I like Paul Krugman's column today for two reasons.
1) He works in a nice allusion to Chomsky. His headline is "Colorless Green Ideas".
2) He makes an important point about California and energy conservation:
Let me tell you about a real-world example of an advanced economy that has managed to combine rising living standards with a substantial decline in per capita energy consumption, and managed to keep total carbon dioxide emissions more or less flat for two decades, even as both its economy and its population grew rapidly. And it achieved all this without fundamentally changing a lifestyle centered on automobiles and single-family houses.The name of the economy? California.
There's nothing heroic about California's energy policy -- but that's precisely the point. Over the years the state has adopted a series of conservation measures that are anything but splashy. They're the kind of drab, colorless stuff that excites only real policy wonks. Yet the cumulative effect has been impressive, if still well short of what we really need to do.
The energy divergence between California and the rest of the United States dates from the 1970s. Both the nation and the state initially engaged in significant energy conservation after that decade's energy crisis. But conservation in most of America soon stalled: after a decade of rapid progress, improvements in auto mileage came to an end, while electricity consumption continued to rise rapidly, driven by the growing size of houses, the increasing use of air-conditioning and the proliferation of appliances.
In California, by contrast, the state continued to push policies designed to encourage conservation, especially of electricity. And these policies worked.
Comments (3)
There are so many other things we can learn from California as well, such as: don't build on a seismically active zone, or in an area prone to brush fires or mud slides. If you build more freeways, mor people will fill them with more cars. The lessons of California abound.
Posted by: Mustafa Mond, FCD | February 23, 2007 9:57 AM