Thinking about unintended consequences yesterday in my post, reminded me about something I read in the early 90s. I think this article, Road to Nowhere, makes several crucial points about the unintended consequences of ignoring information that is already out there when making decisions. This is especially true about setting an overarching policy for the public, such as the proposals for energy conservation and usage.
In “Road to Nowhere”, by Herbert Inhaber and Harry Saunders, in the New York Academy of Sciences journal The Sciences, November 1994, the authors discuss many aspects of the attempt to conserve energy and their results. (As usual, it is extremely informative to read the whole thing, which is available online even though it was written 13 years ago.)
Inhaber and Saunders consider the possibility of conserving energy by making energy-using machines, vehicles, etc., more efficient at using fuel. They write that in 1865, the British became worried about the future adequacy of their own coal reserves. William Stanley Jennings, the father of mathematical economics, wrote a study of coal use over time and showed that the first steam engines had been unbelievably inefficient and used a vast amount of fuel—coal—to run. This meant that they were expensive, and people didn’t use them very much. But with the advent of truly efficient steam engines, which cost very little to run, there was a tremendous growth in use, and therefore they actually ended up using a lot more coal than would have the earlier engines.
The same thing happened with steel. After years of making expensive, inferior steel, the newly invented Bessemer process was so efficient that it used only a little fuel to make steel, and that meant that everybody was soon thinking up new uses for it. And it happened with electrical appliances, too. Making appliances and other electric and electronic items more efficient in using electricity makes them less expensive, and people buy more and more of them, and use even more electricity. They are always discovering new uses for the efficient systems.
In books I’ve read on the history of technology, you could see this pattern repeating itself. Increased efficiency really didn’t help conserve energy. By making it ever so much cheaper to run the newer engines, railways and steam ships flourished. Better, more efficient kinds of materials were developed to make the engines more efficient by using stronger materials that allowed higher temperatures and therefore higher pressures to be used, led in turn to new kinds of engines, using fossil fuels. This in turn opened the vast spaces of the world to more powerful trains and far better roads for the new motorcars and thus an even greater use of fuels.
The fuel consumption for manufacturing steel increased dramatically because the steel was used for building the skyscrapers that came to dominate city skylines throughout the world, and the magnificent bridges like the Brooklyn Bridge in New York and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. These gigantic structures used truly vast amounts of coal to manufacture enough steel for them, far more than would have been used with the older, less efficient methods.
Increasing the efficiency of using energy in a system increases energy-use beyond what it would have been had the system not been made energy-efficient. This is not to say that we shouldn’t try to conserve energy or to increase the efficiency of systems. But when you are trying to control the use of fuels, you have to go further than the bumper-sticker idea of reducing part of your “carbon footprint” by the conservation of energy through increasing efficiency standards. For all Al Gore’s hysteria or DiCaprio’s cry in what I know he thinks must be a wilderness, increasing fuel efficiency does not decrease fuel usage. Other, more complex answers are necessary. The information is out there, knowledge that can reduce the unintended consequences.
The Left is infatuated with its vision of itself as the savoir of the earth, but it thinks only in dramatic images, and doesn’t care at all about details and hidden consequences. But we must care, or we will be forced into a system that will be harsh and costly and yet not accomplish the things it is supposed to do. In fact, it will make things much, much worse. For us on the Right, this demands of us that we learn as much as we can about how systems really work, that we seek the information that is out there and that we always ask the classic Thomas Sowell question in economics: “And what then?”
The “what then” results, and hidden and unintended consequences are serious problems in decision-making, as exemplified by the arguments about what’s necessary to do to fight “Global Warming”. (I am not dealing with the existence of Global Warming here or its “causes” if it exists, or whether it is going on on Mars, too—by the way, it is—or whether any treaties about it are useful or not. I am warning about the existence of unintended consequences in the act of decision-making.
I want to consider the use of alternative fuels to conserve or reduce fossil fuel energy usage. For instance, electric or partly-electric cars (hybrids). The first thing I always picture is everyone in the country with their one, or two, or more, cars plugged into the power grid overnight, every night. Tens of millions of cars across America getting their charge-up for the daytime. (And that charge-up allowing only a certain number of miles per car before it need a re-charge.) Where would that truly massive amount of energy come from night after night?
