{"id":473,"date":"2004-08-06T01:51:33","date_gmt":"2004-08-06T01:51:33","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:44","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:44","slug":"more_energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=473","title":{"rendered":"More Energy"},"content":{"rendered":"

So in the comments to my post below<\/a>, encouraging energy efficiency, Trent and Joe are jumping up and down and suggesting that I’m somewhere between foolish and stoned.<\/p>\n

Which may be true.<\/p>\n

But which doesn’t change the validity of my core policy argument, which rests on three legs:<\/p>\n

# the most secure energy we can create is the energy we don’t use, and it’s possible – through some modest changes in lifestyle and in better engineering on what we consume – to enjoy pretty much the life we lead now while using substantially less energy per person and dollar of GDP. I tossed out 20 – 25% as a good target for that.# this is a good thing to do, for three basic reasons: a) it will shelter our economy – relative to the rest of the world’s economies – from interruptions in supply or spikes in price, both of which are likely as the Middle East works out it’s problems with or without our help and guidance; b) it will allow us to pick and choose where we buy our energy from – which may not help when it comes to price spikes (see above) but will make us relatively invulnerable to interruptions caused by shutting off the ME oil spigot; c) it will lessen the damage to the world economy from interruptions in supply, as there will be more ‘headroom’ in the markets; d) it will give us more of the moral high ground in discussion about the future of the Middle East, as we take concrete (and expensive) steps to demonstrate that we’re not killing Arabs to ensure that we have cheap gas to burn in our SUV’s.<\/p>\n

# that the “don’t conserve” alternative has to be examined and priced out as well. As many of the same commenters who dinged me noted, increases in demand from a consumer society in China and India will wipe out the markets anyway.<\/p>\n

Well, let’s go to the numbers again. Again, from www.eia.doe.gov<\/a>, we get this<\/a> Excel file that shows annual energy budgets by country.<\/p>\n

In 2002, the US used 97.6 * 10^15 BTU. China used 43.2, and India 14.3.<\/p>\n

Assume for a moment that China and India – each of whose populations in increasing at slightly more than 1%\/year – start using 5% more energy each year. That suggests that in eight years, they’ll go from using a total of 57.2 (*10^15) BTU, to 84.4, for an increase of 27.3.<\/p>\n

If the US consumption increases at about 1% per year, we’ll go from 97.6 to 105.7 – an increase of 8.1. But if, instead, we were to cut our consumption by 2% per year, we’d end up using 83.1 – for a swing of 22.7, almost enough to make up for the monstrous growth in consumption in China and India. And certainly enough to have a significant impact on the markets for energy worldwide.<\/p>\n

As before, disagreements are fun, but they’re even more fun when based in facts (and occasionally arithmetic).<\/p>\n

Do I think that we can conserve out way out of the Middle East crisis? Of course not, and I’ve never said so. I do believe that we’ll have far more freedom to act in the Middle East when we’re not worried that the Saudi’s will shut off the Middle East tap and lop 10% or so off our annual petroleum energy budget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So in the comments to my post below, encouraging energy efficiency, Trent and Joe are jumping up and down and suggesting that I’m somewhere between foolish and stoned. Which may be true. But which doesn’t change the validity of my core policy argument, which rests on three legs: # the most secure energy we can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}