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

Chapter Fifteen: End-Use Efficiency: Most Resilience Per Dollar 239A group of oil industry leaders forecast in 1980 that, contrary to their expectationstwo years earlier, total U.S. use of refined products would probably stayabout constant through the 1980s, with demand for gasoline, home heating oil,and residual fuel oil actually falling. 4 Events so far have outdone even thoseexpectations, undercutting also the still lower demand forecasts issued in 1981.For example, in California—a prosperous state which uses over a tenth of allU.S. gasoline—there were nearly a million more cars in 1980, driven almost tenbillion vehicle-miles further, than in 1976; yet gasoline use in 1980 was the lowestsince 1976. 5 By March 1981, gasoline demand for the entire United Stateswas the lowest in ten years. Declining oil demand had become the rule, not theexception—so it was news when, in January 1981, unusually cold weather ledto the first increase in national oil use in nearly two years. 6 Expectations ofunlimited demand growth, so popular in the 1970s, evaporated so quickly thatthe permanent shutdown of approximately a hundred oil refineries during1978–82—abandoned because their proprietors do not expect ever to be able tosell that much oil again—passed almost unnoticed. In total, during the period1973–82, while the Gross National Product grew twenty-one percent beyondinflation, total energy use fell by nearly one percent and total oil use fell by eightpercent: each barrel was yielding thirty-one percent more GNP.These encouraging figures do not by themselves constitute proof thatAmericans have raised their energy productivity. Such aggregated figures asnet oil imports lump together domestic demand with domestic oil extractionand with the substitution of non-oil energy sources. Aggregated demand dataalso cannot distinguish• changes in how much energy it takes to provide a service from changes inthe composition of services provided (since some, like smelting, need far moreenergy than others, such as banking, and industry in most countries hasrecently tended to shift its growth into the less energy-intensive sectors);• changes in efficiency from the effects of economic recessions;• improved efficiency from degradation of energy services (such as reducedcomfort in buildings); and• better progress in some sectors from worse progress in others.For these reasons, such aggregated measures as energy/GNP ratios or levelsof net oil imports, though a convenient shorthand, can be misleading in comparingtrue energy efficiencies over time or between countries. These measurescannot reveal either how much end-use efficiency has been improved orhow much improvement is still possible and worthwhile. For those purposes,the only practical approach is to assess “technical coefficients”—how muchenergy is used, in physical terms, to provide a precisely specified unit of each