Electricity itself is generated by a power plant of some kind, which generates the electricity using other fuels or sources of energy. We would have to vastly increase generation by using solar power (like the huge solar battery field near Boron, CA), oil, coal, gas, nuclear (like that near Oceanside in CA), wind farms (like the field of wind turbines near Tehachapi, CA), dams (like the Boulder Dam I toured once), aqueducts from a height (like the California Aqueduct), etc. Having personally seen all these kinds of sites, I know that these sources of electricity generation are costly and already have problems and/or shortages—for instance in hot weather when air-conditioners and refrigeration systems work hard to keep people, equipment, and food supplies safe.
Let’s look at personal and commercial vehicles and electric power.
Right now we use about 9.7 million barrels of gasoline per day to run gas-powered vehicles. How many new electric car batteries, and replaced batteries after every-so-many miles, would be needed for the electric-powered or part-electric-powered cars to do the work and more that the 9.7 million barrels a day of gas is doing now? How many more generating stations, with their own fuel needs, with their own operational requirements, with their own equipment parts requiring normal usage replacement over time, would be needed? How much more coal, oil, nuclear, and other fuels will we need to generate the extra electricity? How many repair shops? How many stations to provide the electricity away from home or work?
How would the overnight power generation requirements grow? How will the materials to build, equip and run these extra plants and stations (and so on) be made? How transported? How built? All using more energy to do. What about power shortages? (Say the greater San Fernando Valley area experiences a power blackout at night and in the morning over 1.8 million people and 48,000 private sector businesses can’t do anything that requires their vehicles.) These are just some of the problems with making vehicles more “efficient” for our needs (which include limiting emissions into the air) with using an alternative power source. And even then if you could get them using fuel more cleanly and efficiently, we’ve seen that the demand for electricity will go up dramatically even beyond these first needs. And that would mean still more fuels being used to generate the electricity.
Okay, then what about ethanol, which is made from crops such as corn. Here you have another daunting list of problems. In “The conventional wisdom debunked: The ethanol subsidy is worse than you can imagine,” by Robert Bryce in Slate Magazine, there is an awful lot of interesting information about using ethanol made from such crops as corn, starting with:
Making ethanol, they claim, will help America achieve the elusive goal of "energy security" while helping farmers, reducing oil imports, and stimulating the American economy. But the ethanol boosters are ignoring some unpleasant facts: Ethanol won't significantly reduce our oil imports; adding more ethanol to our gas tanks adds further complexity to our motor-fuel supply chain, which will lead to further price hikes at the pump; and, most important (and most astonishing), it may take more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than it actually contains. […] In other words, more ethanol production will increase America's total energy consumption, not decrease it. [The system when made may produce over 8 billion gallons of fuel per year.] Eight billion gallons may sound like a lot, until you realize that America burned more than 134 billion gallons of gasoline last year. By 2012, those 8 billion gallons might reduce America's overall oil consumption by 0.5 percent.
And all this is not to mention the news items I’ve seen lately about the problem that corn is one of the most basic and important food staples of the world. Transferring corn to ethanol-manufacture both removes that important corn from the impoverished countries that desperately need it and depend on it, but it also raises the price of the corn that is available to the food supplies and also the price of other food that then becomes a staple but is no where near as good at nourishing people as corn is. And then there’s the usage of farmlands to grow corn rather than some other needed crop at that site. And corn to feed livestock.
And so on.
I’m only talking about some questions we have to ask before it’s too late, to avoid the unintended consequences of trying to conserve energy by increasing the efficiency of a fuel itself or by replacing it with another fuel. And this is just for vehicles. Then think about the unintended consequences of something as all-encompassing as the way that some politicians and others can’t wait to get their hands on the different versions out there of Global Warming theory, with all of its labyrinth of issues. Imagine it being in “true believer” government regulatory hands, including the power to make laws that punish any individual problems, and the power to control pricing, taxing, ownership of resources, and rationing of supplies.
The mind boggles.
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