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

236National Energy Securityefficiency of providing the energy service—that is, by wringing more work outof the energy so that the same service is provided, with unchanged reliabilityand convenience, in a more clever way that uses less energy.This is not at all what some people mean by “energy conservation”—drivingless, being hotter in the summer and colder in the winter, and shuttingdown the factories. On the contrary, efficient energy use is a way of driving asmuch or more, being more comfortable, running the factories at higher capacity,and yet using less energy and money. Thus it is not true that the less energywe use, the worse off we are. On the contrary, how much energy we use is—up to a point—a measure not of our affluence but of our carelessness or stupidity,our failure to operate our society with an elegant economy of means.The optimum is rather to use the amount (and the type and source) of energywhich will provide each desired energy service in the cheapest way, balancing thecost of buying more efficiency against the cost of buying more energy instead.Many energy preparedness planners do not consider energy efficiency asan option. Because they think it is such a slow, gradual process that it cannothelp in an emergency, they ignore its ability to prevent an emergency. Focusingon what can be done immediately during a shortage, they restrict their choicesto privation and belt-tightening—“saving” energy by simply doing withoutboth the energy and the services it provides. Because of this traditionally narrowview, emergency energy planning concentrates on ways to allocate scarcesupplies during an emergency so that critical, high-priority needs can be metat the expense of all other needs. Furthermore, shortages are often shared byrationing supplies to a fixed fraction of what they were before the shortage—giving everyone an incentive to ensure ample emergency allocation by“padding” normal rates of usage through continued inefficiency.Some emergency planners go even further and say that energy efficiencyis actually undesirable, for two reasons. First, they argue that fat cut now cannotbe cut later—that somehow, if people drove efficient cars all the time, carlessSundays or other means of curtailing driving would become impossible.This is simply a confusion between curtailment and increased efficiency. Bothsave energy, but only curtailment imposes hardship, even though it savesmuch less energy than efficiency can.Second, some people who understand this difference (between saving energyby doing more with less and saving energy by simply doing without) nonethelesssuggest that efficiency reduces resilience by trimming flexibility and reserves.In biological systems (Chapter Thirteen), peak efficiency often does meangreater specialization, and hence a reduced ability to cope with changed conditions.But that is not the type of efficiency considered here. On the contrary, theenergy systems described in this and the following chapters are more flexible and