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

Chapter Seventeen: Achieving Resilience 313findings, someone held up a bucket with a hole in it, to dramatize the drain oftwenty-three million dollars per year from Franklin County, mostly to Venezuela,in 1975. That drain was the same as the total payroll of the ten largest employers inthe county. (The total county energy import bill for all sectors was about fortyeightmillion dollars in 1975. By 1980 it had risen to one hundred eight millioncurrent dollars—of which fifty-two million dollars was just for households.)The analysts next showed that if the lowest official forecasts of energy needsand prices in 2000 became reality, people would become four times worse off,paying over fifty-three hundred dollars per year (not counting inflation) tobuy household energy from outside the county and, generally, outside thecountry. To keep that leaky bucket full, the biggest single employer in thecounty would have to clone itself every few years for the rest of the century.This prospect made the Chamber of Commerce and utility people blanch: thefuture, presented in such terms, was simply not possible.The study group had, however, worked out what could be done instead:making the buildings heat-tight, using passive and active solar heat, running vehicleson methanol from the sustained yield of some unallocated public woodlots,and meeting electrical needs with wind or microhydro within the county. Localmachine shops, with skilled workers unemployed, could make all the equipment.The cost of paying it off would be about the same as what the county was thenpaying for household energy—about twenty-three million dollars per year. Butthe leaky bucket would thereby be plugged up. The money, the jobs, the economicmultiplier effects would stay in Franklin County, not go to Venezuela.Before the 1973 oil embargo, a dollar used to circulate within the countrysome twenty-six times before going outside to buy an import; today, it circulatesfewer than ten times. Franklin County is hemorrhaging money. A fair consensusdeveloped, as a result of this analysis, that the only hope for economic regenerationwould be to stop the bleeding by promoting local energy efficiency and selfreliantrenewable supply. As a result, what was a paper study is now the FranklinCounty Energy Project. With various fits and starts—and considerably delayedby the sudden loss of its modest federal funding—it is starting to be implemented.50 Once the energy problem was so presented that people could see it as theirproblem, and one not just of convenience but of economic survival, they weremotivated to start solving that problem on their own. This is in the best traditionof local self-help and self-determinism. As Ronald Reagan remarked in a nationallysyndicated 1979 newspaper column, the study found thata carefully planned transition to renewable energy sources would not be difficult,would probably yield actual increases in the local standard of living and would cutback sharply on air and water pollution…I suspect quite a few communities and