Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Veblen characterized the American spirit as one of “conspicuous consumption” (1953), and his
theory seems more applicable today than ever before. Among most Americans, forced change
of lifestyles is perceived as categorically un-American. Consequently, the use of coercion to
force lifestyle changes is not considered an acceptable policy solution in the United States. It
would be easier to harness the sun than to change American lifestyles drastically, although small
changes do occur, if slowly and noisily. When oil prices increase rapidly, many complaints are
heard, Congressional investigations are initiated, hearings are held, and emergency measures are
considered. Yet when prices decline even a bit, Americans get back into their SUVs and drive to
the shopping mall.
Those who approach energy policy from the demand side maintain we must either cope with
materialism by increasing supplies—the feasibility of which they view with great skepticism—or
else change our lifestyles in order to reduce demand and conserve domestic energy resources
for use in future periods. They tend to propose that people should make individual sacrifices,
like putting on a sweater and turning down the thermostat, using less lighting, riding a bi-
cycle, bus, or train to work instead of driving a car, staying at home on vacations and driving
less generally, and refraining from purchase of energy-wasting home appliances and gadgets.
President Jimmy Carter emphasized demand suppression measures in two major energy policy
proposals (1977; USDOE 1979), neither of which was embraced with much enthusiasm by
the U.S. Congress.
Many of these proposals are strikingly similar to wartime rationing of goods, and might have
significant impacts on manufacturing, utility, and tourism portions of the national economy.
Growth in consumption of energy-saving devices since the late 1970s has to some extent re-
duced these effects. More significantly, many Americans simply refuse to cut back or will do
so only temporarily while demanding relief in the form of policy change. U.S. energy policy
proposals since the 1970s have included a bewildering mixture of proposals to both remove
barriers and change lifestyles. Perhaps this explains why we have such a shambles of energy
policy: the choices are too numerous, demanding, and unpleasant to be considered legitimate
by many citizens.
In a seminal article shortly after the oil embargo of 1973, Robert M. Lawrence suggested that
national energy policy choices in the United States were constrained by three primary costs of
continued high energy use: higher energy prices, greater environmental degradation, and increased
security risk (1975). Seldom explicit but nonetheless implicit in previous energy policy proposals
have been unsystematic comparisons of the costs of each available energy alternative. Unsystem-
atic comparisons of the mix of different kinds of costs for each available energy resource have
determined, and perhaps will continue to determine, policy choices in the United States about
which energy technologies will be used and which deemphasized in the future.
A conceptual framework is presented here for analysis of various conventional and renewable
energy fuel technologies in terms of their respective dollar costs, environmental costs, and national
security costs to the nation. The objective of this analysis is to examine alternative national energy
policy choices in a systematic fashion and specify the outlines of a coherent national energy policy.
This conceptual framework may be used to evaluate energy policy choices for any nation-state in
the world and with some modifications might be applied to subnational state energy policy deci-
sion making. The focus here is on analysis of technological options for formulating a coherent
national energy policy for the United States.
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