The Importance of Conserving Energy and Energy Sources

Since 1973, most of us have heard so much about "the energy crisis" that the phrase has lost all meaning. We have lived through a steady stream of energy price increases, presidential proclamations, severe-weather energy shortages and raging debate on the various energy-supply technologies. Life remains tolerable and changes slowly for most people, and huge numbers of people are skeptical or at least inactive. "Why should I care about energy?" they ask. "What can one person do in the shadow of gigantic energy corporations, impersonal public utilities, a hopelessly uncoordinated government and a populace that doesn’t seem to care?"

There are volumes of information available on what a household, a person, a business, or a legislator can do to reduce personal or national energy consumption. Most of these conservation steps could be implemented immediately or very soon. If anything is lacking, it is a commitment to conservation that goes beyond shortsighted moneysaving reasons to include long-term changes in the way we use energy. In other words, in the long run, why should an individual person care about energy?

Altruism, Energy and Energy Resources Conservation

There are two sorts of reasons why conserving energy and energy sources is so important right now. Those of the first category all relate to a notion of human responsibility toward current and future generations of humankind and to the ecosystem in general. Such reasons certainly reflect a classical Western view of the social contract, and those who don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves can skip this section and go on to the next. Those who skip will not stand alone; there is no clear consensus among scholars as to whether human beings possess any innate or biological altruism. If there is a natural sense of altruism, it is undoubtedly linked to some long-range sense of danger to the species and the Aristotelian instinct of self-preservation. In the absence of definitive data, for us to assert that humans do care about others or to make a pragmatic decision to care is little more than an act of faith. For those of us willing to take this step, the value of energy and energy resources conservation can easily be understood.

There are three major altruistic reasons to conserve energy and energy resources. The first of these is that if we don’t do so, we are likely to destroy the earth’s ecosystem. Though this thesis is not very difficult to imagine or understand, it is a hard thing to prove. In the past decade, however, several reasonable analyses of world environmental futures have emerged, and they show a definite likelihood of environmental collapse sometime in the next hundred years. The most famous of these predictions was made in The Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome in 1974.

The Club’s researchers built an immense computer model of the world economy and let it advance through time along our present course of exponential energy growth. The result shows a prediction of world population peaking in about 2030:

After this time, the crude death rate exceeds the crude birth rate, so the population declines. Food per capita rises steadily throughout the twentieth century . . . but it declines sharply after 2015. Industrial output per capita reaches a maximum value of 375 dollars per person-year in 2015. The index of persistent pollution reaches a peak of 11 times the 1970 level of pollution in the year 2035. The behavior mode exhibited by the reference run is overshoot and decline. Population and capital grow past their sustainable physical limits and then return to a pre-industrial level of development. Growth is halted in this run through the effects of nonrenewable resource depletion [emphasis added].

The Club of Rome has since updated its findings without substantially altering its main conclusion.

With the use of very different methods of prediction, similar conclusions on world collapse have been reached by Willis Harmon’s group at the Stanford Research Institute. Harmon does not rely on complicated computer models such as the Club of Rome’s World 3. Instead he uses rough calculations and nonnumerical cybernetic analyses of social and technical trends. His results show a spectrum of possible world situations in the year 2000 ranging from "Manifest Destiny" to collapse. All of the successful future paths he finds require what he calls a "war on ecological problems." For all practical purposes, this means the implementation of worldwide energy and energy resources conservation and renewable energy technologies.

Often cynics like to argue that the world is too complex a thing to model, even on a computer, and that something can always come along to save us. Yet if our energy consumption keeps increasing, there is nothing that can mitigate the adverse environmental impacts. We can argue all day as to whether the exact facts and figures in these predictions of doom are correct, but the fact is, ecosystems can be destroyed; Lake Erie is dead and supports no life. Anyone who thinks that the same thing can’t happen to the world ecosystems is working under a delusion.

The Roots of World Tension

The second altruistic reason emerges from a realistic assessment of the first. The Club of Rome report shows a future in which food, energy supplies, capital goods and mineral ores grow increasingly scarce. In such a situation, any economist can tell you, international competition for these resources will be fierce and tensions strong. The idea of taking resources by military force will be on the minds of many nations. By that time, nuclear power plants will be spread throughout the world, and it is predicted that more than 35 countries will possess nuclear weapons (as opposed to seven now). Ask yourself what the chances are that a country’s environmental problems might lead to catastrophe without also creating international military repercussions, possibly starting as an internal rebellion among a citizenry tired of its resource hardships, for which it blames the existing government.

