Power Hungry (24 page)

None of this means the United States should quit pursuing gains in energy efficiency. Asking engineers and entrepreneurs to stop seeking ef-ficiency
would be akin to telling them to go out of business. Increasing efficiency is a natural product of the competitive economic system, and it will continue regardless of any mandates put forward by government. So the next time you hear someone claim that the United States wastes energy, understand that the opposite is true: The United States is among the world's best at energy efficiency, and it's getting better, a lot better.

FIGURE 24
U.S. Energy Use Per Capita and Per Dollar of Gross Domestic Product, 1980 to 2030

Source
: Energy Information Administration, “Energy Use Per Capita and Per Dollar of Gross Domestic Product, 1980–2030,” n.d.,
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/ppt/fig004.ppt
.

Furthermore, U.S. efficiency gains are accelerating. The increasing use of hybrid-electric cars, as well as more efficient lightbulbs, air-conditioning systems, refrigerators, and other equipment, is adding velocity to America's efficiency gains. In the wake of the oil price spike in mid-2008, Americans appear to be less enamored with SUVs and big pickup trucks. Although those vehicles are still selling in large numbers, U.S. consumers are buying more fuel-efficient cars.
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And in May 2009, President Obama announced new federal regulations that will require automakers' fleets to average 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016.
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That's a significant increase over the 2009 fleet average of about 28 miles per gallon.
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Numerous high-profile efficiency upgrades are under way, including the retrofit of the Empire State Building. In April 2009, Johnson Controls announced that it had teamed up with the Clinton Climate Initiative and the Rocky Mountain Institute on a $20 million program to modernize the 103-story building's insulation, windows, lighting, ventilation, chiller, and energy management systems. The project is expected to reduce the eight-decade-old skyscraper's energy use by nearly 40 percent and cut energy costs by about $4.4 million per year.
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Energy efficiency is the one energy policy issue upon which both Republicans and Democrats can agree. That bipartisan support is providing momentum to upgrades of the U.S. electric grid. Although there's been a lot of hype around the phrase “smart grid,” there are significant gains to be had by providing consumers with more information about their usage and by giving utilities better information about the amount of voltage they are pumping into their wires. For instance, if a utility has reliable data showing that it is providing enough voltage to its most-distant customers on a given section of the grid, it can reduce the voltage on its generators and thereby reap energy savings of as much as 4 percent.
²³

In July 2009, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company released a report that predicted that if the United States adopted aggressive efficiency policies it could reduce primary energy consumption by about 20 percent when compared to a “business as usual” scenario.
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The consulting firm determined that there are big gains to be had from efficiency upgrades in the residential, commercial, and industrial sectors. The report concludes that, “in the nation's pursuit of energy affordability, climate change mitigation, and energy security, energy efficiency stands out as perhaps the single most promising resource.”
²⁵

While that may be true, the McKinsey report contains an enormous caveat, a warning that efficiency is not a panacea, not easily funded, and not easily measured or verified:

That last sentence should be read again. “Measuring and verifying energy not consumed is by its nature difficult.” In other words, knowing whether a given efficiency project has made a difference depends to a great degree on how the measuring is done, what assumptions were used, and what was considered “business as usual.”

Though the United States should, and no doubt will, continue pursuing efficiency, efficiency is not a cure-all. We cannot fuel our cars, homes, and airplanes with efficiency; we must supply them with real fuel. And that means digging something out of the ground, manufacturing electricity from hydrocarbons or fission, or wringing juice from the kinetic power of the wind or the radiation from the sun.

Increasing efficiency merely paves the way for greater energy consumption, a situation known as the Jevons Paradox. Named for the world's first energy economist, a Brit named William Stanley Jevons, the paradox has only gained credibility in recent years as increasing numbers of researchers have corroborated Jevons's work, confirming what Jevons said in 1865: “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuels is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”
²⁷

Perhaps the most exhaustive analysis of energy-efficiency efforts and their effects on consumption was done in 2008 in a book called
The Jevons Paradox and the Myth of Resource Efficiency Improvements
. The authors, led by economist John Polimeni, looked at dozens of studies on how energy efficiency affects consumption. Their conclusion: Jevons was right. In 2008, Polimeni told me that understanding the paradox is not difficult. “As you become more efficient you do not have to spend as much to consume the same amount of resources (energy). Thus, you can consume more with the same budget constraint.”
²⁸
Put another way, any time you reduce the cost of consuming something (in this case, by increasing the efficiency of a machine, home, or vehicle), then people will respond by consuming more of it. Over time, the gains in efficiency get
swamped by the increased consumption that follows each gain. Numerous other analysts have come to the same conclusion as Polimeni.
²⁹

We can also look at historical trends for evidence of the Jevons Paradox. James Watt's improvements to the steam engine led to huge improvements in energy efficiency, with the immediate result being a sharp drop in coal consumption. Watt continued making improvements in the steam engine until he died in 1819, before he was fully able to appreciate the revolution he helped to ignite.
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And the dimensions of that change can be seen in the amount of energy that was consumed: Between 1830 and 1863, British coal use increased by about 1,000 percent.
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Given that energy efficiency results in increased energy use, it's obvious that, although energy efficiency should be pursued, it cannot be expected to solve the dilemmas posed by the world's ever-growing need for energy. And as the people of the world continue consuming more energy, they will continue releasing lots of carbon dioxide.

