Wilcox+Background

MEMO: Background Section (1pg)

Wilcox, Spring 2013

In the nearly forty years since President Carter declared conservation-oriented energy system transition “the moral equivalent of war” governance and advocacy institutions have mounted numerous national, state, and local conservation and efficiency campaigns, and energy efficiency, conservation, and environmental protection enjoy widespread public support. However, Americans as a group continue to live in ways that are highly energy intensive compared to the global average. While support for energy efficiency, conservation, and renewable energy has risen and fallen in official Federal and State level discourses—and budgets—during this time, the imperative to reduce carbon-intensive energy use is only growing more urgent as the costs to human and environmental health and well being from climate change, fuel extraction, and energy system operation increase. Despite trends that suggest residential per capita energy use has leveled off since the 1970’s—a development largely attributed to Federal and State investments in energy efficiency codes, standards, and programs—the U.S. seems to have reached a plateau in significant residential energy consumption reductions (EIA 2011a). Indeed, the U.S. continues to remain a “high energy regime” (Nye 1999), using 20% of the world total energy supply and nine times the residential energy per capita than China (EIA 2011).

Decarbonizing and domesticating our energy system is an incredibly complex task, and policy discourses have generally emphasized technological innovation aimed at increasing efficiency, reducing pollution (including greenhouse gas emissions), and lowering the cost of renewable energy technologies. Alongside, but often subordinate to, this dominant, technocentric, policy thrust, some policy scholars, program managers, and designers have recognized the need to address the human dimensions of energy use, primarily through the promotion of energy conservation behaviors (Stern and Aronson 1984, IDEO 2009). This school of thought, which emerged following the 1970s energy crisis, recognizes that humans rarely act in classically rational ways and seeks to leverage social and environmental psychological principles in the design and implementation of energy policy at the household level. Official attention to the behavioral aspects of energy use has risen and fallen over the years, though currently, interest in behavioral economics and community-based social marketing (McKenzie-Mohr 1999), both of which employ social psychological principles, are of increasing interest among some in the energy policy community.

Two persistent problems endemic to energy use reduction efforts have been documented by economic and social psychological research. The “rebound effect” (Sorrel and Herring 2009, Jenkins, Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2011) refers to instances when savings from energy efficiency are expended in other energy intensive ways. The “value-action gap” (Hobson 2001, Thaler and Sunstein 2008) identifies how pro-environmental values fail to translate into meaningful action to reduce negative environmental impacts. These problems speak to conceptual gaps in both dominant and subordinate energy discourses. Each of these phenomena calls into question the conventional wisdom behind everyday energy interventions. While rebound dynamics highlight the unintended environmental consequences of increasingly energy efficient technologies, the value-action gap suggests that habits, norms, and routines are more powerful forces than knowledge, persuasion, and conviction in altering energy intensive practices. Such problems point to the complexities involved in energy system transition and the need for creative and comprehensive institutional interventions to address and curb the drivers of demand for carbon-intensive energy services.