Waste Not II
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I received an excellent reply from my brother-in-law on Waste Not piece:
“Wanna see waste in America? Attached is a monthly home energy report that Com Ed sends out showing that we are 40% more efficient than the efficient neighbors and 60% more efficient than the average neighbors? What is amazing about this is that Mary and I do nothing out of the ordinary to conserve energy and that begs the question – what the hell are the other neighbors doing?”
“Our house is 3-4 bedroom and 2 ½ bath, 2500 square feet which is pretty typical for this neighborhood. We keep our heat at 68 F and run the air conditioner when daytime highs get into the mid to high 80s and 90s. The one thing we did do is downsize to a smaller refrigerator and that did save a lot of energy. We figured you have to go to the store and buy milk 2x a week so there is no need to stock up on months’ worth of food in an oversized, energy guzzling refrigerator. Same goes for a spare freezer in the garage. No need to have one. We also took out the floodlights on the house that people leave on all night. There is already a streetlight on our block and the porch light is still there for when we come home after dark. No need to run those lights all night long. They do make the house look good but at 2 A.M., who is looking?
“That’s it! No solar panels or super energy light bulbs. Just when not in use, turn off the juice. I still have no idea what my neighbors are doing to create such high energy bills but this bill says they could cut their use by 40% without really reducing their lifestyle.”
I’ve long advocated that without a great deal of effort, though some, the US could cut its energy use in half. Of course that goes directly against the American ethos of waste as wealth and industrialism’s dominant value of more, no matter of what, as always better.
It’s funny on the above Com Ed bill above they still use “efficiency.” In regards to energy use, efficiency's an archaic term, never much popular, brought into use with the 1970s' oil shocks, then jettisoned as quickly as possible with the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. In the most recent years, the exact opposite tack has been taken. First, a wrongheaded notion that in response to environmental concerns, we could simply electrify American energy waste, most especially American car culture. This raised such ridiculous figures as Elon Musk to the commanding heights, though it's said he's not so popular in some of the boardrooms of American environmental groups lately.
Secondly, electric cars combined with the latest generation of compute technology marketed as AI, has "experts"calling for a tripling of current electricity generation in the next couple decades. “A nuke in every backyard,” but honestly, Tech wants big centralized nukes to power big centralized server and data processing plants. The once marketed PC revolution and any notions of user control went with the internet has gone the way of efficiency in energy.
In terms of wealth/waste and just plain inequity in the Industrial Age, there’s no greater measure than energy use. No one comes close to the United States, for example with 4% of the global population we use 20% of the oil. To see the complete ridiculousness of exponentially growing US electricity generation, you only need glance at the current global energyscape.
So, looking at the above IEA numbers on global consumption, as good as any I suppose, in the last five decades, total energy consumption has risen 125%, a little more than doubling. The distribution of energy sources has changed somewhat with electricity doubling from 10 to 20% share, coal down a third in percentage of total, but 50% more coal is being burned today than a half-century ago. Oil remains the single biggest global energy source at 40%, down from 47% in 1970.
According to the CIA Factbook, if China were to equal just current per capita US electricity usage, leave aside tripling US electricity as called for by US experts of various varieties, China needs to double its current consumption. India requires an increase of ten times. The numbers for the billion people on the continent of Africa are even greater. It’s even worse from an oil perspective, where China needs a quadrupling of oil consumption and India a twelve times increase for equivalent per capita oil use to equal American consumption. At 100 million barrels a day of current global oil production, if just the Chinese and US burned an equivalent consumption per capita, there’d be only 20 million barrels left for the rest of the 6.2 billion people on the planet.
The good news is there’s plenty of energy for a new era, most especially from the sun, but it means doing things differently, such as discontinuing valuing waste as wealth, but there’s a whole lot of powerful and entrenched interests and strongly held cultural beliefs against doing or thinking anything differently.
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