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C00002 00002	Worldwatch paper 4, Energy: The case for conservation%1 by Denis Hayes
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Worldwatch paper 4, Energy: The case for conservation%1 by Denis Hayes

	The reader of a paper entitled %2The case for X%1 is warned
by such a title that facts that don't support the case should be sought
elsewhere.

p7.
	One trusts that the assertions made in the first paragraph about
more than one-half of energy being wasted will be supported later.
We cannot necessarily meet our needs solely by improving efficiency of
use, because the oil and gas that supply 80 percent (is this the right
number) will run out.  While some conservation measures save money, others
cost money.

	Is failure to achieve 100 percent thermodynamic efficiency
considered as waste?  That is impossible.  When someone drives two
blocks to the store, is this included in Hayes' definition of waste?
How does he know what the person had in mind?  Maybe the person thought
he might buy something heavy or go to another store but didn't.  Maybe
making a decision of whether to take the car each time is psychologically
more burdensome than always taking it.  Perhaps keeping his mind clear
of such trivial decisions is part of his standard of living, or perhaps
he thinks it helps him make large decisions better.  Certainly, people
who are fussbudgets about always turning out lights on leaving rooms
often have time only for trivia.  The people, myself included, who
choose cars with automatic transmissions don't think of it in terms
of avoiding moving the hands.  It is more a question of being able
to keep one's atttention elsewhere.  It seems clear that Hayes's
examples of changes that don't affect the standard of living are not
mine and will not be followed.  Where does he get this anti-American
prejudice.  How has he established that the habit of leaving unnecessary
lights on is uniquely American?

	I simply deny that my habits are determined by mass-marketing.
It is a cheap appeal to prejudice to attribute the prevalence of any
attitude to which he disagrees to mass-marketing.

	The quote at the bottom of p. 8 is invented - more of the
same cheap trick.

	His proposal to use 40 mile per gallon cars would be more
than a debating point if it seriously considered why many people
prefer large cars and why energy efficiency has been a minor
factor in even poor people's choice of used cars.

p10.  I will bet 50 dollars that the physicists knew that it isn't
always economical to increase thermodynamic efficiency and said
so in  their report.  Most likely they said that they were citing
thermodynamic efficiencies in order to give some estimate of
conceivable improvements - not however asserting that anything
close to 100 percent efficiency could be achieved at all - let
alone economically.

	Moreover, many economists are aware of thermodynamic
efficiency.  Hayes is merely building himself up as an expert
by attributing ignorance to others.

A switch from fast foods could save 2 percent, but isn't this a
reduction in standard of living for some people.  Why not the
alternative of producing the fast foods more efficiently?  Conjecture:
Hayes is in ideological company with people who disparage fast
foods for other reasons.  (If the reader thought that this
paragraph expresses my own taste in the matter of fast foods,
he is careless.  I didn't and I won't.  The point of the article
is to respect everyone's taste, but not give anyone a right
to impose his own taste on others).

	The statement that generating efficiency can be improved
is true but probably not as much as Hayes implies.  The laboratory
fuel cells give energy at 75 percent efficiency, but they don't
use coal, they use hydrogen, and no-one knows how to get energy
into the fuel cells efficiently.  With magnetohydrodynamics (MHD),
coal burning efficiency can be raised aboue 50 percent.  Bottoming
cycles can also help, but with bottoming cycles, there is a trade-off
between size and capital costs vs. efficiency.  The turbine that
gets the last 10 percent in a compound system is enormous.

	There is no advantage in cut of electric demand per se.
Energy is only part of the total economic system.  Moreover,
peak-shaving imposes costs on people.  For examples, if different
companies have different work schedules in order to stagger the
load on electric generating facilities or transportation, then
a husband and wife may be unable to find jobs that permit them
to spend maximal time together.  During World War II, industrial
facilities were operated three shifts for efficiency.  Anyone
who worked at this time can tell you the costs in family life.
A major worker demand was the elimination of shift work.  The
industries today whose high capital costs or process requirements
require shift work have great trouble in keeping workers and with
absenteeism.  Synchronization of activities is an element in
standard of living, especially for leisure activities.

	The pro and anti cornucopian arguments are both vacuous,
but Lilienthal is right in preferring to honor those who find
new resources above those who don't.

	The innuendo that the oil companies caused the crisis
has served its purpose, so Hayes finds sees no point in trying
to clear the oil companies of the accusation if they are innocent.

	"Solar heating systems are simple, and are already
economically competitive
electric heating in many situations" suggests that this is a
trend that will necessarily continue.  Perhaps the breeder
reactor, the learning curve in nuclear energy, and the
use of heat pumps will make electricity as a primary source
more economical again.  This is plausible if construction
of bulky systems remains expensive.  The point is that only
research and the future will show.

	It certainly seems that heat pumps are better than
resistance heating even if it is bulkier.  I noticed that
in Britain they used resistance heating in government constructed
housing because the installation is cheaper.  They also don't
insulate well, and this was a socialist government.

p21. The figures on when oil and gas will run out are unwarrantably
definite, although within the range of possibilities.  The effect of
the uncertainty is to delay investment.

Under the most ambitious scenarios, coal and shale oil could fill
the gap.

The deferral of reactor orders is related to the decline in rate
of increase of electricity demand.  Unfortunately, it is a terrible
mistake, because oil and natural gas need to be completely replaced
as a means of generating electricity.  The financing problem is related
to the rate of inflation which puts a terrible front-end load on
utility financing projects.  If lenders could be paid in constant-value
dollars, interest rates would be much less.  Thus Norway issued bonds
in West German marks at 4 percent and dollar bonds paying 10 percent
and the mark bonds were preferred.

To say that solar energy requires only development work is misleading.
This assumes that concepts exist which are more or less guaranteed to
be economical.