That harsh reality leads to my next heresy: The United States should forget about trying to cut carbon dioxide emissions, forget about carbon capture and sequestration, and focus on adapting to the ever-changing global climate.

The United States Can Cut CO
₂
Emissions by 80 Percent by 2050, and Carbon Capture and Sequestration Can Help Achieve That Goal

W
HEN IT COMES to global warming, there are two camps: the believers and the skeptics. Both sides put forth complex studies that discuss topics such as “albedo,” “forcings,” and “flux” in the effort to prove their claims—for or against—the idea that unrestrained manmade carbon dioxide emissions will lead to global cataclysm.

I've seen Al Gore's movie,
An Inconvenient Truth
, and I've read some of the reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I've also listened to and read some of the things published by the climate “skeptics,” including Richard Lindzen, the climate scientist from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I have interviewed climate scientists.
¹
I regularly read blogs on climate from both camps.

My position on the science of global warming and climate change: I don't know who's right. And I don't really care. What can be demonstrated
without any caveats is this: The carbon dioxide reduction targets being advocated by the U.S. Congress and the Democratic leadership in Washington are pure fantasy. In April 2009, President Barack Obama gave a speech to the National Academy of Sciences during which he said that he has “set a goal for our nation that we will reduce our carbon pollution by more than 80% by 2050.”
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Before showing why that target won't be possible, let me explain my stance on climate change in more detail. As a journalist, I'm skeptical of nearly everything. When my mother told me she loved me, I doublechecked it with my dad. And now, with legions of greens, politicos, and pundits all parroting the same message about the dangers of global warming, my reflexive skepticism only increases.

My skepticism about the conventional wisdom on global warming arises from two main points. First, I adhere to one of the oldest maxims in science: Correlation does not prove causation. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere may be increasing, but that does not necessarily prove that the carbon dioxide is causing any warming that may be occurring. Second, models are only as good as the data going into them. All of the alarm bells now being sounded are based on atmospheric and climatic models about how temperatures in the future are expected to react, given the data fed into the models. But as Vaclav Smil put it in his 2008 book,
Global Catastrophes and Trends
, “even our most complex models are only elaborate speculations. We may get some particulars right, but it is beyond us to have any realistic appreciation of what a world with average temperature 2.5° C warmer than today's would be like.”
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There's no question that carbon dioxide plays a significant role in the atmosphere. Just how significant, we don't know. And it's just as obvious that there's a huge amount of political pressure to pass regulations that limit carbon dioxide emissions. In June 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed a 1,400-page bill on a cap-and-trade plan designed to do just that.
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Whatever. For me, in many ways, the science no longer matters because discussions about the science have become so vituperative and politicized.
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Thus, my position about the science of global climate change is one of resolute agnosticism. When it comes to climate change, the key issues are no longer about forcings, albedo, or the ideal concentration
of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Instead, the key question is about policy, namely: If we are going to agree that carbon dioxide is bad, what are we supposed to do? And that question—as the Duke of Bilgewater memorably put it in
Huckleberry Finn
—“is the bare bodkin.”
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Al Gore, James Hansen, and dozens of other people who are sounding the alarm about global climate change are not offering any viable alternatives to our existing energy sources. Gore says we should transition to “carbon-free” electricity within a decade. Hansen says we should shut down all coal-fired power plants. But those are glib responses to a set of enormously complex problems. It's far easier to say “stop using coal” than it is to actually follow that course of action.

The key question, and the one that precious few are willing to discuss in depth—If we are going to agree that carbon dioxide is bad, then what?—leads directly to two more:

The developed countries of the world can talk all they like about solar panels and wind turbines, but what the world's poor desperately need—and quickly—are common fuels such as kerosene, propane, and gasoline. And, of course, they want reliable electricity. The people in the industrialized countries cannot and should not hinder the efforts of the world's poor to gain access to cheap, reliable sources of energy. Sure, solar panels and windmills are appropriate for some locations, and in many cases, they may be the best choices. But it's also true that the cheapest and most reliable forms of energy, in most cases, are hydrocarbons.