People opposed to action on global warming use three arguments most often: global warming is not caused by human activities, reducing CO2 will slow economic growth and really it's just an excuse for eco-liberals to create a neo-fascist nanny state to run everyone's life in an irritating and politically correct fashion.
There isn't much I can add to the debate on the first issue, but let's talk about the other two, with the help of the graph above which I found at the Canadian Green Party website.
People opposed to action on global warming use three arguments most often: global warming is not caused by human activities, reducing CO2 will slow economic growth and really it's just an excuse for eco-liberals to create a neo-fascist nanny state to run everyone's life in an irritating and politically correct fashion.
There isn't much I can add to the debate on the first issue, but let's talk about the other two, with the help of the graph above which I found at the Canadian Green Party website.
We'll see that reducing CO2 by increasing energy efficiency improves the economy and that 'nanny' laws work when the free market doesn't.
That blue line going down shows the dramatic improvement in the energy efficiency of refrigerators in the US since 1973. That pinkish line rising tells an opposite story -- of the dramatic rise in standby power over the same period.
Together they tell a couple stories: one about vampires, the other about nannies.
Vampires
Vampire power is electricity that is sucked away by an appliance while it is turned off. It's also called standby power and phantom power. A microwave oven is a good example: when it's not actually heating something, the digital clock keeps running and the keypad sits ready for your command. Seems pretty innocent, but it's drawing enough power over the course of a day that it will probably waste more power in standby than it will actually use microwaving. The Department of Energy says 75% of the energy used by appliances today is consumed when not in use.
Other products likely to use standby power include anything that recharges a battery like a cordless phone, a toothbrush or power tool; anything with a remote 'on' switch like a TV, stereo, DVD player or ceiling fan; something with an external power supply, one of those transformer blocks (aka wall warts) you plug into a socket like a cell phone charger, an ink-jet printer, an answering machine; or anything with an LED that glows even when turned off.
Think this is all petty? There are a wide range of estimates of what all this standby convenience costs but they're all pretty high: 7 to 15% of home electrical usage in the developed world, $5 billion to $10 billion worth of utility bills in the US alone. That's around $50 to $100 annually per household.
The worst offending vampires draw 20 watts of juice when not doing anything in particular. Some waste as little as two watts. The average US household has the hard-to-believe total of 40 of these gizmos. Hard-to-believe, that is, until you start walking around the house and counting. Where did all these things come from? How could that be? The graph tells you how: slowly and steadily just add one gizmo every year or so for 25 or 30 years. You won't notice a thing except a few LEDs when the lights are off.
Electric Garlic
There are a few ways to reduce standby power consumption from these vampires -- <span style="font-size: x-small; font-family: Arial">electric garlic if you will -- </span>but one is by far the best: just unplug the thing when it's not actually doing its thing. That's tedious, but many people simplify the chore by using a powerstrip to turn off several at once. You can also use something like the standby plug, at least if you live in the UK. That detects when the vampire is not in use and cuts it off. One problem with turning off many electronics, especially audio and video equipment, is that the settings will be lost. And the remote won't turn it on. Your microwave and coffee machine will literally lose track of time.
The real answer, the very best electric garlic, is regulation. The technical fixes are at most minor for most products. Manufacturers can just as cheaply build these things to draw a fraction of a watt as 20 watts and still have them maintain settings, channels, time and all the remote 'on' functions. You can't do that at home with any kind of external controller or by simply unplugging it. Regulation works best because to maintain the full product functions we've all become accustomed to, it has to be designed and built that way.
I'm happy to report that we do have some regulations for standby power. California, a frequent leader in energy efficiency, started with a maximum three watt standard in 2006, then tightened it to 0.75 W in 2007 and finally down to 0.5 W this year.
An unlikely energy efficiency contributor, George W. Bush, signed an executive order way back in 2001 after the California electricity de-regulation crisis created in part by Enron fraud. It requires the federal government to buy products using no more than one watt standby power when purchasing off the shelf products.
