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Smokestack emissions pour out from a refinery in Anacortes,Washington. Humans now generate emissions that are theequivalent of a volcanic eruption every 44 hours.
 AMY GULICK 
O
ver the past 100 years, the world’s industrial production hasincreased more than fifty-fold. Unfortunately, the cost of thiseconomic growth has been an immense release of carbon dioxideemissions that has already committed the planet to a 1°C increase in globalaverage temperature in the coming years (CDIAC, 2007). Tis increase willlikely force us to cope with more frequent and intense meteorological disasters with potentially catastrophic impacts to all humans, as well as acceleratedbiodiversity loss. Te only good news is that gains in energy efficiency canplay a major role in tackling this global challenge and ensuring a more stableenvironmental and economic future. Ask any individual where most new energy services have come from inthe United States, Europe, and Japan over the past fifty years and the likely answer will be coal, oil or natural gas, or maybe nuclear power. Tey would allbe wrong. Te real source has been energy-efficiency gains, or what some now refer to as “smart energy services.” Tis umbrella term refers to the myriadinventive ways to deliver energy services at increasingly lower cost and withless material. Smart energy services often also deliver higher performanceand productivity and reduced risk and may also afford unforeseen emergingopportunities.Te long history of technology design reveals rich veins of smart energy service successes. Efficiency emerges from the virtually bottomless well of human creativity and is replenished by ongoing ingenuity that continues toyield new designs, advanced materials, and innovative techniques. Indeed,the evolution of ever-more efficient technologies has been fundamentalto sustaining societal development and has been a cornerstone to greaterproductivity, prosperity, health, and improved well-being (West, 2007;Bettencourt et al., 2007).Compared to smart energy services, all other energy supply optionsare plagued with varying degrees of external costs and risks that are notinternalized or reflected in their delivered energy price. Tis makes themappear less costly and risky than they actually are. It is also important torecognize that the economics of all energy options are heavily influenced (andskewed) by government policies, tax provisions, rules and regulations, and
CHAPTER ONEMichael Totten
Energy Efficiency
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enforcement, or lack thereof, at the national, state, and local levels. Commonsense dictates that we should try to take advantage of the full portfolio of low-cost smart energy services before turning to more expensive, and potentially dangerous, options.Te economic benefits are obvious. A 2007 assessment by the McKinsey Global Institute concluded that energy efficiency improvements worldwidethrough 2030 could provide an estimated 75% of projected new energy service demand with a 10% or better return on investment (MGI, 2007).In fact, smart energy services are poised to be one of the prime mitigatorsof climate change and the accompanying loss of biodiversity. In the UnitedStates alone, money-saving efficiency gains have also averted the annual releaseof more than 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions. A combination of smart-energy services; the development of ambitious wind, solar, geothermal,and biowaste solutions; and the dramatic reduction of emissions achieved by preventing tropical deforestation hold our best hope for stabilizing carbonproduction while sustaining robust global economic growth.
The Historical Record
It is worth remembering that between 1949 and 1973, the energy requiredto produce the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (E/GDP) declined by 0.4% peryear. Ten, with the price shocks following the oil crisis of 1973, innumerableefficiency improvements to buildings, vehicles, factories, motors, lights, andappliances accelerated the rate of reduction of Energy/Gross Domestic Productfive-fold to 2.1% per year. Without faster efficiency gains (smarter ways of delivering energy services),energy consumption in the United States would have risen from 79 exajoulesin 1973 to 179 exajoules in 2005. Instead, energy consumption in 2005 wasonly 104 exajoules. Te difference (75 exajoules) also avoided $700 billionper year in higher energy bills (Rosenfeld, 2006). How much is 75 exajoules?Envision a freight train annually hauling nearly 18,000,000 railcars of coal, which would wrap around the world seven times. Or imagine 8,800 oilsupertanker shipments per year that are then distributed to gas stations by 70,400,000 delivery trucks. Tere are only two nations that consume morethan 75 exajoules per year: the United States and China.Even if one-third of these savings are discounted as being due to structuralchanges in the economy rather than smart efficiency improvements to energy-consuming devices, this still represents more than $460 billion per year inreduced energy bills. By way of comparison, there were only 16 nations outof the world total of 194 whose Gross Domestic Product in 2006 was greaterthan these energy savings. Just how impressive these achievements are can best be grasped by comparingthese efficiency gains with the conventional energy supply. Te 39% drop inEnergy/Gross