Simple Prosperity

by David Wann

  “Why didn’t we see this coming?” Margo comments as they sit down. “Why didn’t we insist on more efficient vehicles and appliances back in the seventies? … New sources of energy and new ways to make chemicals from plants and waste?”

  “Well, at least we’re learning to use renewable energy,” says Eric. “Did you know that wind energy now supplies electricity for seventy-five million of the world’s households? That’s about one-thirtieth of the electricity we need, and growing fast …”

  They both want to feel secure and upbeat about the future, but instead they feel a little overwhelmed by the lifestyle changes that face them. Since 2006, the cost of gasoline has risen 300 percent, and the price of natural gas has increased sixfold as Canadian supplies became less dependable. Steadily expanding demand for large homes, hot tubs, computers, HDTVs, and an infinite fleet of must-have appliances has been matched by a persistent thirst for fuel. Record-setting weather extremes haven’t helped, either. While there are now many models of hybrids and flexible fuel vehicles on the market, most of America’s 230 million vehicles are still gas guzzlers, and it takes ten or fifteen years to replace that many vehicles. In 2012, Americans drive 25 trillion miles a year (the equivalent of a billion times around the earth), and some households are paying $200 or more a week just for gasoline. Eric and Margo’s household, which accounts for 31,000 of those miles, is one of them.

  The typical front lawn is not quite as shamrock-green as it used to be, as the price of water continues to rise, and Eric’s and Margo’s big backyard is becoming an expensive luxury. Last year they spent more than $700 to water, fertilize, and mow it, and they are now considering taking some of the lawn out and planting a few fruit trees in one corner of the yard, and a bed of strawberries in the other. Like the rest of us, they’re feeling the pinch of rising food prices, and they’re reading up on techniques like “biointensive” gardening that supplies cartloads of food from small, well-tended spaces. Says Eric, “I didn’t realize there were so many hidden costs in things like packaging and processed food.” With all the recent media exposure, he’s learned that nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas, that conventional pesticides are made from oil, and that producing a single hamburger patty uses enough energy to drive 20 miles. The water expended to produce that burger could supply half a year’s worth of hot showers.

  “Instead of Wheaties or Heart Smart, we may as well call cereal Petro Flakes,” jokes Eric, “because the grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline to manufacture.” As you can see, Eric is beginning to dimly understand how much energy is contained in standard, energy-hungry products such as aluminum, plastic, cement, computers, drinking water, and cars. For example, that the manufacture of an average desktop computer uses more than ten times its weight in fossil fuels and materials.

  Even energy itself “costs” more energy the deeper and more remotely we drill and mine. The oil industry once produced about hundred barrels of oil for each barrel of oil spent to bring the oil to market, but in today’s economy each barrel returns less than ten. Many people are reassured because of the abundance of coal, biomass, tar sands, and hydrogen, overlooking the fact that it takes a lot of energy to convert these materials into transportation fuel.

  These days, Eric and Margo hear unfamiliar words like benzene, anhydrous ammonia, and polyvinyl chloride more than they really want to. These are all petrochemicals used to produce such familiar products as plastic, shirts, cleaners, adhesives, surgical gloves, safety glass, watchbands, building insulation, electrical insulation, packaging, lubrication, and pipes for plumbing. And every day the couple hears news stories about energy supply glitches that shut down factories, cause airline delays, or cause power outages in hospitals. “When a backup generator failed in a Saint Louis hospital,” writes a New York Times reporter, “donor organs were lost, operations were terminated or completed under flashlights. Temperatures in the hospital hovered near a hundred degrees …”

  The Colorado couple is learning that a scarcity of resources means more than rising prices. When there isn’t enough energy to go around, choices need to be made about who will get the energy—commuters, farmers, food processors, residents of trophy homes, surgeons, snow plowers, or vacationers? Answer: whoever pays the highest price. They’re also realizing how energy-hungry their own habits are. For example, many of their friends live across the city, and it costs 2 gallons of gas to go see them. Keeping up with the latest media gadgets requires “buying” all the energy that goes into the manufacture, distribution and packaging of each new toy. Every long-distance vacation they take is filled with energy, and so are the clothes, furniture, and appliances their current lifestyle seems to require.

  Peak Civilization

  Earth scientists can’t definitively explain where all the oil we’ve been consuming came from, but their best guess is that most was formed when the algae and plankton that flourished in warm, ancient seas settled in thick deposits on ocean floors, some of which later became dry land. We have a better handle on where it ended up: in the fuels whose emissions are toxic in any form; and in such products as crayons, ink, bubble gum, dishwashing liquids, deodorant, eyeglasses, tires, ammonia, plastic bags, allergy pills, asphalt, shirts, and heart valves. In today’s market, it’s just the opposite: three-fourths of our consumer goods are made from fossil fuels. In contrast, as recently as 1950, three-fourths of all the consumer goods we used were made from natural materials, such as wood, rubber, and cotton.