Both California and the US government are large enough consumers that many vendors will simply design products to meet their standards and then sell them everywhere. After all, no one is clamoring for gizmos to use more standby power, so it's just better and easier to sell one thing everywhere when you can. There's room for improvement though, so the Feds should do what Canada already did and adopt the California standards for everyone.
Mary 'the Refrigerator' Poppins
With apologies to William Perry, the other curve in that graph at the top also tells a story and it's a pretty good one too. A 1973 refrigerator used about three times as much power as today's models. How could refrigerators have become so much more efficient? What happened? The answer: nanny regulations.
California created the first refrigerator regulations in 1976. Vendors easily met the standards and sold the models throughout the country. California improved the standard in 1987 and finally the US government added regulations in 1991 and tightened them in 1993 and again in 2001. You can see the result in the steadily dropping wattage used by refrigerators from 1976 onwards.
This is a resounding success! By my calculation, households saved about $13 billion last year versus what 1973 efficiency levels would have cost. Does anybody miss the right to spend three times as much for refrigerator electricity? Funny, I've not seen a single editorial in the Wall Street Journal or Investor's Business Daily -- newspapers which whine about creeping nanny regs almost daily -- lamenting the loss of that privilege.
Why was efficiency so low and even getting worse until 1975? Why did it take a nanny-law to turn things around? Why didn't the free market work better? I'm not an economist, but I don't think it takes one to answer the question in this case. There are two big reasons.
Failure of the Free Market
The first reason is this. Many refrigerators and appliances are bought by people who won't be paying the electric bill and who have no incentive to spend more to maximize efficiency. We call them builders and landlords. They have every reason to buy an inefficient model if the purchase price is lower. After all, the homebuyers and tenants will be paying the electric bills, so why should they care?
The second reason is something you could call bundling: refrigerator efficiency is one part of a big package of features and specs and you don't get to pick and choose which to take. You take all of them or none of them. So even if the buyer is actually concerned about the power bill, the refrigerator efficiency is bundled with other aspects that are usually more important: cubic feet, dimensions, style, color, features.
If the refrigerator you wanted came in two models that were otherwise identical but one was efficient and one wasn't, the free market might have a chance to work. Buyers could choose efficiency without taking collateral damage on the other features. But that's not the way it works. Efficiency in the absence of regulations is most likely to be a minor feature, determined not by intentional design but as the cumulative side-effect of other design and marketing decisions.
So nanny laws work when the free market has failed. Tenants get an efficient refrigerator even if it was picked out by a landlord. Other buyers don't have to sacrifice features to get efficiency.
That bundling aspect is relevant for our vampire power too. Consumers, even when they care about standby power rating still want the best picture, the best sound, the best features and the right styling so they'll usually choose to optimize something other than efficiency. Regulation has the same role to play for vampires.
No Economic Sacrifice
And it seems that far from slowing down the economy -- the second most common argument about taking action to reduce CO2 -- these regulations actually made the US more productive. The $13 billion consumers save on refrigerator electricity every year can be spent, saved or invested elsewhere. Money that wasn't needed to finance extra power plants and transmission lines can be invested in productive assets we would not have had otherwise.
Other efficiency measures that can reduce energy use and CO2 emissions will likewise actually make the economy more productive instead of dragging it into recession.
Snivelers
Lastly, what about all that whining about nanny regs? Like this WSJ editorial (subscription required). What are these people complaining about? Losing the privilege to carelessly pollute the air and water shared by everyone? To simply not clean up their own mess? To be lazy? Part of growing up is learning things like cleaning up after yourself and that what you do affects other people.
One way to look at these kinds of regulations is to see them as a necessary fix when free markets don't work well. If someone looks at that and instead sees it as an insult to liberty, an abridgement of their privilege to pollute, that is, make a mess and not clean it up, well, that's not the way adults act.
Maybe what they need is... a nanny.