Will conservation efforts have an effect?
Posted by Yankee on November 14, 2005 - 11:52am
Topic: Demand/Consumption
Tags: conservation, energy, peak oil [list all tags]
Well, this is a thorny question, isn't it? It underscores a fundamental problem: should we be able to keep using (all types of) energy at the same levels that we do now? Or should we try to decrease our energy use as much as we can while still maintaining a reasonably comfortable lifestyle?
I'm not sure I want to get into it here, but I will at least recognize that the concept of "comfortable lifestyle" is a contentious issue. Right now, I believe that many middle-class and upper-class Americans behave excessively: constantly air conditioning their houses in the summer, driving SUVs instead of fuel efficient cars, keeping the thermostat at 70 in the winter. There must be an acceptable middle ground between our behaviors now and having houses with no heating or air conditioning, but defining what that is will be a difficult task.
In examining San Diego households during the California electricity crisis of 2000 and 2001, they found that use of electricity dropped surprisingly fast. In the summer of 2000, within 60 days of seeing monthly electric bills rise by about $60 - an increase of 130 percent - the average household cut its use of electricity by 12 percent.Furthermore, the article points out that public service information campaigns have an important effect on encouraging people to change their behavior.That kind of drop requires a big change in behavior. The authors found that households had turned off air-conditioners in the middle of summer and had invested in new energy-efficient appliances, among other things.
In February 2001, with electricity prices capped, the state of California began a campaign to have households conserve electricity. It worked. "It was clear by about six months into 2001 that public appeals were having a big impact," Professor White said. Such campaigns can have significant effects on consumer behavior, he said, if they offer a clear explanation of what people can do and how it will make a difference.This kind of response is why I firmly believe that the government is going to play a very big role when peak oil brings us to crisis levels. Unfortunately, it seems inevitable that the government is going to drag their feet until it's too late, but even so, I feel that people aren't going to do anything until the government tells them to. That's why I think it's critical to push the government on energy issues now.
Finally, Amory Lovins has an interesting proposal for getting people to conserve electricity:
In the case of electricity, waste is glaringly apparent. About 5 percent of the electricity consumed in United States households is simply lost to computers, televisions and other appliances that are turned off but still plugged in. The savings from using electricity more efficiently could be even larger than those from oil, Mr. Lovins says. Rate structures in most states, he says, still reward utilities for selling more electricity. One solution is to decouple the profits of utilities from their sales volumes, and to let utilities keep as profit some of the savings they achieve for their customers.Between public service campaigns and conservation incentives for both businesses and utilites, we should be able to make some headway, shouldn't we?
Then there are things like this. So much for the free market.
In the long run, it gets more complicated. "Diminishing returns" rears its head pretty quickly when your strategy is conservation. We already made many of the easy fixes back in the '70s (though we've since slacked off on some of them, like the 55 mph speed limit). You reach a point where further improvements are very difficult and costly.
There are also the economic factors to consider. A lot of our economy depends on people continuing to consume the way they always have. One city cutting back temporarily is one thing; the whole nation cutting back steeply is something else again.
If, say, gas goes to $20/gallon, we won't switch to Priuses and continue on our merry way. Many people won't be able to afford that, and will give up driving. Homes way out in the suburbs will lose value, perhaps precipitously, while real estate in the city or along public transportation lines will become more valuable. And once not everyone can afford to drive, there will be more resistance to paying for it. Fewer people will be paying gas taxes, and few will be keen on raising other taxes to make up for it. So even people who can afford to keep driving will find it less and less useful, because they need the rest of us to help pay for the highway system. Bill Gates' limo is no use to him if there's no highway to drive it on.
This is really the part that I just don't understand. What if it simply isn't possible to continue our economy in a world where fossil fuels are difficult to obtain? The economists aren't doing their job if they stubbornly stick to the present economy as being the only possible one that they should be modeling. Economic growth just can't be the only scenario that's possible in our future, and if it's not, then shouldn't we know how to deal with economic shrinkage? Alternatively, wouldn't it make sense to come up with an economic model that still leads to growth without such heavy reliance on fossil fuels? Isn't that at least in the realm of possibility?
