rubber, which would require more iron and coal, which would require more trucks … So reducing, rather than recycling, is the answer.
If energy conservation and efficiency is the “fifth fuel,” and if it is easy to do with current technologies, and if it could save an amount of oil equivalent to getting all transport off fossil fuels entirely, if it is truly a no-brainer, then why is it not happening? Earlier I suggested four reasons: energy is priced too cheaply, governments are dragging their feet, clueless consumers are dragging theirs too, and low manufacturing standards operate in our throwaway culture. I could also add a few more: conservation is being undercut by the push for economic growth, and more people need more stuff – the population issue again. But the prime reasons remain consumer resistance and a political system in which politicians are reaping short-term rewards rather than turning their attention to long-term social benefits. The politicians need to be held to account. But that means we the people have to put their feet to the fire. But we the people sometimes seem to be the no-brains in the no-brainer of energy improvement.