repeat when necessary
W
by elizabeth Kolbert
hen I was a kid, my father
used to pad around the house, silently, turning out the lights.
In his wraith-like wanderings he would occasionally click off lights in rooms that were occupied. Someone—me, my brother, or my mother— would squeal at him out of the dimness, and reluctantly he would turn them back on. Our house was not only dark; it was also wintery. When less cold-adapted friends or relations came
2 6 onearth
winter 2013/2014
for a visit, my father would turn up the thermostat. Once they left, down it went again. If anyone in the immediate family complained about this, his advice was simple: “Put on a sweater.”) My father is, let’s just say, frugal, and his campaign to keep the lights off and the thermostat low was motivated primarily by energy costs. (This was the 1970s, when even the president—infamously—donned a cardigan to make a similar point.) But as my father now likes to say, he was ahead of his time. Most experts agree that, in the near term at least, energy conservation is the single most effective way for the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. “That’s where everybody who has really thought about the problem thinks the biggest gains can be and should be,” is how former energy secretary Steven Chu put it a couple of years ago. (In the same interview, Chu described energy conservation as “sexy”—which, I think, is further even than my father is willing to go.) A recent report by the International Energy Agency that looked at 11 industrialized nations—including the United States—found that investments in energy efficiency amount to less than two-thirds of the money spent on fossil fuel subsidies. Nevertheless, in 2010, the energy use avoided through efficiency measures was larger than the energy provided by burning oil. Of course, another way of describing my father is to say he’s a throwback. For most of human history, people heated their homes sparingly, if at all. Sources of heat such as wood, peat, and eventually coal were hard to come by, so everyone wore sweaters or their equivalents—if, that is, they were fortunate enough to have them. Light was even dearer: in colonial America, candles were usually made of animal fat, and producing them was time-consuming and difficult. (They tended to crack, melt, or—worse still—rot.) In May 1743, the Reverend Edward Holyoke, who at the time was president of Harvard, recorded in his diary that his household had produced 78 pounds of candles. In the fall of that same year, he noted laconically: “Candles all gone.” Though the conditions of life in the United States have changed rather dramatically since then—few Americans today have to worry that their light will be “all gone”—conserving energy makes just as much sense now as it did in the 1740s (or the 1970s, for that matter). Indeed, in an age haunted by global warming, ocean acidification, and the myriad dangers posed by fracking and oil drilling and nuclear waste disposal, arguably it makes even more sense. A lot of the best new ideas of the past few decades fit this same basic pattern: they’re old. Consider the movement known as New Urbanism. In its charter, the movement calls for public policies that encourage compact, walkable cities with ample public spaces. As it happens, this was the only kind of city people built for 5,000 years or so, until the internal combustion engine, the oil industry, and the freeway system made sprawl possible. A variation on New Urbanism known as New Pedestrianism goes one step further. It aims to reshape car-dominated streets into lanes designed for walkers and bikers only. Here’s another idea whose time has come, and gone, and come again. Or consider the local food movement. For much of American history, just about everyone ate locally and also seasonally—not on principle so much as because the alternative, generally, was not to eat at all.
illustration by ellen weinstein
think again