Trying to re-imagine our economy is a job for anthropologists or perhaps science fiction writers, I think. It has more in common with the classic "utopia" novel than with current economic theory.
Jared Diamond's Collapse doesn't just talk about societies that failed, but also those that succeeded. And it's fascinating. What it takes to become a successful sustainable society is often brutal by our standards. Population control is critical; zero population is the ideal. This is achieved not only via abortion and birth control, but by encouraging infanticide, warfare, and suicide. One of the societies studied in the book has a hard population cap; the king sends away people each year, to keep under the cap.
One incident that stuck in my mind was the way one society dealt with the pig problem. Pigs are often a problem. They aren't very sustainable. They are tempting, because they turn plant matter into meat more efficiently than just about any other critter. But meat production really isn't efficient, even at best, and pigs do not provide milk or eggs or wool or transportation, as other animals do. And they eat only food people can eat. So societies declare them unclean, as in the Middle East, or put taboos on them that allow only certain people to eat them (as in ancient Hawaii).
One society Diamond studied went a step further. They decided to exterminate every pig on the island. The pigs were getting into the gardens and eating food people needed, and only the elite ever got to eat pork. So they decided to eliminate every pig on the island, and did. (Must have been a heck of a barbecue!)
I just can't see us ever agreeing to anything like that. We believe that if you can afford it, you can have it, regardless of the cost to society. I don't think we have it in us to make the hard choices. At least, not yet.
3 vegetarians can be fed by one acre,
7 vegans can eat from one acre
consider how much oil goes into agriculture, pesticides, ferilizers, transportation of grain and cereals to feed the animals, transporting the animals.
refigeration of meats.
cooking meats.
I really envy americans you have a far greater ratio of arable land per person than any of us europeans.
it takes many kilos of cereal to create one kilo of meat.
and meat isnt very good for you, the health implications also make for a less sustainable society.
go on
go vegan
for life
http://www.alternet.org/story/12162
http://www.beyondveg.com/cordain-l/grains-leg/grains-legumes-1a.shtml
http://www.tbkfitness.org/TBKdiet.html
http://www.mercola.com/article/insulin.htm
http://www.beyondveg.com/cordain-l/grains-leg/grains-legumes-1a
Consequently, the human genome is most ideally adapted to those foods which were available to pre-agricultural man, namely lean muscle meats, limited fatty organ meats, and wild fruits and vegetables--but, significantly, not grains, legumes, dairy products, or the very high-fat carcasses of modern domesticated animals
meat and dairy products have been consitently linked to heart attack and cancer (also partly due to steroids, hormones and I suspect antibiotics that industrialised animals are fed) as outlined in your second link
http://www.tbkfitness.org/TBKdiet.html
Most of us today follow a diet containing a large amount of food which is not readily available in nature, and that must be highly processed to become edible. Our bodies were not made to handle such foods, and thus we suffer by dying of heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and complications from diabetes and osteoporosis.
http://www.mercola.com/article/insulin.htm
reads very much like the atkins diet and he is trying to sell his book.
however i agree cereals and legumes should not be the basis of a diet, you would definetly get malnutrition.
I advocate a BALANCED vegan diet for optimum health and using less resources
nuts, seeds, berries, fruits, vegetables and some legumes, root vegatables and rice if you can get it
a potato based diet is not good, but that is not to say potatos are bad for you.
as an aside britains oldest man was vegan lived till 111, cycled to work till he was 100 and retired at 104.
if you would like to know more about the free organic food that is available to you then go to
www.pfaf.org
they have a database of 7000 plants that are edible
happy foraging.
But then mabye millions of people dieing from a pandemic is just what we need to save resources so we can carry on eating meat??
and drive suvs.
sorry thats a totally unfounded conspiracy theory I composed after watching "twelve monkeys" recently...
its not serious :)
And then bashing grains? You sound like a raw fooder, lol!
If grain-based diets caused chronic disease then the incidence of western ilnesses like heart disease/cancer should be HUGE in the poor populations of the world that base their diets on grains. Instead, these diseases are nearly unheard of in these populations, which make up a major part of world population - clearly a glaring contradiction.
