I don't even think you need "a lot of sacrifice" to stop emitting so much carbon. The EPA estimates that energy efficiency could cut emissions by up to 20%.
The trick is that most energy inefficient buildings and appliances are used by poor people who can't afford to upgrade or maintain to the latest and greatest standards, and massive funding for poor people is a giant lightning rod at least in the US. I know that in a previous house my utility was literally paying me to replace my fridge and air conditioner to reduce peak power demand, but I have no idea how widespread such programs are.
The problem with efficiency is that it's usually not tied to reduction. We need people to have more efficient buildings and to heat and cool them less. We need LED lighting with no more lighting. So, https://www.treehugger.com/energy-efficiency/are-we-using-le...
Put simply: INDUCED DEMAND
Just like roads or computer hardware (every improvement in hardware can get eaten up by people no longer caring about optimizing software efficiency or modest file sizes: nobody needs their cute family videos to be 4k HD etc)… we can easily use up ALL the gains if we are let to just do that.
We use more efficient building technology to support homes being larger and more luxurious than we need. Defeats the whole purpose.
We need to internalize the costs. Heavy taxes on the source of pollution rather than subsidizing the clean-up or the use.
If energy gets MUCH MUCH more expensive, people WILL upgrade to efficient tech and keep minimizing their use of it.
We can’t conserve our way out of this. We have to electrify everything we can, and completely decarbonize our electric grid. To do that, we need to make clean electricity cheaper than fossil electricity, and just as reliable. Spending our focus on trying to convince people to stop consuming energy is a bit counterproductive. Your carbon footprint is almost certainly massive even if you personally use zero electricity, because the supply chain that keeps you alive is extremely carbon intensive. If you run your numbers, I think you’ll find that cars and AC are relatively minor contributors. Heating is much larger for most than either of those, as an example.
Appliances use a significant amount of resources. It’s a bit tricky to attribute gains to standards versus general technological progress and consumers being more aware of issues like climate change but the amount of energy saved by increased efficiency in appliances is significant.
1. The Jevons paradox. Increased efficiency, by itself increases utilisation of a resource. If you want to reduce consumption, you need to INCREASE costs. In the context of fossil fuels, this means carbon and other taxes, generally.
2. Efficiency gains are typically overestimated and underrealised. More generally, more efficient systems tend to require tighter integration and coordination.
3. Much efficiency within the US has to do with basic infrastructure and land use. Housing, commercial, and industrial building design. Land use, more than anything else, which drives transportation patterns. Appliance design, education, and more.
4. Le Chatlier's Principle probably also applies (and the Jevons Paradox may well be a special case / instance of this). Changes to a system in one direction tend to lead to compensatory response in the opposite.
5. Many efficiency technologies or adaptations are not themselves highly lucrative, or have greater costs than the apparent economic benefits.
On that last:
Proper tyre inflation and regular tune-ups. The first ... simply has to be done regularly. Tune-ups are pricy relative to energy savings.
Replacing incandescent lights with LED (Do this!!!). Start with high-use fixtures.
Proper insulation (easy) and weatherproofing (harder) of homes and building. Increasing ceiling insulation makes a tremendous difference. Blocking and stopping drafts and other leackages is much more intensive, and is often hampered by poor initial construction and standards.
Wrapping water and HVAC pipes and conduits. Thermal loss within the structure from water and space heating/cooling is another easy win.
Understanding your home's energy-use cycles and dependencies. In cold-weather climates, thermal stratification and hot/cold zones within the structure often lead to overheating (or cooling). Increasing insulation efficiency may exacerbate this as blower fans run for shorter periods of time, and hence mix interior air less completely. Counterintuitively, having high-efficiency, low-speed fans within rooms to mix floor and ceiling air, or running central blowers for longer periods of time, even when heating or cooling aren't being applied, may significantly increase overall comfort.
The amount of energy wasted to do this has mitigated what thousands of households have tried to save to avert climate change. Sad. No wonder there is never any progress on climate change and greenhouse gas reductions.
This assumes that higher efficiency leads to lower total consumption of energy, the data says otherwise. [1]
It is interesting that "saving energy" has been established as a dogma that does not even get questioned. I guess the propaganda by big energy monopolists about "carbon footprint" was very successful.
Currently nearly the whole world is running a economic system that is based on economic growth and leads to maximizing resource consumption. Sure using resources efficiently does increase the value society can gain from them but not total consumption. If you stop Bitcoin, people will find other means to use the excess energy.
The reasonable way to solve this is to make energy PRODUCTION stop using fossil fuels anymore. Simple as that. That is why we need to keep talking about our carbon footprints so we don't take any action that might go against the interest of certain corporations.
[1]
> The data and
analyses presented here show that historically, over long time periods, improvements in
efficiency have not succeeded in outpacing increases in the quantity of goods and services
provided.
No, alternatively we radically change how we produce energy, how we transport goods and people and how we heat homes. Don't make it sound easy. Reducing consumption only buys time. We need an absolutely massive effort.
The main action advocated by the author here is to increase efficiency (in insulation, appliances, food production, transportation) as a means to curb CO2 emissions and slow climate change - all very important. Lately I've been reading Saul Griffith's book "Electrify" which proposes a different tack - "simply" electrify all energy usage and let people maintain their current lifestyles exactly. Interestingly, doing so would reduce total US energy consumption[0] to about half its current levels while still allowing big trucks and air conditioning and fun energy-intensive things. A lot of that energy reduction comes from a) the higher intrinsic efficiencies of electrical machines and generation compared to heat engines and b) no longer needing energy to run fossil fuel exploration, extraction, and refining processes.
Griffith is also careful to note that climate solutions are "yes ands", so we should increase efficiencies as much as we can in addition to electrifying as much as we can (and also pursuing ambitious strategies like fusion and CCS). Definitely make a great case of rolling out existing solutions like solar and wind in a big way to bring down carbon emissions really quickly.
[0] - the book focuses only on the US, but results could be similar in countries with similar economies.
Energy efficiency technology has been an unsung hero for decades now. It's probably done more to mitigate carbon emissions than any other effort to date.
It just boils down to energy/capita. While there have been some efficiency gains on the consumer usage side, the big cuts in quality come from the production side. Our lifestyles need to worsen to stop climate warming...
Probably a bit, but there is only so much juice to be squeezed out of the efficiency stone and it's hard to squeeze. It takes time and money and wherever the math penciled out comfortably it already happened. If drops in energy consumption happen quickly, deeply, or on a budget then it's probably demand destruction, not efficiency gain.
Energy efficiency is a bad substitute for clean energy. We desperately need vast amounts of clean, emission free energy, to power electric vehicles, trains and tractors, the infrastructure used in their manufacture, the economy as a whole and the quality of life of the other 5 billion who lack internet.
The energy that we stand to save on the web, in the best case, is no more that the equivalent of a few points of GDP growth for some impoverished nation. It's less than negligible, it's net negative, because you are wasting the political and human energy optimizing irrelevant things and thinking you've made a difference.
The trick is that most energy inefficient buildings and appliances are used by poor people who can't afford to upgrade or maintain to the latest and greatest standards, and massive funding for poor people is a giant lightning rod at least in the US. I know that in a previous house my utility was literally paying me to replace my fridge and air conditioner to reduce peak power demand, but I have no idea how widespread such programs are.
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