Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

Chapter Fourteen: Rethinking the Energy System 229and New England Regional Commission helped to expand and improvesustainable wood use.• The region’s eleven thousand solar systems in 1980 are expected to trebleby 1985. Hydroelectric capacity should increase thirty percent and energyrecovery from municipal solid waste may increase by up to tenfold.Finally, New Englanders made their greatest progress in harnessing theirmost abundant energy resource—correctable inefficiencies. During the two-yearperiod, by low-cost/no-cost efficiency improvements and by a slight shifttoward less energy-intensive industries, they saved energy equivalent to atwelve percent increase in their total supply. That rate of saving, six percent peryear, was nearly twice the national average, and was fourteen times as importantas New England’s shift from nonrenewable to renewable sources. Yet itrelied on even smaller technologies—chiefly weatherstripping and insulation.Is this a real turning point?From the vantage point of the five years or so in which the transformationillustrated by the New England example has been well underway, it may seemthat the results are meager. But so it must have seemed in 1900 when therewere only five to eight thousand cars on U.S. roads, or even in 1908 whenthere were one hundred ninety-four thousand. Cars became more noticeablein 1911 when the six hundred thousand on the roads caused Standard Oil tosell more gasoline than kerosene for the first time. Two years later there werea million cars; seventeen years after that, in 1930, twenty-three million; today,over a hundred million. In the first decade after World War I, the automobilebecame sufficiently widespread to transform at first the perceptions of mobilityand later, in consequence, the settlement patterns and the whole industrialinfrastructure of American society. Yet the car may not at first have seemed soportentous: indeed, on the assumption (common in the early twentieth century)that car drivers would have to pay for their highways just as railroads hadhad to pay for their roadbeds, the odds seemed stacked against the commercialsuccess of the car. Until the Model A and Model T brought cars to everytown, few observers expected rapid success. Thus profound changes in thetechnostructure of America can creep up on us unawares. Small energy technologies—forefficient use and renewable supply—are likely to repeat the story.Nobody can say for sure whether they will ultimately work such a transformation.But they certainly have the technical, economic, and social potentialto do so. As Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment concluded,