  An eye-opening article on the Energy Bulletin Web site, called “The Long Fingers of Petroleum,” pictures a Boston lawyer standing in his driveway, next to his Porsche 911 Turbo. As each petroleum-related aspect of his life is considered, we imagine a world without oil, and remove the item from the scene:

  John is wearing a nice suit and tie. Unfortunately, the suit is wool and polyester, the buttons are plastic as well as the zipper in the pants. Remove 25% of the material from his suit, all elastic and plastic stays, the buttons and the zipper. Why? Polyester, dacron, rayon, orlon—are all petroleum-based, human-made fibers. All plastic is petroleum based, as is elastic. Better get rid of the waistband on his under shorts too while we are at it. Abruptly, our friend John is rather chilly, as what is left of his suit, pants, shirt and undershorts have fallen around his ankles.1

  John’s glasses have polycarbonate lenses, and the frames are also plastic. He stands bewildered, as credit cards, shoe heels, watchband, driver’s license, and the bills in his wallet (printed with petroleum-based ink) all disappear. Then he realizes that his car is useless, without gasoline; its transmission fluid, gear oil, brake fluid, grease, automotive paint, tires, steering wheel, and all the plastic-insulated wires likewise disappear. Now, naked, broke, partially blind, and extremely embarrassed, he turns to go inside to see what’s left of his house!

  John’s predicament helps us realize what “peak oil” really means: that the emperor has no clothes. Along with peak oil, we may soon hear phrases like “peak grain production” and “peak water consumption,” because we are reaching supply limits for these basic resources as well. A recent U.S. Department of Agriculture bulletin announced, “World grain supplies are expected to be much tighter in 2006/07, boosting global grain prices. Rising consumption is expected to outstrip production for the second straight year, which would push world grain ending stocks to their lowest levels in more than 25 years.” Put simply, there are too many mouths to feed, and too many of those mouths are eating energy-intensive food (grain-fed meat, heavily packaged, processed, and transported). Grain-based ethanol will also be in the competition. Especially troubling is China’s rising appetite for grain. As that country’s standard of living continues to rise, their diet contains a larger percentage of grain-fed, energy-intensive livestock products such as pork, poultry, eggs, beef, and milk.
The recent opening of a handful of drive-through McDonald’s restaurants in China (among eight hundred mostly sit-down locations, total) is significant; the Chinese automobile market is expanding as fast as is its taste for Big Macs.

  The Carbon Conundrum

  Says Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, “No one seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won’t involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium.” He argues that human reactions are often based on morals and emotions, not facts. “When people feel insulted or disgusted, they generally do something about it, such as whacking each other over the head, or voting … If climate change were caused by a brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming would be this nation’s top priority … Or if it were caused by gay sex, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets.”2

  No, it isn’t a brutal dictator that causes global warming, it’s Pop-Tarts, chilly movie theaters on hot days, and Hummers. In a frenzy of consumption, we’ve mined geologically massive quantities of carbon from below the ground and redistributed it above the ground. In the planet’s atmosphere, it creates a translucent blanket that holds heat in (another example of putting something in the wrong place). It’s that simple. The maddening, slow motion debate over the human role in global warming continues, but really, it doesn’t matter whose “fault” it is. The Earth is heating up, in direct proportion to the blanket of carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases building up in the atmosphere—just as Nobel Prize-winning scientist Svante Arhenius predicted back in 1896. Without further “fiddling,” we need to control the emissions that are in our power—literally—to control.

  Anyone who’s ever climbed into a sweltering car on a hot summer day has experienced the greenhouse effect that causes global warming. The rolled-up car windows are the greenhouse gases, and the broiling person—or panting, dehydrated dog—is the Earth. Those who insist this effect could never occur on a planetary scale need only view photographs of cloud-covered Venus, where the temperature today will be about 850 degrees Fahrenheit. Or else read a detailed Earth science textbook that relates the history of anaerobic bacteria. Many eons ago, these oxygen-hating microbes were the planet’s headliner species, and when they began to run out of hydrogen—an essential element for building cellular structure—they improvised a way to tear apart water molecules to get it. They made use of the hydrogen but brainlessly dumped massive quantities of oxygen into the biosphere. Oops. Their minute but ubiquitous actions began to render the Earth’s surface unfit for their own habitation, except in stinky (to us), oxygen-starved places like swamp slimes. Then evolution’s greatest innovation, photosynthesis, made matters even worse for the anaerobes, since plants and photosynthesizing microbes take up carbon dioxide but “exhale” oxygen.

  The lesson is this: When you mess with the bio-geological cycles of elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, Mother Nature comes unglued. So, to avoid further wrath, let’s quickly absorb the carbon back out of the atmosphere by farming organically (which sequesters carbon dioxide in the soil and crops), by planting and maintaining billions of CO2-utilizing trees, by reducing the planetary herd of livestock (now about fifteen to twenty billion methane-emitting animals), and by reducing the amount of greenhouse gases our technologies and activities emit. As I write this, more than three hundred U.S. cities have declared their intent to operate under the agreements of the Kyoto Protocol. Why can’t individuals accept a similar challenge? What steps can the above-average American take to cut his or her resource use (and emissions) roughly in half, without reducing quality of life? Can YOU accept the challenge of cutting your resource use in half in the next ten years?