Domestic Product from 1975 to 2000 represented, by 2000,“an effective energy ‘source’ 1.7 times as big as U.S. oil consumption, threetimes net oil imports, five times domestic oil output, six times net oil importsfrom Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) members, andthirteen times net imports from Persian Gulf countries” (Lovins, 2004).If the amount of energy consumed to produce one unit of Gross DomesticProduct—a measurement known as “energy intensity”—improves or is reducedby only 1% per year, global carbon emissions will still triple by 2100, pushingatmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and global temperature far intothe catastrophic zone (Ward, 2007). Achieving 2% per year in energy intensity improvements will basically maintain the current emission levels throughoutthe century, raising the global temperature more than 2°C, destroying most of the world’s coral reefs and cloud rainforests, and triggering massive, long-termeconomic dislocations, as well as significant morbidity and mortality impactsfrom more frequent and severe weather-triggered disasters. If, however, society achieves a 3% per year improvement, emissions will dramatically decrease,stabilizing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide at 450 to 550 partsper million.History tells us that achieving such smart energy service rates is very plausible. Attentive firms are profitably cutting energy per unit of outputby about 6–8% per year (Lovins, 2007). Te United States cut its energy intensity by 3.4% every year from 1981 to 1986, 2.7% per year from 1997to 2001, 3.2% per year in 2001 and 2005, and 2.4% per year in 2003 and2004. California cut its energy intensity about one percentage point faster,
A CLIMATE FOR LIFE
BedZed, in Beddington, London, is the United Kingdom’slargest eco-village, where residents live a sustainable lifestylewith zero carbon emissions.
 ASHLEY COOPER
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ENERGY EFFICIENCY
halving electricity use per capita and achieving 75% less energy use in new homes. China did even better, cutting its energy intensity more than 5% peryear for more than twenty years, and 7.9% per year from 1997 to 2001; thisthen dramatically declined after that country cut efficiency programs andfailed to enforce standards (Lovins, 2007). However, in 2006 China adoptedone of the world’s most aggressive energy efficiency goals (4% per year) in itsEleventh Five-Year Plan, a national economic and social development plan. Although it fell short of this goal for the past two years, it greatly increasedfunding in July 2007, which should help close the gap.Smart energy services are without a doubt the best large-scale, least-cost,lowest-risk climate solution available worldwide.
Delivering Efficiency
Energy efficiency is attained by continuously improving the thermodynamicefficiency of delivered energy services. For the past century, this has beennarrowly interpreted and artificially constrained to “improving supply options”(e.g., bigger power plants or exploring-extracting-refining larger amounts of fuels derived from concentrated resources that are shipped over longer andlonger distances).However, since 1974, when the American Physical Society’s assessmenton the thermodynamic efficiency of energy use found that all the ways in which we utilized energy were highly inefficient(Ford, 1975), a continuous stream of economic-engineering analyses have provided a roadmapfor harnessing increasingly smarter energy serviceopportunities ranging from no cost to highly competitive cost that touch upon virtually every daily action of our lives (Lovins et al., 1982;Goldemberg et al., 1988; otten, 2007).Consider several examples. Tis past century’sshift from the candle to the incandescent bulband now to the compact fluorescent lamp (CFL)has yielded remarkable efficiency gains. Onecandle consumed about 80 watts of chemical energy to deliver 12 lumens of light for seven and a half hours. Tis was replaced with the carbon-filamentincandescent bulb, which used one-quarter less energy (60 watts), deliveredfifteen times as much light (180 lumens), and lasted 133 times as long as thecandle (some 1,000 hours). When the tungsten filament replaced the carbonone, the efficiency quadrupled. Te tungsten bulb can now match the lifetimeoutput of 8,100 candles, yet the lamp and the electricity cost only about asmuch as fourteen candles. Te compact fluorescent light, however, rendersthe same lumen output as an incandescent bulb, while consuming 75% lesselectricity and lasting thirteen times longer, thus eliminating the need for500,000 candles! (Lovins and Sardinsky, 1988).Rapid advancements now occurring in solid-state light-emittingdiodes (LED) are expected to dramatically eclipse even CFLs in price andperformance in the coming decade (DOE, 2007). Lighting experts fully expect that potentially super-efficient LEDs will largely displace incandescentand fluorescent lamps worldwide this century (Schubert and Kim, 2005).Lighting—and the air conditioning required to remove the heat emitted by inefficient lamps—currently consumes 20% of the United States’ electricity.Tis is equivalent to one-third of all coal burned by American utilities. Light-emitting diodes are expected to become twenty to fifty times more efficient thanincandescent and fluorescent lamps and eventually eliminate the equivalent of 
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