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Growth Through Energy
anna missed points to some angry childish comments on energy consumption, Senator Grassley recently made on NPR:
You know, what–what makes our economy grow is energy. And, and Americans are used to going to the gas tank (sic), and when they put that hose in their, uh, tank, and when I do it, I wanna get gas out of it. And when I turn the light switch on, I want the lights to go on, and I don’t want somebody to tell me I gotta change my way of living to satisfy them. Because this is America, and this is something we’ve worked our way into, and the American people are entitled to it, and if we’re going improve (sic) our standard of living, you have to consume more energy.
When you have worked your way into a mess, you are entitled to it – for now and ever.
That is as stupid as it gets, even worse is his claim of a relation of economic growth, improved standards of living and energy consumption.
That relation is hard to avoid for undeveloped countries. It is unnecessary in a developed country where everybody has food and shelter and can live a life in relative luxury. At a certain development level growth can be accomplished with less energy usage.
At least that is what Germany’s big oil, the German mineral oil industry and distributor association says. Their May 2005 study forecasts (pdf in German) the change in energy usage in Germany up to 2020.
According to their calculations total usage of primary energy in Germany during the next fifteen years will sink by 5%. Oil and oil products, which today have an energy market share of 36.5%, will sink to a 34% share. Today’s use of 115 million (metric) tons per year (1 metric ton = 7.33 barrels) of oil will be lowered to 101 million tons in 2020.
These decreases are driven by today’s energy politics. High gas taxes encourage cars with better mileage. Gasoline consumption will sink by 33% and diesel fuel consumption by 10%.
Tough building standards plus the existing tax credits for house insulation and better heating methods will lead to a 20% decrease in heating oil usage.
Will the Germans of 2020 be poorer than today? Will they be less mobile?
Of course not – the study reasonably assumes a real (ex. inflation) GDP increase of 1.5% per year, a 2004-2020 total increase of 32%. The population numbers are about steady, mobility is assumed to increase (more air traffic) as is oil usage for industrial goods.
Grassley links two factors, growth and energy usage, that are only linked if politics do allow the link to continue. A few and relatively unobtrusive measures can decrease energy usage while enabling decent economic growth.
But such measures have to be taken now, or much harsher rules will have to be made later.
Because this is America will not heat a home or fill up a car, neither will war on the Middle East.
Please send Grassley back to the kindergarten. He has much to learn.
Excellent post, jj. I didn’t know about VEIC but I will look into them.
One of the problems with energy policy in this country, as with all policies, is that these days they must hew to the regnant “free market” religious cult that has infected all “serious” public discourse as the only acceptable solution to the problems of industrialized life. The consequence of this line of thought are the crafting of a public policy program skewed heavily to the wealthy, to the detriment of the poor and middle class, and society in general.
How does this manifest in energy policy? In the state I reside in, Massachusetts, as in others, a typical approach to energy efficiency would be tax credits for home improvements. Well that is great if a couple is pulling in $100 to 200K, not an unusual amount for the coordinator class–doctors, lawyers, reporters, misc. professionals, etc.–to make here. However, if you are working class and struggle to raise a family on $40K or less, you are not going to have the money to invest in improvements, and the tax credit will be meaningless to you. I have no idea what happens if you have fallen into Barbara Ehrenreich’s frightening Walmart world.
Additionally, energy efficiency programs are, not surprisingly, generally crafted as giveaways to the utilities, not aid to the common person. I priced replacing my 90 year old, 40% efficient, “snowman” furnace several years ago and found that it was cheaper to hire an independent plumber than the local utility despite their partaking in a $3000 state subsidized rebate program. Go figure. The plumber who eventually did the job, installing a 78% efficiency boiler, told me that the wealthier customers who hired him were installing state of the art German furnaces with 90% efficiency ratings, and 20-30 year payoff rates. Great if you have the money. But if you don’t have an extra $10-20K sitting around to dump into a furnace, and there is no government program, the needed efficiency programs will not be enacted.
Additionally, such programs were far more generous during the Carter years, and were scaled back or cancelled by “The Greatest American Ever”, Ronald Reagan. Many people I know had their whole houses insulated for free at that time. No such similar programs currently exist in this state.
I remember living in a tenement in NYC 20 years ago, and the bedroom actually had a broken window pane in the middle of the winter. The landlord asked me to tape a plastic bag over it and he would supply additional heat. How’s that for energy efficiency?
