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

Chapter Seventeen: Achieving Resilience 315tive plan which the City Council is to consider in 1982. The Energy/L.A.Action Plan is expected, during 1981–90, to turn the officially predictedgrowth in electricity demand into a decline, save a fifth of projected demand(worth nearly half a billion dollars in 1990 alone), and create nearly ten thousandnew construction jobs in the 1980s and fourteen thousand permanentjobs thereafter. 55 Economic development was a similar motive in Fresno’sProject Energy Independence, a joint city/county plan expected to enrich thelocal economy with annual utility savings of twenty-five million dollars. 56These examples suggest that large numbers of people can be motivated toan individual action by an obvious community problem. Giving citizens creditfor maturity is often rewarded—as when the government of Nova Scotia, distressedby oil deficits, simply gave every household a check for several hundreddollars, asked that it be spent on weatherization, and decided that policingwhether the money was so spent would cost more in money and (moreimportantly) in public confidence than it was worth. Most of the money waswell spent—after all, people were themselves burdened by their oil bills—and atleast half of the houses had been weatherized within the first year. (Someother Canadian provinces later did even better.) Enabling people to benefitdirectly from actions for the community can also elicit much help: a southernschool district which told students that they could have half of the money theysaved by simple “energy monitoring” (such as turning off lights in emptyrooms) reportedly had to pay them forty thousand dollars in the first year.Some communities have found that planning against energy emergenciessaves so much money at once that they cannot understand why they did nottap this sources of revenue earlier. In 1973, for example, Dade County,Florida, disappointed with chaotic federal responses to the oil embargo, set upits own office of energy management. Metro-Dade County’s energy managementnow embraces more than seventy program activities which have savedmillions of tax dollars. The energy coordinator manages a county-widereporting system of energy use and savings; identifies local energy resources;develops policies and programs to promote their use; promotes energy efficiencyas a component of community economic development; strengthens thecounty’s energy management abilities; and develops county-wide energy contingencyplans. Already, the Fuel Management Program has increased the efficiencyof forty-six hundred county vehicles, set up better accounting controlsthat since 1973 have saved the county more than thirteen million gallons ofmotor fuel, established priorities if fuel becomes scarce, and stockpiledenough fuel to run essential services through a complete cutoff of severalmonths. The county’s energy management program carefully integrates crisismanagement measures with efficiency and renewables programs meant to pre-