Embracing Energy Conservation as Prices Go Up
Global songfests are all well and good, as are pouty polar bears and sobering docu-alarums, but let's be serious: The reason that Americans may finally embrace energy conservation is because filling up their SUVs now costs $80 and their air-conditioning bills this summer may mean having to pass up that daily double-caramel iced latte. In other words, it's the economics, stupid.
How do we know? Because for decades Europeans have provided a very satisfactory test case. As a matter of policy, European governments have consistently slapped onerous taxes on fuel and electricity and, by gosh, they have had an impact. Even before it was fashionable, hotels on the continent were notorious for regulating hallway lights with especially stingy timers; you have to be a world-class sprinter to get to your door before getting pitched into complete darkness.
Their responses have, over time, become even more creative. For instance, the houses that dot the Turkish hills overlooking the Aegean today are topped with large barrels, which almost obstruct their magnificent views. These unsightly containers store water heated by solar panels and provide a reliable and virtually free source of hot water. Local residents say the entire kit that converts a house to solar hot water heating costs about $1,600, and requires only two hours of sunshine each day.
This entirely sensible approach is only one of the many, many manifestations of Europe's longstanding energy thriftiness, which has taken on new life of late. In fact, based on recent travels, I can report that Europe is now obsessed with global climate change. Any temperature anomaly, such as the recent heat wave experienced in Greece and Turkey, is ascribed — with total conviction — to changes in the earth's natural patterns.
"Global Warming Ravages This Year's Olive Harvest" is a typical headline plucked from the Turkish Daily News. The unusually hot weather in the country is being labeled a natural disaster, a result of global warming, so as to wrest relief from the government.
Close by, the president of Greece recently announced that he would be donating a copy of Vice President Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" to every school in his country. Elsewhere, a British member of the European Union's parliament infuriated his counterparts in Italy and Germany by proposing a ban on all sports cars, including Ferraris and Porsches, because of the inherent wastefulness. He also recommended that car dealers be required to dedicate one-fifth of their showrooms to providing information on fuel economy, according to the Financial Times.
Prince Charles, meanwhile, has been personally going green by converting a royal Jaguar to running on cooking oil and by taking the train more often. In Sweden, the authorities have cleverly begun to convert alcohol confiscated from smugglers into fuel for the country's mass transit system.
Americans are a little late coming to this party, but are slowly joining in. While Europeans were driving Smart cars and Minis in response to punitive taxes on gasoline, Americans were building a fleet of the largest, most gas-guzzling cars imaginable. Our outsize appetite for energy is ongoing and routinely detailed by the International Energy Agency. That organization reports that for 2004, the latest figures available, we in America consumed 343 million BTUs a person; the European average is 146.5 million BTUs an individual. Germany's total was 178 million, while France logged in at 186 million an inhabitant.
While the widespread showing of Mr. Gore's film and publicity about melting glaciers have done a lot to raise consciousness in America, at the end of the day, Americans are responding primarily to economics. Surprise! If the price of energy goes up, people will use less of it.
America has been always been reluctant to artificially raise the price of energy, in part because the powerful oil and auto industries have opposed such a move. It is but one of the disappointments of the Bush administration that it has not tackled this issue more forcefully. Just as it required a Republican administration to enter China, the Bush team, with its long involvement in the oil business, would have been the natural choice to take on energy conservation.
The government's involvement in meeting the challenge of coping with higher energy costs and reducing pollution will, happily, not be essential, unless the price of oil declines, as was the case in the 1980s. A drop in oil prices going forward would almost certainly put the brakes on investment in conservation and in alternate fuels. Should that happen, one hopes the government in power would respond by putting a floor under energy prices.
Meanwhile, American businesses are nothing if not opportunistic, and creative. The efforts of Wal-Mart, General Electric, UPS, and many other companies to improve their carbon footprint and to come up with energy-saving devices will cumulatively take hold.
Certainly, Americans have tuned into the conversation about global warming. How do we know? Starbucks, that beacon of citizenship and caffeine, has another movie launch coming up. (It is only the second time the company has backed a film — the first was "Akeelah and the Bee.") Starbucks has apparently spent untold people-hours trying to come up with a movie that will be family-friendly and grab the nation's attention. So here it is — a documentary about the challenges to a young polar bear and a baby walrus whose habitat is endangered by global warming. It will be narrated by Queen Latifah.
Any minute now, we'll have barrels on our rooftops, too.
