When it comes to sustainable energy, America really IS the land of opportunity

There is a sad fact that we have to face....the US is a very wasteful country. Our politicians like to talk about all the waste in our federal government, but truth be told, that pales in comparison to the amount of food, energy, water, material that we waste on a day-in and day-out basis. This attitude of waste grows logically out of two different characteristics of our early country: First, the amount of available space that existed in North America during the 17th through 19th centuries, and second, the fact that our country developed all of its lasting infrastructure after the Industrial Revolution and during an era of nearly-free energy resources. Efficiency was not an issue...progress, prosperity, and profit ruled the day.

Now that we are dealing with the repercussions of that, one might think that we have to completely change our infrastructure to move to a more sustainable future...

But they would be wrong.

Precisely because we have been so wasteful, we have an extraordinary opportunity to make improvements...potentially even more so than even Europe (where infrastructure naturally supports sustainable action more effectively) or China and India (where they are starting with mostly a clean slate and do not have the burden of sunk investment. In order to move to a more sustainable economy, but without the financial shock that comes from contraction, we need to make three major shifts:

1.  Eliminate fossil fuels from our mix of electricity generation.
2.  Shift fossil-fuel burning as a source of heating energy from our buildings.
3.  Reduce vehicle milage per unit of GDP and shift remaining to cleanly generated electricity.

If we were starting from scratch, we would need to develop a large grid infrastructure to handle the new loads shifting from fossil resources for buildings and vehicles. Because we are so wasteful, we can build this capacity much more cost effectively through efficiency in our existing buildings and systems. Meanwhile, as we close coal, nuclear, and natural gas electricity-generating plants (in that order) and add new renewables, we can, again, use efficiency to reduce the pain associated with dropping new generation.

This also opens up great opportunities for innovation. New technologies and design strategies make it so that as we renovate or replace buildings in existing, developed cities, we can introduce distributed generation assets that are easier to install. With advances in communication, grid operators can have an even better handle on these distributed resources than they traditionally had on large utility-scale generation. We are learning that the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy resources can happen more swiftly and with less disruption than previously thought.

Many environmentalists treat our culture of inefficiency as a pox that we should try to wipe out by degrading all of us for years of efficiency sins. Instead of that negative view, we should focus on the opportunity...we can make great strides, very quickly, and with no disruption to quality of life. In fact, if we do it well, we can increase quality of life dramatically...across the whole spectrum of Americans...while we grow more and more efficient. Americans have shown, as Churchill said, that we will do the right thing once all other options are exhausted.

We are just starting to do the right thing...and we will all be the better for it.

www.folkartfromtheharbor.com