The Genius of Efficiency
As a physics graduate student at Berkeley in the 1970s, David Goldstein began studying the potential of efficiency measures to reduce the nation's energy demands. He could not have had better timing. The country was emerging from the 1973 oil crisis, and California's government was eager to cut the state's energy use. "Even a young graduate student could influence public policy just by giving the right answers," Goldstein recalls.
Goldstein, now co-director of NRDC's energy program, has long seen efficiency as an essential key to controlling this country's mounting energy consumption. After three decades of groundbreaking work -- which earned him a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002 -- his efforts seem more crucial than ever. His new book, Invisible Energy: Strategies to Rescue the Economy and Save the Planet, explains how efficiency can help solve two of our most pressing challenges: reducing greenhouse gas emissions and finding a sustainable pathway out of recession.
Since joining NRDC in 1980, Goldstein has proved especially adept at enlisting industry in his cause, persuading business leaders that efficiency is in everyone's economic interest. In the 1980s, he helped convince appliance manufacturers that national energy standards, fostered by improved technology, would lower costs for both them and their customers. These conversations eventually resulted in the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987, which set minimum requirements for 12 types of appliances and established a mechanism for raising those standards over time. In Goldstein's home state of California, where efficiency has been a focus of energy policy for 35 years, per capita electricity consumption declined 40 percent more than the rest of the nation from 1973 to 2003.
The future could yield even greater benefits. By simply using existing technologies, argues Goldstein, the United States could reduce its energy use by at least 30 percent in 20 years -- an amount equivalent to the power generated by any single energy source now in use, even oil or coal. The array of common-sense efficiency strategies includes retrofitting existing commercial and residential buildings; designing urban and suburban neighborhoods that give residents easy access to public transit and in which stores, schools, and workplaces are within walkable or bikeable distances, thus cutting down on driving time and fuel consumption; stronger manufacturing standards for appliances; and regulatory incentives that allow utilities (and their customers) to reap substantial financial benefits by reducing energy consumption.
Goldstein is optimistic that these win-win solutions, once understood, will be found "surprisingly attractive," as he puts it, by both liberals and conservatives -- indeed, by anyone with an open mind.