All of this is not just idle speculation. In the oil embargo of 1973 concrete plans were considered for the invasion of OPEC countries to secure the oil the U.S. was thought to need. Harper’s magazine (May 1975) featured the article "Seizing Arab Oil: The Case for U.S. Intervention." The cover shows U.S. paratroopers descending on Saudi oil fields, and the article concludes that "assuming fairly extensive but unsystematic sabotage, pre-invasion output levels could be resumed in one to two months so long as certain essential items are sealifted with the first Marine convoys and plenty of skilled manpower is flown in." As fighting rages in Afghanistan and the world’s eyes remain fixed on the supply of Mideastern oil, there is talk like this once again in high political circles. Yet the anti-draft movement is also growing, and although everyone acknowledges that oil would be the reason for a U.S. war in the Middle East, no one seems interested in fighting it. What surer way do we have of reducing these pressures than decreasing our reliance on energy use in general and on oil in particular?

In this perspective, energy and energy resources conservation plays the role of decreasing world energy demand, decreasing the need for both nuclear power (and its attendant problems) and scarce mineral resources. Such a development cuts at the roots of our most fertile source of world tension. Our goal should be to establish a comfortable, stable economic system that conserves as much energy as possible and gets the rest from renewable energy sources such as the sun and wind.

Our Children’s Children

The final altruistic reason to conserve energy and energy resources is this: What kind of world do we want to leave to our children’s children? If we continue to use energy at our present rate, all oil and natural gas will be gone by the year 2040 in everywhere else. If electricity use continues to double every nine years, huge amounts of power will have to come from 500 years’ worth of coal supplies and lots of nuclear power plants -- by this time possibly breeder or fusion plants.

Even with antipollution devices, total air pollution emissions are predicted to triple to 30 million tons per year, bringing with them large increases in air-related sicknesses such as lung cancer. Huge amounts of land and water would be required for these plants -- at present rates, by 2177 every usable patch of land in the country would contain a 1,000-megawatt power plant, according to Malcolm Peterson of the Committee on Environmental Information.

Other but perhaps more serious problems devolve on any future generations that must rely on nuclear power. These include adequate uranium supply (probably necessitating immense uranium strip mines in Tennessee), almost inconceivable reactor and waste-transport accidents, low-level radiation effects from normal plant operations, and the burden of guarding both radioactive waste and outdated but radioactive nuclear plants for thousands of years. On top of all this, all electric power generation produces heat, and too much generation will raise the earth’s temperature, possibly enough to cause partial melting of the polar ice caps and wreak havoc on the world’s ecosphere.

Even our present rate of energy consumption is not sustainable in the long term, so it is a matter of decreasing per-capita energy use as soon as possible. Never again will generations of people use as much energy as we do with so little productivity and so much waste. The longer we wait to begin conservation, the less energy will be available to future generations, and the worse off the environment will be.

Self-Preservation and Self-Interest

We now come to several arguments for energy and energy resources conservation that require no lofty goals or moral analyses. Each one of these reasons benefits the individual over the course of a lifetime, and one need not consider the fact that one is also doing society a big favor.

The most obvious reason in this category boils down to the simple fact that saving energy saves money. This is a common appeal made by private industry and government. Because energy is nonrecyclable and in short supply, it will continue to be one of the most expensive resources around. But it is not difficult or unusual to save 20 or 40 per cent of one’s heating and cooling bill with very little effort. This can be a very sizable amount of money, and it doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of money savings available to the low-energy household.

In connection with saving money, it is appropriate to mention a phenomenon called the "respending effect." Presumably if a person saves a bit of money by reducing energy costs, he or she will either spend the money on something else or put it in the bank. If it is spent on something that uses up as much or more energy per dollar as the original reduction, nothing has been gained in the energy budget at large (though this person may now own a more desirable mix of goods and services than before). Only respending money on an activity less energy-intensive than the one reduced will result in a net energy saving for the economy. Those who are truly serious about living the low-energy life divert their spending from consumer activities to direct investment in the tools they require to change and then maintain their life style: land, bicycles, pressure cookers, solar and windpower equipment, a garden, bus rides, etc.

A more immediate gratification available to a community of energy conservers is better health and a more pleasant local environment. Many of the harmful and unpleasant effects of both nuclear and coal-fired power plants are temporary and can show signs of improvement after only a few years if the plants are shut down. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has reported that in the ten years since it implemented water pollution guidelines for Lake Michigan, the quality of lake water has actually improved. Radiologist Leonard Sternglass cites a study of a research reactor located about 100 yards from where I work in Urbana, Illinois. According to Sternglass, when this reactor went into operation, infant mortality in the U.S. increased 300 per cent and deaths from congenital malformation increased sixfold. When the reactor was shut down (temporarily), both rates dropped to about double the original level. During this same period in a more distant Illinois county, both of these death rates declined steadily.

In 1972 the city of Uppsala, Sweden, revamped its central city, eliminating automobiles and improving bus, bicycle and pedestrian routes. Aside from the resultant energy savings, the city experienced a decrease in dust and carbon monoxide, a factor-of-two reduction in noise levels, a 46 per cent lower traffic-accident risk, and even faster average travel times since buses ran more frequently.