Full Title: The Efficiency Dilemma
Author(s): D. Owen
Publisher(s): The New Yorker
Publication Date: December 1, 2010
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
The environmentalist Amory Lovins, whose thinking has influenced Chu’s, has referred to the replacement of incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents as “not a free lunch, but a lunch you’re paid to eat,” since a fluorescent bulb will usually save enough electricity to more than offset its higher purchase price. Tantalizingly, much of the technology required to increase efficiency is well understood. The World Economic Forum, in a report called “Towards a More Energy Efficient World,” observed that “the average refrigerator sold in the United States today uses three-quarters less energy than the 1975 average, even though it is 20% larger and costs 60% less”—an improvement that Chu cited in his conversation with me.
But the issue may be less straight-forward than it seems. The thirty-five-year period during which new refrigerators have plunged in electricity use is also a period during which the global market for refrigeration has burgeoned and the world’s total energy consumption and carbon output, including the parts directly attributable to keeping things cold, have climbed. Similarly, the first fuel-economy regulations for U.S. cars—which were enacted in 1975, in response to the Arab oil embargo— were followed not by a steady decline in total U.S. motor-fuel consumption but by a long-term rise, as well as by increases in horsepower, curb weight, vehicle miles travelled (up a hundred per cent since 1980), and car ownership (America has about fifty million more registered vehicles than licensed drivers). A growing group of economists and others have argued that such correlations aren’t coincidental. Instead, they have said, efforts to improveenergy efficiency can more than negate any environmental gains—an idea that was first proposed a hundred and fifty years ago, and which came to be known as the Jevons paradox.