Facing Energy, Water & Climate Crises, Conservation is Still Too Often an Unmentionable "C" Word
Whether the challenge is energy, mobility or water, addiction to the status quo has long cut against doing something incredibly effective at community scale - using less.
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First posted June 6, 2022, updated March 8, 2023
Too much of the clean-energy and climate conversation focuses on deploying the new and the cool. I say that even though I'm a big fan of both, and - like most journalists - hyper focus on the new.
I quickly signed up on the Ford F-150 Lightning wait list. The first thing I'm doing when we settle into our new old home in Maine next week is setting up meetings with energy contractors to see if the latest heat pumps can cut our electric and propane bills (yes, and CO₂ emissions).
[Update - The Lightning is way too much truck, and way too expensive. But our dirt road - alternating between mousse and a frozen Grand Canyon scale model - was impassable in our Prius and my dad’s 23-year-old Sienna. In the space of 72 hours, we bought a 2020 RAV4 hybrid (no plug-ins available or affordable) and, yes, a 2020 Ford Ranger pickup. Reality bites. We addded a heap of insulation and added heat pumps (about $10,000 after a hefty rebate). More soon in a separate post.]
But not enough attention is focused on something as old as Amory Lovins's "negawatts" metric - the energy you don't use, as with the water you don't waste, the trip you don't take.
In a way, resource conservation is like disaster-risk reduction; there's no headline in an avoided kilowatt-hour just as it's hard to write a news story about a flood that passed without killing anyone because people and property were prepared. I ran a great Sustain What webcast on making avoided disaster the story. Not easy!
With the energy jolt from Putin’s war, inflation and climate change, there’s never been a better time to amplify old-fashioned personal steps to substantial impact in the aggregate. It’s mostly boringly obvious:
Lowering the thermostat at home. Choosing to live in a walkable or bike-safe community. Telecommuting. Shifting from watering and cutting lawns to designing landscapes for the climates they exist in.
But ever since President Jimmy Carter's 1977 sweater-and-fireplace speech on the energy crisis and inflation, talk of using less has seemed decidedly impolitic. It's almost as if conservation is still an unmentionable "c" word.
I hope you and I can help change that dynamic.
Read on for where we're at these days with conservation, even with Europe in an energy crisis, America's driving miles back up over the pre-pandemic peak and Utah's not-so-Great Salt Lake shriveling away.
Fight Putin at the thermostat
As I've written, advocates for both clean-energy technology and natural gas as solutions to Europe’s real-time energy emergency facing Putin’s war have been in sustained competition for the spotlight. Gas fans keep pushing visions of wartime flotillas of liquefied natural gas tankers (while the gas industry still resists rules cutting planet-heating gas leaks). Bill McKibben lobbied for a heat-pumps-for-peace vision for electrifying homes currently heated by Russian gas.
President Joe Biden gave a home-front boost Monday [June 6, 2022] by invoking the Defense Production Act and undertaking related tariff relief to boost solar energy deployment, heat pump production and related jobs. (He had already taken steps to boost gas and oil production, of course.)
But heat-pump technology is still costly to install, works best on a deeply energy-retrofitted structure (and retrofitting also takes time and money, as you can see here) and deployment of these heating and cooling systems and other components of any "Electrify Everything" campaign is badly constrained by a deepening workforce gap from New York City to Ohio and beyond.
Europe, facing a true energy emergency, has announced an aggressive set of actions to cut its use of Russian oil and gas. But almost all of the steps will take time - except for conservation.
The value of simple steps, if widely adopted, came through with crystalline clarity in an International Energy Agency analysis I touched on in a recent post. As I wrote, a recent comprehensive Bloomberg story on Europe's crash effort to wean itself off Russian fuel concluded that old-fashioned steps like European homeowners lowering thermostats a degree or two would have many times greater impact on gas use than a mass installation of heat pumps even if the skilled workforce were there to both do the boiler-to-pump swap and also the full-house insulation installation that's required to make such heating systems work effectively.
But will they do it? We'll see.
