Dear Dr. Chu,
As a “cleantech” entrepreneur, I’m really excited by President Elect Obama’s decision to appoint you the next Energy Secretary. Based on the tremendous breadth of energy research that you have overseen in your time at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, I believe that you may be one of the best equipped scientist-administrators to take on the challenge of American energy policy. It has been my experience that this sector needs a healthy dose of perspective. We all get lost in the weeds of our particular technology and become myopic. Those who can afford it hire lobbyists to spread their myopia in Washington where any and all things nominally pro-environment are seemingly being promoted with reckless abandon. If your project Helios lecture is any indicator, I think you will be able to help Washington to get out of the weeds and properly prioritize our research and short-term energy priorities.
However, I do have some warnings and observations to share. The rest of this post will be devoted to the critical observation that when it comes to energy policy, California (your home state) may not be the shining example of sustainable consumption success that its politicians like to claim. You rightly have pointed out that while America’s average per capita energy consumption has been rising since the industrial revolution, California’s per capita consumption leveled off around 1970 and has remained the same since. Way to go California! But wait a second… Is “per capita energy consumption” really the right metric?
At VisibleEnergy we are big fans of using meaningful metrics (see the Cheeseburger Calculator and the Gallons per Mile posts). When it comes to metrics that are intended to assess our energy sustainability, “per capita use” isn’t very helpful. This metric fails to consider some very important characteristics like population growth and energy source. If the population is growing and the per capita energy consumption is flat, the total energy use still grows. When it comes to resource sustainability, our finite resources don’t care whether our average consumption is low. Sustainability is much more a concern of aggregate or total consumption. So what does California’s total energy use look like? Not so great. That is not to say that per capita consumption is a useless metric altogether, just not an adequate measure of sustainability.
The following series of graphs illustrate different ways to look at the same data. You tell me, where should we be investing our attention? Making the country more like California or figuring out what on earth is going on in Alaska?
This first graph shows a zoomed-in picture of the per capita energy consumption in all 50 states and the total per capita energy consumption for the US. I've highlighted some stand-outs. Nice work Rhode Island!
To make things comparable in this second plot I scaled all of the values to be a percentage of the total consumption in 1970. So, you can see for instance that America's energy use is now about 150% of what it was in 1970.This plot reveals that California doesn't look so great when compared to the US if total consumption is the metric of choice. Since the per capita consumption is relatively flat, the population must have grown.
The following graph shows the zoomed-out perspective on the first graph. From this perspective the worst offenders are Alaska, Wyoming, Lousiana, and North Dakota.
And finally, a zoomed out picture of total consumption for Alaska, California and the US.
Thoreau wrote: “In the long run, men hit only what they aim at." (Walden) Let's find something good to aim at.
Best of Luck Dr. Chu!
- The data for all of these charts can be found through the Energy Information Administration (eia.doe.gov) -
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