The Fallacy of Inevitability in Energy Demand

Cross-post: Brudaimonia

Do we really need a new wave of nuclear power plants in the U.S.?  Do we really need to mine and gasify coal?  The answer to these and other proposed energy crisis mitigations is clearly "No."

One of the more fallacious assumptions of our energy discourse is that our excessive energy consumption is inevitable.  A corollary of this assumption - that demand-side solutions to impending energy crises are of no more than secondary importance - has led the discourse to an undue bias towards supply-side mitigations that carry with them negative connotations for sustainability, environmental protection, and national security.

I must admit that I have been surprised how much support two of these mitigations - coal gasification and nuclear power - have received on Daily Kos.  It's not that I expect everyone to agree with me that these two mitigations and others should be avoided as much as possible in our effort to right our energy ship.  Nor do I think each is devoid of any positive aspects.  It's just that I tend to subconsciously (and perhaps unduly) associate them with what I call develop-at-all-costs conservatives: those that put extraction of resources ahead of other innovative ideas (usually to please their energy industry donors).  But that is beside the point.

Of course, I agree that we should have an honest debate about each supply-side mitigation, whether it be in the realm of transportation or electricity generation, as to its feasibility, scale, upsides, and downsides.  Such a debate, however, should be subsumed by a broader discourse about our level of energy demand in general.  Our current level of energy use is certainly not inevitable.  If we were to commit to using less energy, then it would be much less stressful to think about how we will be able to supply that energy in the future.

As of the present moment, many Americans talk as if we cannot help but use the amount of energy we use, which turns out to be around 8,000 kilograms of oil equivalent (kgoe) per person per year (according to the World Resources Institute [2001 figures]), much more than double that of Europe (3,600), and nearly double the average for developed countries (4,600).  The trick to convincing oneself of this compulsion is to make it a condition of the modern lifestyle and all its conveniences.  "If we don't build more nuclear plants," an extreme argument goes, "then we'll all be sitting naked in trees eating nuts and leaves."  But just because we can be grateful to a cheap, constant flow of energy for important contributors to our well-being, such as advanced health care or computers and the internet, doesn't mean that we must acquiesce to the monumental task of having to supply the ravenous future energy demand indicated by projections.  We can and should use less energy, while at the same time making massive investments in renewable energy until it supplies the vast majority of all of our energy demands.

In short, I feel that with enough knowledge, innovation, and effort, a threefold plan consisting only of conservation, efficiency, and renewable energy can solve our impending energy crises.  But here I am digressing a bit into a corollary of my own.  This post is to focus on the fact that we don't need to use so much energy.

Consider the familiar punching bag of suburbia.  It wasn't a foregone conclusion that our built environment would be developed that way, so it wasn't a foregone conclusion that we would have to use so much oil for suburban transportation.  Market conservatives like to contend that the suburbs are the epitome of efficiency, because they represent what the housing market has generally dictated over the last sixty years, but they mean "economic efficiency" (a contention I doubt anyway).  In terms of energy efficiency the suburbs perform abysmally, and they are a major reason why we're heading towards such a mess in the near future.  Sure, the booming post-WWII population needed somewhere to live, and the emerging middle class needed places to call their own, but their living spaces didn't need to be constructed in such a fossil-fuel-dependent manner.

The U.S.'s current energy demand is certainly not a necessary condition of a high quality of life.  Several countries use much less energy per capita than the United States yet have better quality-of-life rankings.  Norway (5,921 kgoe per person per year), Ireland (3,876), Switzerland (3,906), Australia (5,975), and Sweden (5,762) all rank higher than the U.S. in both the UN Human Development Index of Most and Least Livable Countries and The Economist's 2005 quality-of-life index (PDF).  I'm not trying to say these countries are "better than" the U.S. - I would rather live here than anywhere else in the world - just that they can generally live well using less energy per capita.

A couple weeks ago I satisfied a growing interest to learn more about American architecture by picking up a couple books from my local library.  One is entitled Architecture and Energy by Richard Stein, which can be visualized as an excellent and comprehensive predecessor to the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED rating system.  Indeed, Stein himself was known as a pioneer in energy-conserving architecture.  Though written in 1977, in the midst of the 1970s energy crises, I was impressed by how relevant it still is today.  

One paragraph, in particular, has so many uncanny parallels to today that I will digress from my argument in order to cite it here.  (I was going to intersperse today's parallels in brackets, but I decided that it would disrupt the flow of the excerpt, and I'm sure readers will be able to point them out.)

The attacks by the oil industry on environmentalists and environmental controls as the reason for the shortages has been carefully organized and has had some success in speeding through federal authorization of the Alaska North Slope oil development and pipeline.  There is now mounting industry pressure for access to the continental shelf off New England.  There has even been a counterattack by the oil companies in defense of their inordinate profits...on the grounds of their being in the realm of public welfare, since these profits gave the companies the possibility of more rapid expansion of their productive capacity.  Continental Oil, whose former chairman, John McLean, had been the most articulate voice of the petroleum industry for the removal of restrictions as the basis for the petroleum industry's growth, recorded profits for the first six months of 1974 as $209,601 million as compared with $99,180 million in 1973. (p. 18)

Though referring to a different time period, Stein's discussion of a disconnect between profligate energy usage and quality of life very much applies to our generation's energy situation.

Twenty-five years ago, or about 1950, when we were beginning to fill our housing and other building needs, we were satisfying our national requirements with one sixth of the amount of electrical energy we now use and less than half of today's total energy expenditure.  Since then, our population has increased by about 45 per cent, while our use of electrical energy has increased by 600 per cent and our total consumption by 250 per cent.  If there had been a dramatic improvement in the quality of life proportionate to the per capita increase in energy use and if the perspective for the future was for an endless extension of that improvement - assuming endless reserves - there would be no reason to characterize our present condition as a crisis.  However, if we discover that we are only doing things differently and that a good part of our effort merely corrects or offsets the damaging byproducts of these processes, then we are truly in a crisis of the gravest sort.

Stein's book provides a shining example in our nation's buildings of how we waste energy.  Even today we could retain the function and modern amenities of buildings while drastically reducing their energy usage.  At this point, I will highly recommend that those unfamiliar with the U.S. Green Building Council to visit their website.

It is important to keep in mind that there is a middle ground between Luddism and gluttony on the energy demand spectrum.  The cursory statistics I provided above on selected countries' energy demand and quality of life lend support to a hypothesis that more and more energy use provides, at best, diminishing returns on our well-being, and, at worst, increasing deficits.

A claim that we "need" to extract and burn the equivalent of x amount of BTUs depends on the assumption that it is not worth conserving x BTUs, or that it is better than generating x BTUs with renewable energy.  Future discussions on energy should take this truth into account and ask how much we value the higher elevations of our energy demand.  Do we value them so much that we are willing to put aside the many caveats of nuclear power or coal gasification (to name just two mitigations) and mischaracterize them as inevitable?  I hope that this is not the case.