  By generating energy at or close to the point of use, we can reduce the loss of energy in transmission lines, and also meet some of our own energy needs. Credit: Eric Wahl

  Ten Ways to Cut Individual Energy Consumption in Half

  • Tune up your house (see suggestions that follow).

  • Downsize your house and car—and your expenses.

  • Eat one-third less meat.

  • Use carbohydrate fuel (food) rather than fossil fuels, by being more active.

  • Live in a neighborhood that requires less driving.

  • Use highly efficient public transportation.

  • Reduce the amount of energy-intensive packaging you use.

  • Replace part of your lawn with something you can eat.

  • Buy durable, high-quality products and learn how to maintain them.

  • Learn to enjoy forms of entertainment other than fuel-hungry, mind-numbing media.

  Energy use in the United States is roughly divided into three sectors: industrial, residential/commercial, and transportation. The products, infrastructure, and services Americans consume add up to the highest per capita use of energy in the world. American consumers are directly responsible for half the energy and materials used in this country’s economy, largely in the residential and transportation sectors. Designers, architects, engineers, and politicians directly affect much of the rest because the use of land, the design/operation of technology, and the implementation of policies are all major factors in how much energy we use.

  Energy consumption per capita is calculated by dividing the total amount of energy consumed in a country by that country’s population. We each have a share in the relative efficiency of the whole economy, and our informed participation in policy making can and must improve that overall efficiency (For example, we can vote for transportation choices like light rail and high speed rail that are more efficient than cars). An important reason why Europeans consume less energy per person than Americans is that EU populations are denser, their homes and yards are smaller, and public transportation is readily available, all of which result in greater efficiencies. The average car in the United States travels 10 percent farther per year than a British car and 50 percent more than a German car.3 In addition, Europeans are more likely to value public amenities. In Denmark, for example, where bike and rail infrastructure is well used, 30 percent of all households don’t even own a car. West Europeans in general use public transit for 10 percent of all urban trips—and Canadians for 7 percent—whereas, in the U.S., transit use is only 2 percent.

  Per capita consumption by selected countries

  (million BTU)

  Source: U.S. Energy Information Agency (2005)

  Personal consumption is less of an obsession in Europe, where more time is spent on energy-neutral activities such as lively conversation, reading, gourmet cooking, civic celebrations, and direct participation in sports. Europeans have a stronger environmental ethic; there’s less food waste and much higher recycling rates. Manufacturers are more conscious of designing regional systems that conserve resources. It simply takes less energy and fewer materials to live a good life in many parts of Europe.

  Americans are at a disadvantage in several critical ways concerning personal consumption. We’ve become accustomed to the luxury of extra-large everything; convenience, comfort, and lack of responsibility are perceived necessities; we’ve lost many of our maintenance and craft skills; we don’t know how to entertain ourselves; and we’ve built a car-and-suburb culture that can’t just be quickly rearranged. (So much energy and effort has been sunk into roads, energy grids, building materials, and construction that it will take at least a generation to reshape it.) To symbolically comply as individuals with the Kyoto Protocol and reduce personal consumption to half our current levels, we’ll have to try a bit harder than EU citizens, but why not make it an “energy Olympics” that can spin off millions of jobs and ultimately save trillions of dollars? Are we Americans so out of shape that we can’t compete?

  Prioritized, Street-Smart Remedies for Auto-Dependency

  1. Stay out of your car. Live where you can meet more needs on foot and by sharing rides. The greenest vehicle of al
l is the one that doesn’t get driven much. Even an SUV is far greener when it has multiple riders. When you do drive, combine errands. Shop on the Internet when it makes sense; telecommute or consider becoming self-employed. Investigate home delivery of groceries from the whole foods store. Start a food co-op. Promote teleconferencing and high-speed rail. Challenge yourself to try car-free vacations!

  2. Purchase a high-efficiency hybrid or a conventional high-performer like Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, Saturn Ion, or Chevy Cobalt.

  3. If buying a new car isn’t in the budget, buy a used, highly efficient vehicle. Consider retrofitting your car to a natural gas-fueled or electricity-powered car. Visit the offices of your political representatives with a small group of friends and neighbors to advocate much higher fuel efficiency standards: 44 mpg for cars, 35 mpg for trucks.

  4. Get back on the old (or new) bike: Cycling is the most efficient form of transportation yet invented. In Davis, California, 80 percent of the streets have bike lanes, and 20 to 25 percent of all local trips are by bike. Imagine a world designed for bicycles, with safe bike lanes, bikes with trailers, electric bikes, and folding bikes that are easy to take on a bus or train. In the past twenty years, Germany has tripled the length of its nationwide bikeways, and the Netherlands has doubled its network. All over the Netherlands, parking for bicycles far exceeds spaces for cars at railway stations as a result of customer demand.