OP-ED: Room for Debate - The Siren Song of Energy Efficiency
March 19, 2012 | NY Times
[A short introduction to the main article, below:]
nytimes.com
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Efficiency’s Promise: Too Good to Be True
David Owen, a staff writer for The New Yorker, is the author of " Green Metropolis" and " The Conundrum.
Updated April 4, 2012
Amory Lovins once famously characterized energy efficiency as “the lunch you’re paid to eat”; Steven Chu, the secretary of energy, has called efficiency a tool for reducing energy consumption and carbon output with minimal personal sacrifice.
Lovins, Chu and other efficiency enthusiasts are undoubtedly correct when they argue that we Americans could live regally on little more than we currently waste. But turning efficiency improvements into environmental gains isn’t as easy as they make it sound. When I replaced the incandescent bulb in my desk lamp with a compact fluorescent, I expected the amount of electricity used by my desk lamp to decrease — and it did. But the broader, long-term impacts of that switch — both for my own life and for the world — are certain to be more complex.
Nearly every device we use today is more efficient than whatever its equivalent was in 1970. Yet energy consumption has soared. Increasing the efficiency of energy-using machines has the practical effect of making energy cheaper, and when we make useful things cheaper we use more of them. This isn’t an abstract argument, because the history of civilization has played out in exactly this way. Nearly every energy-consuming device I use today is vastly more efficient, in multiple senses, than whatever its equivalent was back in the early 1970s. Yet my energy consumption has soared, and so has the world’s — not only over all, but also per capita and within every income stratum. Of course, correlation doesn’t prove causation. But when the long-term correlations all run in one direction, we should take notice.
Cont.: nytimes.com
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