The book noted below is yet another elucidation of the unhealthiness of meat. Even tiny amounts (by western standards) showed negative consequences. 5000 people in the US drop dead every day from artery diseases clogged and ruptured by what, rice and vegetables? The head of The Framingham Heart Study, the grand prix of heart studies,
says they have never seen a case of heart disease from a person with a cholesterol lower than 150. Guess what level cholesterol drops to when you stop eating meat and dairy? under 150.
The China Study : The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health -- by T. Colin Campbell,
It's important to keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out. (Carl Sagan?) In my unpopular opinion, if you believe meat is healthy then your brain is flopping around on the ground, waiting to be picked up.
Hmmm. Didn't Lenin (Trotsky? Stalin?) define a liberal as someone whose mind is so open that his brains fall out?
In most "traditional" cultures meat was considered a flavoring.
Best to limit all highly refined substances in one's diet, be they pastas or pepperonis.
This is really at the heart of the issue. The world's economy has grown, on average, for centuries, and our fossil fuel consumption has increased in lockstep with it. We can get one-time efficiencies, and be more productive. But can we, as a world economy, grow long-term without using more energy? I doubt it, but I don't think anybody really anybody knows the answer yet.
Could we continue to grow by substituting other forms of energy for oil or natural gas? Sure, if they are available in enough quantity, at an acceptable price, and in usable forms. But the physics, economics, and logistics of pulling this off are unbelievably enormous.
The problem with substitutes
If you look at any aspect of the energy problem, it looks like a house of cards. Half the homes in America heat with natural gas. No gas? Electricity is a substitute heating technology that is feasible and commercialized and ready to go--a best case substitution scenario. Call the contractor, put in a heat pump.
It works fine for one home-expensive, but otherwise quick and fairly easy. But consider scalability. If a large number of people convert, transmission lines overload. Remember the East Coast blackout? So we need to tool up to manufacture a lot of heatpumps, and rebuild the lines, and the substations, and then we need to put in more electricity.
But where do we get the electricity? Can't burn more natural gas, 'cause there isn't any more. So we need to build new power plants using other fuels or renewables of your choice, which takes years, and raises lots of other issues.
We need substitutes, but it's a process that will take decades to do. In the meantime, economies will suffer. We simply do not know how to manage a steady-state economy, or how to manage economic shrinkage in a humane way. There is a lot to learn.
Geothermal. Geothermal heating of houses is the only real way to go. Burn wood/pellets? Everyone? Lots of dirty chimneys dumping carbon and soot into the air. Gas is going to get evermore expensive and NEVER come back down. Electricity? One of the worst ways of heating a home there is - really wasteful and merely transfers the pollution/fuel use upstream to electricity generating plants.
The only valid way to properly heat AND cool a house in the coming problematic times will be, for the middle and poorer strata will passive earth - buried or partially buried housing that thermoregulates from the ground. For those that can afford more elaborate systems is geothermal - drilling deep and laying pipe to transfer cooling/heat from the ground.
I'd LOVE to go geothermal but to retrofit a house with geothermal heating/cooling is extremely expensive. As it is, I'm rural and my house uses propane and a woodburning stove for heat. I've been looking into solar heating, at least for water. It is too expensive to retrofit for solar home heating as well as water heating.
Passive geothermal or deep geothermal are the easiest. You could try to sell people on it by tapping into the Lord of the Rings movies: homes and communities built along the lines of Hobbitown.
But... this is a very long-term undertaking. Roughly speaking, 50% of the US population lives in the suburbs and 25% lives in urban areas. Buried housing is impractical for much of that — there is no buried equivalent that matches the density of high-rise housing (or even three-story tall "garden" apartments), and while it might be possible in the suburbs it would require complete replacement of the existing housing stock.
