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NEW ATTITUDES TOWARD ENERGY AND RESOURCES: A HIGH-TECHNOLOGY, LOW-ENERGY SOCIETY
NEW ATTITUDES TOWARD ENERGY AND RESOURCES: A HIGH-TECHNOLOGY, LOW-ENERGY SOCIETY
Pages 102-129
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From page 102... ...
As a result, changes in behavior with respect to one activity often affect other activities. For example, restrictions on energy use for heating home swimming pools might shift leisure activity away from homes and onto the highways.
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From page 103... ...
The prose is an attempt to illustrate kinds of behavior that are compatible with one another. The synthetic information in the prose scenario constructions could have been stated as postulates, for example: High unemployment is found in increasing association with rising crime rates; an active consumer movement is incompatible with high unemployment; an increase in self-employment is compatible with increasing selfreliance, increasing individual productivity, and increasing worker satisfaction; growing one's own food may be associated with a decrease in food waste; energy systems that are highly vulnerable to sabotage are compatible with a more active police force and a less democratic form of government.
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From page 104... ...
There are still large cities, although the urban congestion of previous years has been greatly reduced. In all the large urban centers, city shopping, business, and cultural activities continue to flourish, but as one moves into areas surrounding the core city, one finds centers for industrial arts, social life, and services in use every day of the week.
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From page 105... ...
Congestion in cities and suburbs was becoming increasingly stressful in the late 1970's, and without more efficient cars and public transportation for short trips, the quality of life in the deteriorating environment was dropping sharply. With real shortages in nonrenewable energy resources foreseeable in the near future, people began to realize that certain needs could no longer be met by more of the same technology.
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From page 106... ...
The rapid advances in solid-state technology, however, have an even more direct impact on energy use. Small integrated systems can be designed to control energy use in climate conditioning, injection of fuel and air into automobile engines, the balancing of air and fuel in industrial boilers, and the optimization of electrified industrial processes involving many types of motors, conveyor belts, and lifts.
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From page 107... ...
In many of these communities local industry produces the necessary electricity by cogeneration. Many households are engaged in agriculture and cottage industry, which are part of a series of experiments with different energy, waste, industrial, and technical systems.
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From page 108... ...
Their infant mortality rate was higher and their life expectancy lower than in many industrialized countries. Americans were also enjoying less vacation time and ate smaller amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables than did people in Western Europe.
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From page 109... ...
. Reprinted from The Joyless Economy: An Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction by TiFor Scitovsky.Copyright 1976 by Oxford University Press, Inc.Reprinted by permission.
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From page 110... ...
Butter and margarine (percent butter) Meat (percent fresh or frozen3 Italy 97.9 76.7 99.9 93.9 France 93.3 79.4 84.7 94.7 Belgium 89.6 80.8 51.9 86.6 Sweden 87.3 82.5 46.2 76.3 German Federal Republic 87.2 81.6 46.0 92.7 Netherlands 80.9 72.2 10.8 84.6 United Kingdom 72.8 72.5 67.8 90.4° Weighted average for above countries 87.2 77.6 68.6 90.5 United States 62.0 67.4 34.0 66.0 Excluded from this category are ground meat, fresh sausage, and sausage meat.
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From page 111... ...
971 estimate or latest available Source: Scitovsky (1976) Reprinted from The Joyless Economy : An Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction by Tibor Scitovsky.
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From page 112... ...
Citizens were concerned that some forms and systems of energy production might be too vulnerable to human and organizational error, or subject to sabotage and theft, and might put us into a system of spiraling costs and diminishing returns. People began to demand serious consideration of energy sources that were relatively inexhaustible, not dangerous to human life or the larger environment, easy to locate in clustered cities, communities, or individual buildings, and with fewer social and economic costs for succeeding generations.
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From page 113... ...
Population density is relatively low in nonurban areas, and clustered settlement patterns have left wide expanses of land open for use. Various social trends apparent by the 1970's have continued: emigration from cities to the suburbs, movement from suburbs to rural or suburban countryside, proliferation of communal farms, efforts to revitalize urban centers for convenient and pleasant living, cottage-industry communities, and, unfortunately, a growing use of alcohol and other drugs.
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From page 114... ...
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From page 115... ...
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From page 116... ...
With intensive solar research and development incentives in the 1980's, residential demand for fuel and for electricity in general was reduced from the projected figures of 38 quads to 8.7 quads.3 A conservative estimate suggests that solar water heating will make the greatest impact; solar space heating will be next in importance, with air conditioning a distant third. Some of the saving in energy use for buildings comes from changing appliance use habits, but larger savings come from greater thermal integrity of structures, the greater technical efficiency of appliances, the increase in the proportion of multiple-family dwellings, and the direct use of solar energy (Pilati, 1976)
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From page 117... ...
Combined-cycle systems, such as gas turbines heated by the exhaust of fluidized bed combustors, offered the possibility of high efficiency for electricity generation combined with low pollution levels. The Dow Chemical Company (1975)
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From page 118... ...
For the residential sector, total energy use in 2010 is 8.6 quads. Air conditioning now accounts for 0.09 quad; space heating consumes 1.62 quads in older homes and 1.03 quads in newer homes; appliances have increased their general efficiency by 40 percent since the 1970's and now consume 0.53 quad; other miscellaneous uses account for 0.59 quad.
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From page 119... ...
By using demand-at-point-of-use water heaters, as Europe and Japan have done for some time and as was done in the United States before World War II, the commercial sector is avoiding water-storage problems, pipe cool-down heat loss, and unnecessary use of hot water. New structures and use of solar energy for all water heating in some buildings, supplemented by recycled generator heat when necessary, allow for a large saving in hot-water heating in the commercial sector as a whole.
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From page 120... ...
^Saving factors and per-capita activity assumptions in Table 32 have been changed as indicated; other factors are held constant.
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From page 121... ...
, the total direct-energy-use figure is 25 quads. This figure excludes solar and other renewable energy sources for process heat, and electric generation losses; the solar capacity for process heat in a high-output future was estimated in the 1970's to be 48 quads.
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From page 122... ...
Work in England suggested that smallscale coal use was possible and environmentally acceptable. Modest-sized fluidized bed burners were found to be technologically feasible.
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From page 123... ...
. One might suppose that raising the price of energy might reduce energy consumption or that increased prices would stimulate production of more sources of energy.
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From page 124... ...
The century has brought, among other things, credit buying; a greater cost of government; increased home ownership; a stronger labor movement; shorter work hours; increased reliance on drugs; more entertainment in the home by means of radio, phonograph, and television; increased communication by telephone and other electronic means; migration from farm to cities, and now to the suburbs and smaller cities and towns; age-segregated neighborhoods; a revolution in sexual mores; a shift from thrift to a throwaway style of living and the beginnings of a shift back again; the civil rights movement; decreased family size from factors both related and unrelated to fertility; and a larger proportion of college-educated people. Massive planned change is a recent phenomenon, and there is a literature that attempts to isolate degrees of cultural persistence or change in the face of such plans.
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From page 125... ...
. District heat assumption: 10 percent of single units and 25 percent of multiunits (20-percent saving)
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From page 126... ...
Slight reduction in residential sector because of cogeneration from district heating (see note 2)
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From page 127... ...
15. Industrial generation losses calculated at 90 percent of the losses in the 72-quad scenario.
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From page 128... ...
1979. Domestic Potential of Solar and Other Renewable Energy Sources.
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From page 129... ...
1976. Draft report to the Demand and Conservation Panel, Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems, National Research Council, Washington, D.C.
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