I've written about energy conservation issues several times on this blog and in its precursor rants section. This is a topic that is pertinent to the economics of the hardware upon which we ply our trade.

I was advocating compact fluorescent lightbulbs six years ago, and have documented my family's power usage along with some of the steps we've taken to reduce it.

We turn off the (100% CF) lights when we don't need them, intelligently bank cooler outdoor air on summer nights to limit air conditioning, and we try to conscientiously reduce the energy we're using. When we buy electronics and appliances, the Energy Star rating tops our criteria list.

This year we even marginally supplemented our food purchases with the produce of a humble home vegetable garden (doing our very small part to reduce the energy used to grow and transport it from elsewhere, not to mention that a small patch of once slow-growing grass now hosts fast-growing, carbon-trapping vegetables).

We are far from a great example of a carbon-neutral lifestyle, however. As I write this my wife and children are travelling in our fuel-guzzling, 5000lb 255hp minivan to a children's museum some two hundred kilometers away. We don't forsake modern conveniences like televisions and gaming systems, and of course I wouldn't go without my computers. We live in a suburban home, adding to suburban sprawl, and often commute long distances.

Compared to an urban dweller living in a tiny condo, commuting to work via the foot express, we're gluttonous power pigs. We're lazy environmentalists of convenience.

It's this pragmatism that has me questioning a lot of the enviro-nonsense that has become a religion as of late. Many, it seems, feel a perverse, corrupting need to polarize their position -- as has sadly become the norm in many areas of debate -- simplistically categorizing everything into absolute right or wrongs.

Often there are only grays.

The 10,000 mile Diet

Buying local, for instance, is a meme that has taken hold in enviro-circles. Simply ensuring that whatever plastic junk you're buying wasn't shipped overseas, and that your strawberries didn't come from California (or, if you're in California, that they didn't come from wherever else grows strawberries) and you're doing your part to save the Earth, the meme goes.

Is that true?

If one only considers final shipment, then local farmers have an obvious enviro-advantage. Yet that energy analysis seems simplistic: What if the alternative is grown on larger farms with a longer, more suitable growing season? What if the economy of scale of remote growers allows for increased automation and efficiency?

Is it really saving the environment if you're buying from small, labour- and energy-intensive farms where crops have to be coerced through the short growing season via considerable energy and chemical assistance? Where the ill-suited soil needs continuous supplementation?

I'm not providing answers -- I don't have the numbers -- but the energy that goes into making the foods that you eat and the products that you buy is much more complex than simply measuring the fuel that went into the boat or truck that it rode to your grocery store. Given the low cost of large plastic toys from China, for example, it's clear by simple economics that very little energy was necessary to ship it across the ocean (and that might reduce further as shipping companies look to save costs).

False Smugity

Automobiles are another area of the whole environment debate that seems to be much more complex than often perceived. Consider the media's coverage of Al Gore the IIIrd, son of Al Gore the IInd, getting caught speeding down a California freeway at 100mph in a Toyota Prius. Many of the news reports described the car as "environmentally friendly", and this has been a recurring description when describing hybrid vehicles.

The Prius is "environmentally friendly" only by the same confused logic that would deem a lit M-80 "hand friendly" relative to a stick of dynamite.

The Prius still requires roadways (and contributes to the clogging of the same) and parking lots and rubber tire factories and mines. The perceived moral righteousness of the Prius and its ilk might even exacerbate the problem of urban sprawl, making people feel almost heroic to commute 40km to work in their "environmentally friendly" hybrid car. Worse, it still requires copious amounts of energy to move its 3000lbs around -- not least of which is a giant array of batteries -- often with a smug driver as the lone occupant, contributing to the growing trend of smug pollution (as South Park hilariously characterized it).

The sort of absurd moralism about hybrid cars -- the kind that has the media declaring a 3000lb car "environmentally friendly", and the rich and powerful can gain environment credibility by being sighted in a hybrid (just ignore the numerous mansions and private jets...they were seen in a Prius!) -- is how you end up with absurdist theater like this.

The Prius is but one example (and I don't mean to pick on hybrid cars. All else remaining the same they're a definite improvement. Definitely better than the hilarious large older car I saw roaring down the highway yesterday, prominent "Boycott Gas!" sticker on the back). Many recent stories have praised absurdly high mileage vehicles, deep in the article noting that much of the vehicle's energy was supplied via an unmeasured draw from a household electric socket. That's akin to claiming that your 1984 Chevy Citation gets great mileage by going half of its kilometers slung on the back of a tow truck. That sort of energy-fraud is becoming far too common.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

Consider also how the so-called law of unintended consequences rears its head when you improve the operating costs (both economic and moral) of an activity: A driver of a fuel-guzzling SUV is likely more apprehensive about long drives, knowing how the exorbitant fuel costs will punish their wallet. Reduce the moral and economic costs, however, by replacing their vehicle with a more efficient model, and suddenly longer commutes and family drives become acceptable again, completely negating any energy savings.

Here in Ontario the power grid's supply barely exceeds normal consumption: Decades of Not-In-My-Backyardism and cost cutting has the province importing power during peak loads. To reduce demand, reducing imports and staving off the building of expensive new power plants, the province has been offering rebates on energy star appliances, and direct rebates on things like LED Christmas lights. The latter makes for an interesting study: I suspect the super-efficient LED lights have many consumers bulking their Christmas display up with more lights, and then leaving them on longer. That is the rough conclusion of some small studies done on behalf of the utility, coming to the conclusion that the programs did nothing to reduce consumption. But it did help make for a more colourful Christmas display.

I don't pretend to know the answers, or to have all of the numbers to declare basic truths about energy consumption (other than "less overall is better than more overall"), but I do know enough to know that it's much more complex than the superficial, naive analysis commonly repeated.