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The End of Growth
Blog post
If California's our smart-energy leader, we've got a long way to go
Posted Jul 22, 2008 by Daniel Lerch
California gets a lot of attention for pushing renewable energy and energy conservation. So I was somewhat taken aback when I came across this statistic in a recent post on Wired:
California alone uses more gasoline than any country in the world (except the US as a whole, of course). That means California's 20 billion gallon gasoline and diesel habit is greater than China's! (Or Russia's. Or India's. Or Brazil's. Or Germany's.)
This made me think of something Portland Office of Sustainable Development's Michael Armstrong says in his presentations on Portland's climate change policy. Armstrong displays a chart showing Multnomah County's (Portland and its eastern suburbs) GHGs growing at a somewhat lower rate than the rest of the country's from 1990 until about 2000, and then declining since then (while the US rate continues to rise). That's all well and good, until he follows it up with this chart showing how much farther we'd need to reduce GHGs to meet the future goals:
"We fought tooth and nail just to get that little decline in our emissions since 2000" Armstrong says, referring to the Portland region's 30+ years of conservation-minded energy, land use and transportation policy. It's going to be just as hard, if not harder, to keep those emissions (and oil consumption, which is basically the same graph) trending downward. The implication, of course, is that if it's going to be hard for Portland, it's going to be really hard for the nation as a whole, which of course is trending in the wrong direction.
The statistic about California's transportation fuel consumption has a similar implication. If California's relatively energy-smart 36.6 million people are consuming more energy in total than, say, Germany's 82.4 million people, or Japan's 127.4 million people, Americans as a whole have a long way to go indeed.
On the bright side, another quote later in the Wired post reminded me of something at bit more positive:
[G]asoline usage in California has increased 50 percent, that's 6.7 billion gallons, since 1988. Has there been anything close to a commensurate increase in quality of life here to accompany that rise in energy use?
My colleague John Kaufmann notes in his peak oil presentations that, according to a recent study, the United States hit "peak happiness" in 1968 -- and if you compare per capita energy use in 1968 to per capita energy use today, you may well conclude that we can both reduce our oil consumption and improve our quality of life.
These folks certainly seem to think so.
Get The End of Growth http://www.postcarbon.org/eog | Watch the animation Who Killed Economic Growth? http://bit.ly/whokilledgrowth
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