If America sincerely wants to limit its energy use – and that’s still a big 'if' – there are two general approaches to achieving that entirely reasonable goal: employing energy efficient technology and personal sacrifice. The first approach gets a lot of people excited. The second scares most people to death.
Many people formed their impressions of conservation in the 1960’s and 70’s, when energy-efficiency technology was much more primitive than it is today; when shutting off lights and “dialing down” were the prescribed tactics, and “freezing in the dark” was the fear.
A frugal Lyndon Johnson preciously tried to set the country an example, wandering around the White House turning off incandescent lights. “Tell your friends,” he told Time Magazine, “that you have an independent, taxpaying, light-bill saving President.”
Richard Nixon called for national energy independence by 1980 in his 1974 State of the Union.
And Grand Rapids-own "Gerald Ford was the first U.S. president to really use the levers of the presidency to try to break our addiction to oil," energy economist Philip Verleger Jr. recently told the New York Times. "He was way ahead of his time."
In wintertime we dialed down the thermostat, installed woodburning stoves and bundled up. President Jimmy Carter appeared on television wearing a cardigan. To some people, it was fun. Certainly it had its folksy side.
A different dynamic exists today. The same boomers who braved 68-degree living rooms in the 1970’s are older now, with poorer circulation and suffering from occasional bouts of rheumatism. If I can’t keep the thermostat around 72 these days, I feel chilly and deprived in January, or sticky and irritable in July. A whole bunch of us have tied ourselves to lengthy commutes and absurdly heavy vehicles. We all have an expanding list of energy-thirsty conveniences, toys and gizmos. And no one wants to tell us that we might have to give any of this up.
More seriously, we are now trying to cope, not just with the economic self-interest of the petroleum exporting countries, nor even the political swagger of leaders like Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but with a climate crisis of unknown proportions and a growing assortment of religious fanatics who would gladly murder every one of us. A modern energy strategy – rooted in conservation and innovation – clearly is in our long-term economic, environmental, and social interests.
Conservation can be Painless
Yet what we should anticipate from energy conservation is a continuum of suffering, relative to how much conserving we actually do.
At one extreme, we will hardly notice that we are conserving. Energy-efficient technology is paying substantial dividends to those who can make use of it, and the payoff is growing by double digits, driven by the increasing cost of petroleum, coal, and natural gas, not to mention tax incentives. Fluorescent lighting is the great example of effortless conservation today. But there are many technologies available that yield the same desirable result and the market for new services and products is growing.
When California faced its energy crisis at the turn of the 21st century, due to the machinations of energy brokers and wholesalers, Californians almost effortlessly reduced the magnitude of the problem by curtailing their energy use. In 2001, residents voluntarily reduced monthly peak energy demand by 10 percent, 14 percent, 11 percent, and nine percent in May, June, July and August respectively, compared to the previous year. That's according to California’s Energy Commission
Clearly there's plenty of low hanging fruit at the top end of the conservation scale, where small investments reap huge returns.
At the other, more draconian end of the scale are the costlier and more challenging palliatives – strategies for reacting to more urgent climate conditions, or to some great, disturbing shift in the geopolitical compass.
Chief among these is rationing, especially of electric use and gasoline.
How likely is rationing? Electricity would be rationed at the production end. And in a very real sense we already do it – coping with galloping demand by reducing service as needed on hot summer afternoons. We already enjoy virtual energy independence as far as electricity is concerned, and I don’t see us freezing in the dark anytime soon.
A severe rationing program is more likely for gasoline in my opinion. The U.S. first undertook gas rationing in 1942 as part of the war effort. Gasoline wasn’t the issue – the rationing program was devised mainly to conserve on Asian-Pacific rubber imports. Americans accepted it with resignation, even grace and humor – partly because transit alternatives were available, partly because we hadn’t invented the modern auto-dependent suburb; but mainly because people understood the military necessity of action.
Maintaining a Unified, Innovative Front
We’ve had nothing comparable since. An odd-even fill-up system was deployed in 1973, and a federal gas rationing plan was drafted in 1980. There are many rationing tactics available, some harder than others. And the extreme strategy has the potential to constitute a real hardship for many people.
“Rationing would not be a quick solution, nor an easy solution nor, in my judgment, a fair solution,” President Ford said in 1975. His assessment was based largely on the difficulty, even the impossibility, of devising a system that everyone thought was fair.
He also believed that we should focus on voluntary conservation of petroleum, not rationing. That's one reason why he imposed a $3-a-barrel tax on imported oil to curb consumption. President Ford, who was recently referred to as America's 'first energy president' by a nationally acclaimed commentator, also pushed to deepen federal investment in alternative energy research; establish the first automotive mileage standards; and develop state-level energy conservation programs.
The important point to make is that we are positively bristling with reasonable energy conservation alternatives. Some of the most powerful options are entirely voluntarily or driven by incentives. And the more aggressive approaches, like rationing, have been tried before and the ship of state has not foundered because of them. But then again, there was a war on. How well rationing, and conservation in general, works is a function of how we feel about it, which in turn relates directly to how necessary, how effective, and how fairly applied it seems to be.
We have every reason to embrace energy conservation now, in the biggest way we can afford and on a voluntary basis. The technological options are plentiful and there's an entirely new batch of companies and entrepreneurs organizing around the idea of energy innovation.
More important, we haven’t yet been painted into a corner by circumstances. So let’s move on it quickly, and not test the solidarity of the American people before we must.
Tom Leonard, the former executive director of the West Michigan Environmental Action Council, is a writer and independent consultant living in Grand Rapids.
Photos:
Rising gas prices at the Eastown BP gas station (photo by Brian Kelly)
President Jimmy Carter dedicates solar panels in 1977
Energy crisis of 1973
Gas coupon circa 1979
Photographs sourced from Wikipedia except as noted