Worldwatch Institute

A Convenient Truth
In 2001, as U.S. Vice President Dick
Cheney was assembling the Bush Administration’s
energy policy proposals, he
described saving energy as a “moral virtue”
not worthy of serious consideration alongside
more robust energy options such as offshore
oil drilling and nuclear power. 1 Cheney’s quick
dismissal of the demand-side approach to
meeting energy needs reflects a widespread
neglect of efficiency by policymakers and
investors since energy prices fell dramatically
in the 1980s.
But as energy prices recently reached alltime
highs, the consensus of expert opinion
has shifted decisively. Reducing the amount of
energy wasted and increasing the amount of
economic output that can be produced with a
given amount of energy is now considered the
most economical way of reducing dependence
on fossil fuels. The monetary savings associated
with boosting energy productivity are
often sufficient to justify the investment even if
the world were not facing a climate crisis.
Given the urgency of the climate problem, that
is indeed a convenient truth.
Energy productivity measures an economy’s
ability to extract useful services from the
energy that is harnessed. From the earliest
stages of the Industrial Revolution, energy productivity
has advanced steadily, a trend that
accelerated dramatically when energy prices
soared in the 1970s. In the United States, the
economy has grown 165 percent since 1973,
while energy use rose just 34 percent, allowing
the nation’s energy productivity to double during
the period. 2 Germany and Japan, starting
with higher productivity levels, have achieved
comparable increases. 3 But even today, well
over half of the energy harnessed worldwide is
converted to waste heat rather than being used
to meet energy needs. 4
This suggests enormous potential to
improve energy productivity in the decades
ahead, and broader trends will boost that
effort. Many technologies are becoming more
and more efficient—from steelmaking to automobiles—and
in
recent decades, the
economies of most
industrial countries
have centered the bulk
of their economic
growth on light
industry and the service
sector, with
energy-intensive
industries such as
smelting metals and
manufacturing petrochemicals
falling as a
share of the total
economy. Even larger
opportunities are
found in developing
nations, where energy
productivity tends to
be lower and much of
the basic infrastructure
is still being built.
However, this potential
will be offset in some countries in the short
term by the fact that they are entering an infrastructure-
and energy-intensive stage of economic
development.
In China, for example, energy growth suddenly
accelerated in 2002—with the bulk of
Smart Car, manufactured
by Daimler AG.
© Chris P. Walsh (Flickr Creative
Commons)
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