Of course, when I lived in Denmark in the mid ’80’s, all radiators had state of the art regulating valves on them. When you weren’t using a room, you simply turned down the valve. I have about 15 radiators in my house and it would cost about $6,000 to install such valves, but it would save at least 10%/year in heating costs with no diminishment in lifestyle. A government (after it had been pulled out of Grover Norquist’s proverbial bathtub) program to upgrade houses in this way would save energy AND provide jobs. But, as Chomsky has pointed out, it would also have a redistributing effect on income, and a corresponding empowering effect upon the populace, which is to be avoided at all costs. Therefore, the elite planners consider it much better policy to throw money at military purchases, which have none of those defects.
As for jlcg, I have two words: storm windows. 60 years ago no one had them. Glass was single paned and we simply pushed our furnaces harder. Now they are so common we forget that they are an addition to all older houses. Have they somehow impinged upon jlcg’s lifestyle? Such logic as his is fatuous. Indeed, he is somewhat correct in stating that development is heat, but only multiplied by efficiency. The question of what type of development is also highly pertinent, and quite complex, therefore I will not take the time to treat it presently, and only provide one question for further consideration: Is there a way to design our society where the average person doesn’t need to drive 100 miles round-trip daily to get to their job and run their errands? Somehow, I managed to live in Europe and NYC without owning a car and not missing it. Where I live now I could barely get to the supermarket without one.
Posted by: Malooga | Dec 5 2005 5:49 utc | 10
I understand your point JLCG, and it has merit. The more activity, the more heat produced. Yet items like insulation are still net savers of energy, even after you take into account other people’s contributing economic activity.
I think the metric you are looking for might be the Energy Footprint, or even more accurately, the ecological footprint, also found at that site. Restraint is excellent, many of us here practice it. So would be reducing the world’s population, which is far beyond sustainable carrying capacity.
Native People’s lived at, more or less, sustainable balance with the planet; the way industrialized man lives is sheer madness squared.
I think of all human work, or activity, as falling on a spectrum of environmental sustainability. At the far end of the scale, absolute ecological destruction, is the War Machine, which burns more hydrocarbons and releases more pollutants, than any other activity. Even there, distinctions can be made. DU is ultimately worse than bullets, tanks and planes worse than infantry. I have never seen a study done, but I have no doubt that the current war in Iraq increases the energy consumption of this country by several percent, making it even more counterproductive.
It is important to realize that virtually all development policy, the World Bank and IMF junta’s solution, worsens this problem. But that is because it is all geared to large-scale hierarchical solutions which allow for the centralization of capital, i.e. wealth, for the project’s planers, builders and financiers. Capitalism is a particular madness in this regard: Its thirst for continual productivity increases allows fewer people to produce more, forcing the production of more and more “stuff”–largely ephemeral and ecologically destructive.
Agricultural policy is a particularly egregious example of this madness. In the US, .25% of the population now produce all the food, down from 25% a century ago. That might sound great to world planners and the readers of Fortune and the WSJ, but this comes at a cost of significant hydrocarbon inputs in machinery and fertilizer, significant reductions of biological diversity and land fertility, and significant increases in alienated urban populations. who miss any natural attachment to the land thus spawning increasingly ecologically destuctive manias, like “xtreme sports.”
This, too, is the thrust of so-called “Free Trade” policies in the third world, which seek to break up relatively self sufficient indigenous societies and cultures, divesting people of their land and resources, relocating them into cities (and exploding horrifying shantytowns that increasingly form the face of the urban third world, the obverse face of our suburban sprawl in developed nations), disempowering masses and forcing people out of sustainable communal barter systems and into the so-called cash economy where they can now be economically quantified by our ideologically and ecologically perverse economic systems as A NET PLUS, thus enabling their respective countries to pay off their IMF loans on the sweat of this immiseration. (Phew, that was a sentence!) So, where we once saw indigenous, sustainable cultures, we now find sweat shops, industio-beef farms for MacDonalds, and mineral extraction mines.
The solution to all of this madness will not come until there is a wholesale rejection of current thinking, as exemplified by the mania of neo-liberal ideology, at the minimum, perhaps after the next great market crash. We propably need to go farther than this, rejecting even the managed neatness of European Social Democracy, which more subtly masks its interactions with the so-called “third world”, that is that portion of the globe set aside by our policies for resource and labor extraction, or as it might be more accurately expressed, theft. Political views such as Social Libertarianism or Anarcho-Syndicalism come closer to expressing a sustainable relation to the planet, although they are not by any means complete solutions. One hundred years ago there was much ideological ferment and development and refinement of radical political thought. I see new movements arising, drawing from the past, but incorporating the contributions of more recent years: The developmental work of Buckminster Fuller and his World Games, the futurist and economic thought of Hazel Henderson, political movements like the Zapatistas, and, more generally, the actions occurring throughout South America, Primitivism, a new Tribalism, and many more contributions, too numerous to mention.
Posted by: Malooga | Dec 5 2005 13:33 utc | 16
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