In the envisioned 2000-watt society, the quality of life will not suffer at all. On the contrary, aspects such as safety and health, comfort and the development of the individual will in fact improve, and income is expected to rise by around 60 percent over the next fifty years.

Recently, I heard Greg Watson, former director of New Alchemy Institute and now a senior energy advisor to Governor Deval Patrick of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (may G*d preserve her), talk about New Alchemy's 1980 renovation of an old barn into an auditorium and office space.  They had insulated the building so well that only body heat and the waste heat from the necessary appliances were enough to keep the building comfortable.  He called it a zero carbon building using 1980 technology and, when they presented their results to local architects, they were met with almost total disbelief, "How can you heat a building without a furnace?!!!"  I can remember reading a newspaper report about a similar model energy building built in Denmark around 1976 where they had to open all the windows and doors on the night of the opening party because the heat generated by the crowd of people was excessive.  I am sure that both the New Alchemy and Danish buildings had air-to-air heat exchangers to make sure that the indoor air quality was healthy.  We could build these buildings in the 1970s and the 1980s and yet are still not building the majority of our buildings this way in the early  21st century, the decade I call the Uh-ohs (for obvious reasons).  

My own observation, since the 1970s, is that the energy problem has never been a technological problem but a human problem, a problem of vision and will.  What I like about the 2,000-Watt Society is that it gives us a target for an equitable and sustainable, if not restorative, economy.  

My focus has been primarily on survival solar, essential solar, refugee camp solar, solar as civil defense - flashlight, radio or cell phone, extra set of batteries - because I know that scale of renewables is affordable and available now.  Solar IS Civil Defense, I keep on saying (and said to Greg Watson and the staff of my local Congresscritter within the last few weeks).  This is my baseline for the world economy and an improvement in the standard of living for a billion or two of the people who now live on this Earth.  Provide everyone with these things and we have a renewable foundation on which we can build a restorative economy.

2,000-Watts per person per year, equally distributed, is the next step up in that economy.  Within that measure, people all around the world can live full and productive lives of relative comfort, approach a standard of living that the Swiss enjoyed as recently as 1960, not exactly a subsistence era.  Back in the early 1990s, the Dutch Friends of the Earth produced a study which looked at equity and sustainability in a similar way.  They broke down the fair share of all the goods and services available per person per year within a sustainable framework.  My understanding is that this book had quite an effect in Europe but I have never been able to get my hands on a copy to see in detail what their sustainable fair share actually was.  The only nugget I remember is that everyone could have access to one three thousand mile plane flight once every five years, if we were committed to equity and sustainability.  That is what strict justice and the world ecology could provide.

Counting up my own gas and electric use over the past year, I use 2250 kWh, leaving 15,270 kWh to provide for my food, clothing, entertainment, transport (I use bike, foot, public transit, and took one long distance flight), as well as my share of the common infrastructure (roads, water, sewage, and the like).  The Swiss calculate that the individual share of infrastructure amounts to 900 Watts.  If the same ratios apply between their energy use and ours, my share is 3600 Watts or 31,536 kWh right there.  So, I use 33,786 kWh or 3856.85 Watts per year just counting my gas, electricity, and share of our infrastructure.  [My numbers may be off as I am not an engineer, mathematician, or statistician.  Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong.  I do vouch for the gas and electric figure of 2250 kWh but could have gone haywire anywhere along the line from there.]

But now, at least, I have a target.

The canton of Basel-Stadt is a pilot program for the 2,000-Watt Society.  They have been working towards that goal since 2001, concentrating on transportation and urban development.  The general outlines of the Swiss approach is Smarter Living and is as rigorous as one would expect [pdf alert].  Their timeframe is to reach this goal by 2050, halving their carbon emissions in the process.  Personally, I think 2050 is too late and halving carbon emissions is too little.  I agree with Dr James Hansen and Bill McKibben that we have to reach 350 ppm of carbon dioxide and do it as quickly as possible.  Of course, 350 ppm CO2 is only short-hand for all the greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere.  It may be that managing methane and NF3 will be quicker and more effective than concentrating completely on only atmospheric carbon.

The thought experiment of a 2,000-Watt Society is a bracing one but an extremely useful exercise.  Thank you, Sally, for sending me the article.  You helped me find a piece of the puzzle that I'd been missing.  Now I have to do the hard work of improving my practice to live within those limits, 2000 Watts, my fair share of the energy wealth of this Earth.

*More on Ed Mazria and the 2030 Project at
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/3/27/18758/9963
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/5/1/214221/7410

cross-posted to http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/7/23/111419/665