[font face=Serif][font size=5]Some Dilemma: Efficient Appliances Use Less Energy, Produce the Same Level of Service with Less Pollution and Provide Consumers with Greater Savings. What's Not to Like?[/font]
Posted December 17, 2010 in Curbing Pollution
[font size=3]In
The Efficiency Dilemma, The New Yorker (December 20, 2010), David Owen revives a discredited 19th century article on economics to posit that the increasing efficiency of household products such as refrigerators and air conditioners is responsible for a range of problems, including everything from food waste to America’s culture of excess. Owen argues (apparently seriously) that by allowing consumers to save money that would otherwise go to high and wasted energy bills, efficient appliances have caused Americans to abandon the simple life.
Owen – whose expertise lies in the unrelated field of golfing (
I'm not making this up), has unfortunately cobbled together this thesis without the benefit of facts or data. In the real world, efficient appliances (and the laws and policies that make them increasingly efficient) play a major role in reducing household energy usage, slashing energy bills for those consumers who can least afford them, and avoiding the need to build new costly power plants. Sad to say, this article – however well-intentioned, is a great example of misguided pseudo-analysis that is based on rank speculation made worse by gross errors of fact.
The reality is that the increase in efficiency of appliances is a huge success story for all consumers who benefit from the savings these products provide. Refrigerator energy use was growing
with a trend that would have resulted in electricity demand of about 175 GW by today; but with efficiency policies that level of power demand was cut to less than 15 GW. The difference, about 160 GW, compares to about 125 GW provided by the entire nuclear power fleet in the United States, or to 400 large coal plants that were expected to be needed but now are not.
Owen, however, blames a host of evils on efficiency, but fails to back up his accusations with facts. Owen starts by conceding that serious energy analysis of rebound effects shows them to be “comparatively trivial.” People who insulate their houses don’t absorb all the savings by sweltering through the winter, and buyers of efficient refrigerators don’t start leaving the door open gratuitously. But after admitting that the serious studies show rebound effects to be small and getting smaller over time, he does nothing to address the finding of the studies but instead starts writing a fairy-tale story of how efficient refrigerators don’t really save energy because somehow efficiency is responsible for the growing size of refrigerators, the increasing extent of refrigeration, and even the growing girth of Americans. The author notes how the size and feature offerings of refrigerators increased rapidly from 1954 until recently, and then, with out-of-the blue imagination, tries to link this to efficiency increases.
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