I only use the geothermal heating as back up if I'm going to be away and I don't want the pipes to freeze. For the time being (while I can still afford it) I use the system for cooling in summer when the temperature gets into the truly unbearable range. I recognize that it's a luxury though, and that I'll probably have to do without it in the future. If I was looking for a home again, I'd do as you suggest and build a hobbit-hole.
www.earthship.org
this house doesnt need heating!!
and is made from recycled materials
http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=162495078&p=y6z495784
The CHP plant makes the sawmill site self-sufficient in electricity, saving over £1 million a year, with the surplus electricity sold to the Northern Ireland grid.
In addition it powers the largest bio fuel pellet production facility in the British Isles.
The plant produces 50,000 tonnes of high-energy fuel pellets - displacing fossil fuels and the 200,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide which would otherwise have been released into the atmosphere.
Your system was not sized properly. Can you go after the contractor?
I wanted a ground source heat pump system but municipal code precludes drilling and my lot is too small for the other trenching method.
Perhaps newer models are more efficient, but the cost of replacing it would be too high. Of course if my house were newer, better insulated and had a lower surface area to volume ratio, the geothermal system I already have would cost less to run and would keep my house warmer. I should have built a hobbit-hole when I had the chance!
Your heating scenario is overly simple. Let me suggest another: 40% of the homes convert to heat pumps, and the other 60% swap furnaces for gas-burning cogenerators. When the mercury falls, the homes burning gas get their heat from the cooling jackets and exhausts of the generators, while the homes with heat pumps get their electricity largely from the surplus of the cogenerators. If the cogenerators had 30% electric efficiency and 95% overall efficiency, and the heat pumps had a CoP of 3.5, you'd multiply the effective heat by about 1.8 and cut 45% off the gas demand without any less heat.
This system works great with extra generation. If you can supply wind up to the limits of the wires, the heat-pump users could run on it and the cogenerator users could buy the surplus at minimal rates to use as resistance heat.
The US builds what, 13 million cars a year? We should be able to build at least that many cogenerators a year, maybe in the same engine plants. At 13 million a year, retrofitting the gas-heated fraction of our 80 million households should be doable in just a few years. (Other considerations would prevent it happening that fast, but I think I've made my point.)
Your heating scenario is overly simple.
My heating scenario could actually occur. We need vision, and hope, but we also need reality. I think our only real hope for the next decade or more is off-the-shelf solutions that fit with established habits, practices, and infrastructure.
From the American Housing Survey, I estimated that less than half the homes would be good candidates for heat pumps, based on the severity of winters (determined by heating degree days), but no other criteria, such as fuel availability.
Not that the government might feel limited in any way, but doesn't NAFTA imply the USA can't block energy exports to Canada and Mexico?
People get used to prices and they keep driving. At some point, behaviour will change, but not at these prices it would seem...
From Today's EIA release:
Ignoring questions about the likelihood of such a utopia there are great problems ramping up the installation of alternatives to oil that have a low energy returned to energy invested ratio. Wind energy and photovoltaic energy do have a greater than unity ratio (despite some claims to the contrary) but it is not that much greater than unity. This is also true of tar sands, oil shale and nuclear power. The payback period, the time to generate energy equivalent to the energy to manufacture and install the plant, is often several years.
This may be acceptable in a static situation but when you are rapidly ramping up the installed capacity the energy required to produce the new installation can equal or exceed the energy produced by the existing installations. Putting figures to this produces some frightening answers. The rate of expansion that will completely cancel out the energy production for various payback periods and the number of years to get a hundred fold expansion at that rate are as follows:-
payback expansion 100-fold
period rate expansion
(years) (%) time (yrs)
3 39.5 13.75
4 28.4 18.5
5 22.1 23
6 18.1 27.5
Thus if world wide photovoltaic generation is 1.2GW peak rating giving about 1.2TWh per year (about a tenth of one large fossil fuel power station) and we want to raise it to 120GW to replace 10 fossil power stations and the energy payback period is four years, we need to expand the installed base at 28.4% per year from now until early 2023 during which time we will gain zero net energy benefit.
Faster expansion will have negative energy benefit during expansion.
This is not a argument against renewable energy sources of which I am strong advocate but a plea to start investing now while we still have reasonable oil supplies even though if it has no, or even negative immediate benefit. If we wait until we are desperately short of oil we are sunk.