Numbers show power of energy conservation
Bad habits are hard to break, especially when they've come to define how we think of ourselves as a nation.
For most of the last half-century, Americans have enjoyed relatively easy access to cheap, abundant energy that has made our economy and lifestyle the envy of the world.
Our homes are equipped with power-hungry creature comforts. Our offices are icebox-cool in summer and toasty warm in winter. Our cars are the biggest gas guzzlers on the planet, and we own more of them and drive them farther than anyone.
But such a lifestyle has its cost, and it's not measured by gas prices alone. We are struggling with an occupation of Iraq, for example, made necessary in part by concern for stable oil supplies. And evidence that fossil-fuel emissions are warming the planet gets stronger with each passing year.
And yet, efforts to make energy conservation a bigger part of our national policy are often dismissed as somehow less than American. That was epitomized two years ago, when Vice President Dick Cheney spelled out an energy strategy calling for hundreds of new power plants while brushing off conservation as little more than a "personal virtue."
Congress and the administration have opposed any attempts to substantially increase fuel efficiency standards for the nation's 240 million cars and trucks, which burn nearly 6 billion gallons of fuel each week.
The popularity of SUVs and light trucks, encouraged by federal tax breaks on these vehicles, has helped push auto fuel efficiency to its lowest level since the mid-1980s.
Conservation can be a home-grown source of energy, with the potential to free up barrels of oil, tons of coal and cubic feet of natural gas by the millions. It can also help insulate our economy against unpredictable fluctuations in the cost and supply of foreign oil, especially from the Mideast.
Contrary to doubters, conservation won't require those who have grown fond of their SUVs to squeeze into underpowered matchboxes. Using existing technology, raising the average fuel efficiency of SUVs, cars and light trucks a mere three miles per gallon would save consumers more oil over a decade than is likely to be produced by draining the oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
And while President Bush has lauded the Energy Star program, which gives manufacturers and consumers voluntary incentives to buy more efficient appliances, his administration last year dropped the mandatory efficiency standards for air conditioners and heat pumps, which account for a third of the energy bill in most low-income households.
Those standards were lowered despite a U.S. Department of Energy study that concluded that increased energy efficiency in homes and offices could reduce electricity demand by as much as 33 percent, "producing" as much energy as 600 new power plants. Those steps, coupled with wider use of renewable energy sources, could save consumers $500 billion over the next 20 years.
Saving money, saving energy, saving the environment. If those aren't American values, they ought to be.
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