Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [77]
I doubt that it is in the best interests of the American people to adopt Professor Inglis’s program for limiting energy growth. Since every projection of population, GNP, and industrial production indicates major increases in total energy use, electric energy use, and per capita use, I shall discuss the impacts of environmental costs on the program of expansion and growth as I visualize that growth.5
In plain terms, Sporn dismissed Inglis. The weight of “every projection” added up to an inevitable future in which Inglis’s wacky ideas weren’t even worth discussing. In fact, Sporn had bigger fish to fry. Given that energy demand growth was inevitably going to reach higher—but not too high—he devoted the rest of his speech to dealing with the real business of figuring out, or inflating, the environmental costs of producing all that power.6
Who could blame Sporn? Every projection did call for major increases because between 1900 and 1970 average annual energy growth was over 3 percent. Electricity demand growth from 1950 through 1970 had averaged 7 to 10 percent per year.7 Consequently, growth in energy usage was a sure thing. If growth like that was a sure thing, the only solution to the “energy problem” was to build ever more and larger power plants. But what if, just maybe, the forecasts Sporn and everyone else created were less accurate than they seemed? What if all those models produced by government officials, corporations, analysts, and academics were all wrong? The country’s engineering elite would have spent a decade planning for the wrong future.
There were people like Inglis who believed that a different future was possible. Some very specifically called attention to the inadequacy of the top-down forecasting methods. For instance, Herman Daly, a University of Maryland economist, lobbied intellectual grenades at the energy industry, but to no avail. Daly wrote in 1976 that
recent growth rates of population and per capita energy use are projected up to some arbitrary, round-numbered date. Whatever technologies are required to produce the projected amount are automatically accepted, along with their social implications, and no thought is given to how long the system can last once the projected levels are attained. Trend is, in effect, elevated to destiny, and history either stops or starts afresh on the bi-millennial year, or the year 2050 or whatever. This approach is unworthy of any organism with a central nervous system, much less a cerebral cortex.8
Few in the traditional energy forecasting business listened. As it turned out, they were terribly, almost unbelievably wrong. In 2000 the United States used less than one hundred quads of energy.9 In 2009 the United States used just 95 quads of energy. That’s less than even the outlier /activist Inglis had thought possible. Yet no calamity befell the United States. In fact, the 1980s and 1990s are not exactly considered years of hairshirted deprivation nor rationing. We are more likely to remember them as the adolescence of the sports utility vehicle and the exurbs. They were a time when energy usage, supposedly, was profligate. Those on the left may think Americans live in a sprawled out, Mc-Mansion, and SUV-loving world, but that’s nothing compared to what those “in the know” were projecting for the country.
Consider the high-end industry estimates, which would have required nearly doubling the current U.S. energy infrastructure. For every power plant,