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

Chapter Seventeen: Achieving Resilience 303fuel bills), to increase military spending, or to rescue bankrupt cities, than toweatherize individual buildings. Energy emergencies also provide the purveyorsof the slowest, costliest, and least competitive, but highly visible, supply technologieswith a vocal argument for more federal bailouts. All these pressures onthe Treasury tend to raise taxes or interest rates or both, and to crowd the smallestborrowers, who have the fastest and cheapest energy-saving opportunities,out of the capital market. The difficulty today of financing many small investmentsrather than a few big ones is a warning that under the pressure of anemergency, this imbalance of investments will worsen.Hardware availability America has shown, in past national emergencies, aremarkable ability to increase total industrial production: after Pearl Harbor, forexample, production grew about fivefold in two years. 21 The capacity to produceand distribute the specific equipment needed to replace vulnerable energy supplieswith resilient ones may well behave in the same way: in principle, it should beeven easier to expand because the devices are generally smaller, simpler, and ableto be made by a wider range of industries. But it does take time and money toexpand the capacity to produce anything, including caulking guns, insulation, andgreenhouse glazings. No systematic study has been done on where bottlenecksmight arise, if an energy emergency induced people to buy a great many suchitems all at once, and how these bottlenecks might be anticipated and forestalled. 22(Dr. Abbie Page and Alec Jenkins wrote various proposals for several years tomake such a study, but no federal agency seemed interested.) Some preliminarydata are available, however, from historic examples and from telephone surveysmade by Roy Pitts (wind and hydro) and Carolyn Danahy (insulation). The datadeal mainly with the purely logistical problem of expanding factories; they do notaddress the managers’ problems in deciding how reliable the expanded marketwill be or in raising capital to finance the expansion.In 1977, a surge in demand led to a six-month shortage of glass fiber insulation,which accounts for ninety percent of the insulation used in new housesand is also widely used for retrofits. By August, the shortage was stallingprojects for half of all builders. 23 The insulation-making industry actually hadexcess capacity in place, but it takes about a month to bring the productionprocesses up to their working temperature and two months to move suppliesfrom the factories to the retail distributors. A similar shortage today, whenglass fiber factories are working at only fifty or sixty percent of capacity(because of the depressed building industry), could likewise start to be metwithin three months, though it would take months more to work off the backlogof orders. Actually building new insulation plants would take two or threeyears. Capacity to produce cellulose insulation, however, could probably be