Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
has happened with tobacco). In his otherwise brilliant book,
Sustainable
Energy - Without the Hot Air
, David MacKay disparages the notion in
“every little helps” in energy saving and efficiency. He argues that “if eve-
ryone does a little, we'll only achieve a little”.
But while this is a useful warning against complacency, and a call to
scale up low-carbon power, it ignores the possibility of individual action
contributing to the spread of societal norms about energy saving.
Collective action
There are some excellent examples of collective action making a difference
that is larger than the sum of its parts. One is of wind-farm cooperatives in
which local people and firms have banded together to achieve greater scale
and power than they could individually. The wind power generated by a
turbine is proportional to the square of the turbine's diameter (see p.119).
Another pertinent example is the Carbon Trust's minor coup in persuading
members of the British Frozen Food Federation that they could all reduce
their energy consumption by turning down the temperature in their super-
market freezers a couple of degrees without the produce going off.
Paying the full cost for energy
The EU nations committed to cutting their emissions by 50 percent by
2050 (or 80 percent in the UK case). It is hard to imagine how this can
be achieved without the public paying more for their energy. At the same
time, as democracies supposedly committed to social welfare, they have
a responsibility to help those who can least afford more expensive energy
bills. In this regard, the government payment schemes for older cars to be
scrapped - called “cash for clunkers” in the US - have proved a winner.
Of course, these schemes were introduced in 2008-09 mainly to help
various car industries around the world. But older cars tend to be driven
by poorer people who, under these schemes, received money towards
newer and cleaner models they could not otherwise afford.
Telling the government to intervene
Governments have long been active in regulating energy-hungry prod-
ucts, but they have only recently woken up, or returned, to the realization
that the market isn't delivering the low-carbon economy as fast as they
need it to. After the discrediting of financial markets during the reces-
sion, taboos are disappearing, even in the UK and US, against non-market