[UPDATE, March 8, 2023: Europe did far better at dealing with its gas shortage than many anticipated when this column was written in 2022, although a mild winter helped, too. And the jolt is accelerating renewable energy uptake, although Germany is still planning to shut down its last operating power plants starting in April.]
Resisting the lure of the road
On the roads, much coverage of the need for a clean-transportation revolution have similarly focused on flash - sustaining America's addiction to mobility through electrification of cars, trucks and the rest to speed the shift from oil.
None of this is surprising given the media focus on the new, and the powerful human focus on shiny stuff, the allure of energy abundance, and the comfort of the status quo - including driving. While any impact of the current gas price spike on driving habits is yet to be assessed, the latest Federal Highway Administration data show little lasting impact from the pandemic.
Federal Highway Administration data on vehicle distance traveled
With cars, commentators and reporters (sure, count me in), fixate on the latest vehicles. There've been hints of concern, as when the clean-energy climate-hawk writer David Roberts posted a Volts review of his week driving a loaner electric Mustang Mach-E.
Roberts loved every minute, but then added a big "However!" He explains:
As I was driving home, hands blissfully warm, thinking I might take the long way so I could drive more, I started feeling some reservations. I started thinking about what it would mean for EVs to become dominant, the default choice, with most people driving them.
For one thing, they make driving much more fun, even for someone like me who has a deep-seated antipathy toward cars and has never enjoyed driving. All the electric gizmos and screens and features, combined with the unbelievable torque and acceleration, make driving feel like a game in which you’ve just leveled up.
It's difficult to believe that if driving is more fun … people won't do it more. And electric or not, less driving is better.
It'll take awhile before we know what a massive switch to EVs will do for driving habits. Despite recent growth, EV models being bought these days are at the top of the market, with little evidence of an "EV for the rest of us" emerging as a dominant part of the American fleet. (Read Shannon Osaka's Grist story on the upward shift in the purchase prices of electric cars.)
In the meantime, I endorse the points made by Brian L. Kahn in this Protocol story - "The best EV policies are ones that keep them off the road." Please read it and return.
And I love the conservation focus in this tweet from Alan J. Hershkowitz, a longtime senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council now focused on sports and sustainability:
Never let a water crisis spoil a fine lawn
A bay in the Great Salt Lake is becoming a salt flat. (NASA)
Resistance to conservation spills over into people's relationship with water.
Chris Flavelle, one of the best journalists on the climate adaptation beat, has a new piece in The New York Times showing how Utahans' wasteful water habits are poised to kick back in a deadly way. The shriveling Great Salt Lake - deprived of ever more water by generations of development and demand - could soon become a toxic dustbowl like Owens Lake in California, sucked dry by Los Angelenos decades ago.
So what is the city named for the lake doing about this?
Read on, but tighten your head vice:
Of major U.S. cities, Salt Lake has among the lowest per-gallon water rates, according to a 2017 federal report. It also consumes more water for residential use than other desert cities — 96 gallons per person per day last year, compared with 78 in Tucson and 77 in Los Angeles.…
In the suburb of Bluffdale, when Elie El kessrwany stopped watering his lawn in response to the drought, his homeowners’ association threatened to fine him. "I was trying to do the right thing for my community," he said…
Robert Spendlove, a Republican state representative, introduced a bill this year that would have blocked communities from requiring homeowners to maintain lawns. He said local governments lobbied against the bill, which failed.
In the state legislative session that ended in March, lawmakers approved other measures that start to address the crisis.... But lawmakers rejected proposals that would have had an immediate impact, such as requiring water-efficient sinks and showers in new homes or increasing the price of water.
Salt Lake City government agencies have been using social media to nudge residents to embrace brownness, including a tweet last year with this message:
"Is your lawn showing its brown? Be proud! Share a photo of your conservation-minded lawn..."
But it's pretty clear stronger measures will be needed. Ponder the resistance to reality there and compare the aversion to conservation to the energy issues above.
There's a deeper human trait here.
Salt Lake City lawns from above in 2020 (by Leijurv, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International)
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