Rather smartly, the green movement has aggressively positioned itself to tap into America's deep-seated futurism and adoration of technology. Vision of our green future, and even our coming green jobs, often dwell on hydrogen and hovercrafts, solar cells and humming turbines. But the short-term reality is that many of the most significant gains will come in simple conservation. Buildings need copper wires. Roofs will be painted black. Windows will be sealed to cut heat loss. The work will be mundane, but it will matter. Cue Elizabeth Kolbert, and the story of the refrigerator:This past summer, Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who currently heads Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—and who has been tapped to be the next Secretary of Energy—delivered a talk on climate change and how to combat it. Consider, Chu said, the refrigerator.Refrigerators consume a lot of energy; all alone, they account for almost fifteen per cent of the average home’s electricity use. In the mid nineteen-seventies, California—the state Chu now lives in—set about establishing the country’s first refrigerator-efficiency standards. Refrigerator manufacturers, of course, fought them. The standards couldn’t be met, they said, at anything like a price consumers could afford. California imposed the standards anyway, and then what happened, as Chu observed, is that “the manufacturers had to assign the job to the engineers, instead of to the lobbyists.” The following decade, standards were imposed for refrigerators nationwide. Since then, the size of the average American refrigerator has increased by more than ten per cent, while the price, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has been cut in half. Meanwhile, energy use has dropped by two-thirds.The transition to more efficient fridges, Chu pointed out, has saved the equivalent of all the energy generated in the United States by wind turbines and solar cells. “I cannot impress upon you how important energy efficiency is,” he said.
Expect a lot of that sort of industry anger. A lot of dire warnings that if we indeed legislate efficiency, we will be ensuring deprivation. We Californians have heard that a lot. We heard it with appliances, and with zero emissions cars, and with the building code. Indeed, a recent study found that "California’s energy-efficiency policies created nearly 1.5 million jobs from 1977 to 2007, while eliminating fewer than 25,000." So remember the refrigerator. Image used under a CC license from Jason Rogers.
