America's Next Economic Model
Can telecommuting and videoconferencing bring down carbon emissions?
Most policies to bring down carbon emissions raise the cost of energy. What happens then? According to conventional economic models, the first result is inflation: The cost of goods and services goes up. In this view, climate policy is a kind of castor oil for the economy—good for you, but really unpleasant.
But what if energy users, assisted by smart public policies, interpreted high energy prices not as a pain, but as an incentive to use energy more wisely? What if there were copious opportunities to increase efficiency, those investments paid handsome returns, and the energy savings made up for the price increase? Real-world studies show that businesses and consumers actually can reduce emissions and come out ahead—as John "Skip" Laitner, an economist at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, puts it, "The evidence is everywhere but in the models." Laitner, who also spent a decade at the epa, has been working to integrate the news about efficiency into modeling. In June, he showed Congress' Joint Economic Committee that transportation measures alone—such as "crusher credits" for low mileage cars, energy driver's ed, and telecommuting and videoconferencing—could save the equivalent of 46 billion barrels of oil by 2030, as much as the country uses in six years.
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I would have thought that the major contradiction in a world of more efficient use of energy would be that while one does more work using less energy the effect in economic terms will show negative growth. That is if country A produced X amount of goods and country B also produced X amount of goods with the exception that country A produced its X amount of goods using 50% less energy than country B then country B would have a larger gross national product than country A which means that the method used to calculate economic growth by is flawed.
I think that this sort of reality will force a change in economic models. It would mean that how we determine economic value will need to be altered. Similar forms of efficiency in terms of lowering pollution output would most likely have the effect of raising the cost of a product and there will have to be a method to evaluate this kind of cost as social benefit instead of it being an economical penalty. In other words producing less pollution ought to be a reward but in terms of economics it will be a penalty.
Other aspects which need to be thought about are the actual life expectancy of a product produced (perhaps the products renewability). The ability to actually make things is a decreasing function of resources and these resources (like various metals, oil for plastics, and so on are finite so that it isn’t just energy that is finite but a large quantity of the materials used in production are also finite and these will run out. What will we do when we’ve wasted all the iron ore, and copper and aluminum and so on? This means that somehow we must begin to create a vision of the level of technological development we desire—as things are now we have no vision and seem to be blind in regards to our consume mentality. The concept of supply equals demand is important but insufficient in terms of sustainability. As things are presently we will in a relatively short time—within the next 100 to 200 hundred years have expunged the planet and yet by the looks of things we seem to believe that we can continue with total disregard for the planet.
I do not think that telecommuting and videoconferencing will remove this problem though it will save some energy costs provided that the computer systems being used are efficient—if a company has 1000 computers and they use on average 300 watts per machine then that company uses 300 kilo watts per hour and that does not strike me as a good sign. While computing is becoming more energy efficient it is still a rather energy intensive method for storing information. Paper for example does require energy creating the paper and the question is whether the energy used to create paper is on average less than the energy used to run our computer systems (trees are at least a renewable resource while the stuff used to make the computer is not). Because the storage of information on paper while slow in terms of retrieval (someone has to go to the archive and find it but while the paper is in the archive its energy consumption is zero but the information in the computer system is always consuming energy)
I don’t know how Laitner calculated these savings but I when we look at our new telephones we use I think we are facing a new kind of problem where we may discover that our desire to be like Spock and Scotty on the USS Enterprise may have even greater destructive consequences for the environment than previously thought—we must wait and see if we figure out what it is that is killing our honey bees. But at this point in time the PC and computer systems as a whole represent a considerable contribution to increased energy consumption and not lowering it.
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It has often been on my mind to say that I don't understand why 5 execs from different parts of the world have to get on a plane to meet, use up the resources of air tickets, hotels rooms, a boardroom, taxi fares, restaurants the list goes on, when our five year old kids can telecommute with their friends on skype! Great article.
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But what if energy users,
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