If All of America Behaved Like Californians……….
Let’s all be Californians! For several years now, California residents used 40 per cent less electricity per person than the people in the rest of the U.S. Considering that generating electricity for Americans produces one-third of all the carbon we release, simply getting the rest of the country to behave like Californians would cut carbon from electricity use by 969 million tons, just like that.
Stopping our headlong rush to use more and more fossil fuels by using less can make a serious and almost immediate contribution to getting us out of our carbon-black hole. What California does is not just an exercise in cheerleading (like getting people to be conscious of wasting electricity), although it does that too. Its building codes, subsidies and incentives encourage people to insulate and generally make their homes and place of business more energy efficient.
California leads in energy efficiency appliance standards. But most importantly, it has changed the way people pay for electricity: your electric rates don’t go down the more you use; rates per kwhr go up as you use more. The fact that Europeans, whose standard of living is just as high as ours, use half the electricity per person that we do has a lot to do with the fact that their electricity costs 50 per cent more per kwhr than ours. We’re human: if something hurts us when we use it, we’re likely to stop using it. Higher prices hurt.
Conservation works for transportation too. While increasing the amount Americans walk wouldn’t hurt (obesity has been closely linked to urban sprawl), there are many things that can be done to reduce the size of the 28 per cent bite that transportation takes from the American energy pie. California is focusing on passenger transportation. California’s current attempt to reduce passenger miles traveled contains all the basics: encourage higher density for residential developments that bring work, shopping, schools and living closer to each other; invest in alternative modes of transport by providing better mass transport and more bike- and walk-friendly environments; make it more expensive to drive by increasing tolls and parking fees. Of course, higher gas prices make their contribution.
Air travel is by nature a national issue, but good regional train service would cut deeply into regional air travel, just as Amtrak’s Acela service, despite its limitations, has had a significant impact on air traffic between New York and Washington DC. As trains use significantly less energy per mile to move a passenger than airplanes, more and better trains would have a conservative effect.
Commercial transport is a different game. While personal preference and convenience skew passenger travel figures, moving freight is strictly a time-and-money game. As long as we subsidize long-haul trucking by providing virtually free roads and poor alternative transportation, trucks, with their intense energy use and high CO2 production, continue to rule. However, while trucks cannot at this time be replaced for local delivery, intermodal transport — the increasing use of containers that can be carried on both trucks and trains, and trains designed to carry whole trucks — is changing the dynamic. Virginia is considering funding a separately tracked two-rail 80 mph freight train system to reduce the number of trucks that are causing congestion on its cross-state highways, rather than adding lanes to the throughways that cross the state.
Heating America’s buildings and supplying them with hot water takes up only eleven per cent of the U.S. energy budget, but that is still a lot of BTUs and tons of atmospheric carbon. More than three-quarters of that comes from natural gas, with oil-fired boilers supplying a declining share of the balance. Nevertheless, this is an energy sector where conservation will leave a big mark: perfectly insulated, situated and ventilated buildings don’t need any heating system at all. In half the U.S., hot water can be efficiently and consistently provided by solar systems.
The last 20 per cent of our energy budget is spent by industry, doing what industry does: mine, manufacture, build. This should be entirely driven by money, but in fact much of the money companies spend on energy is determined by custom – what their industry has been doing in the past. For almost a century, the electricity-producing industry has been relying on coal-fired plants, and that used to be what would get built. But in the last few years, more than 100 new coal-fired plants have gone from the drawing board into the wastebasket, as communities and other involved parties saw that there were cleaner, and even cheaper ways of generating electric power for their region. More and more industries are finding that there are more energy efficient ways to do things, and they are doing them.