A buyer of home insulation runs a substantial risk of being swindled
or having his house burn down.  Every two-bit salesman is pushing
insulation at vastly inflated prices.

No nuclear plant has cost α$3000 per kilowatt as far as I know.
Heat pumps are indeed a good idea, and I haven't heard of any
disadvantages, but I suspect there are some.

Byproduct electricity is generated at times chosen by the primary
producer.  For this reason, it must be matched by peakload generating
capacity, and the price paid for it must be such that the average
price works out less than baseload capacity.

One notes the boom in light trucks not subject yet to EPA.  American
values haven't changed as much as Hayes hopes.

What does the 377 mpg show.  The man wasn't in a hurr
y.

Many of us like automatic transmissions.  Hayes is expressing snobbism
here, because his chances of making automatic transmissions efficient
is far greater than his chances of eliminating them.

p28 What well tested alternatives to the internal combustion engine?

Your desire to make cars last longer conflicts with the desire to
replace them by more efficient cars.

Many people with ideological commitments to car pooling and public
transportation abandon them when they discover how it restricts their
freedom to have flexible hours and to run impromptu errands before
and after work.

A planned community is good if people stick to the plan.  Unfortunately,
the planners rarely know enough to make a plan to which people will
adhere.  Moreover, a planned community of any size may require an
investment that cannot be obtained all at once.  Planning is particularly
difficult if it must be decided what occupations will be available.
The demands of well educated people for an enormous variety of
occupations are particularly hard to satisfy.  Observing the Stanford
community leads me to believe that there will be husbands and wives
living at maximum feasible commuting distance whatever that turns out
to be, and some people will sacrifice desirable jobs, because the feasible
commuting distance is greater.  People also have many reasons for deciding
where they wish to live, and the demand for variety in life-style will
increase this further.  One eco-freak I know lives on his boat in San
Francisco and commutes to IBM south of San Jose.  We libertarians and
lib-simps say he is entitled to do that if it seems to him a worthwhile
way to spend his money and time.  What would Denis Hayes say?

I am dubious about the replacement of skilled labor for energy.
It conflicts with the desire of the skilled labor to be well paid.
Already too few people can afford to live in the product of skilled
labor.  It is probably easier to learn to reduce the cost of nuclear
reactors than to persuade carpenters to work for less money.

Buildings can certainly be made more energy efficient, though
energy freaks often ignore other values.

I am somewhat dubious of the statement that lighting uses a quarter
of all electricity.  It would be nice if it were so, because there
are indeed great opportunities to conserve energy in lighting.

Heat pumps again!  This book needs editing.

Suburban "sprawl" is a snobbish cliche.  Nothing will be accomplished
by "policy-makers" who don't listen to why most people prefer to
live in suburbs.  Their regulations will be adopted, because the
suburbanites will be fooled by the loaded words, but when the time
comes to implement them, there will be a collision in which the
regulations will be repealed.

If the Green Revolution is reversed or if American agriculture becomes
more labor intensive millions of people in other countries will
starve.  Hayes ignores all inconvenient facts.

The use of sewage as fertilizer increases the spread of disease unless
the sewage can be sterilized.  Slow viruses which are very difficult
to detect and culture and aobut which we are only beginning to learn
(two recent Nobel prizes) are perhaps a danger here.

What fools gave an award to BART for civil engineering?

Trash fuel is indeed a promising minor source.

50 How could the archaeology students discover what wasn't thrown
away just by looking at what was?

GNP is certainly not a direct measure of quality of life, and I doubt
anyone suggested it is.  However, it is the one measure that can
reasonably be compared on a country-to-country basis and which doesn't
evaluate the choices people make on how to spend their money.
The quote from Robert Kennedy cites extreme examples as befits a politician
but is consistent with the idea that Kennedy was prepared to evaluate
whether a person who buys a camper, a common choice of retired working
class people, is worse off than the person who buys a VW, a common
choice of new university graduates.  If evaluation is done, it will
certainly be done by the recent university graduates who will have
plenty of reasons why the retired working class person is has been
misled by advertising into buying his camper.  It won't even be necessary
for the evaluator to talk to the camper buyer - he just knows.

The trouble with trying to control the energy/GNP ratio is that it
puts strange constraints on the variables people more naturally
optimize.  It is like the Soviet habit of trying to control more
variables than the system has degrees of freedom.
Energy/GNP is merely a curiousity.

60 "Replacing good carpentry by prefabrication plants, cabinet-making
by assembly lines, and cobbling by machines that never wore a shoe
has become increasingly difficult to justify".  This is mere verbiage
since the relative costs at which Hayes thinks the replacement is
bad is unstated.  Hayes fails to note that hand-cobbled shoes are
available as are cheap Mexican sandals with soles made from truck
tires.  I don't buy them, because they are too expensive given my
other ways of spending the product of my labor.  Why should one
expect to be able to buy a hand-made shoe for less labor time than
one now pays, and how do you suppose people who aren't motivated to
pay the price now can be so motivated in the future.

There seems to be an implicit assumption that employment in the U.S.
is limited by the availability of capital.  In 1968 it required
1.6 dollars of capital for manufacturing facilities producing one
dollar of output per year in the U.S.  (The figure for USSR was 2.6
and for Iran 3.3).  Even now there is plant capacity to employ all
the labor force.  The economic servo-mechanism is much more complex
than that.  Labor intensive processes pay low wages, and low wage
jobs are not muchf in demand, so the farmers have to hire illegal
Mexicans.

The boomerang law is the first thing in this book which I hadn't
heard of before.  It is an example of "Oh look how deep we dig a
hole, When first we practice to control".

67. Does Hayes seriously believe that permanent rationing is
tolerable or even sustainable without enormous corruption?