ogies (see 45, 46, 47). There are also obstacles to conservation that derive from attitudes and actions on the part of millions of dispersed and largely ill-informed energy consumers (48, 49), from the calculations of household economics (50), and from the slow emergence of a social ethic that emphasizes frugality in an energyconscious “conserver society” (51, 52, 53). Conservation is neither easy nor cheap, but most studies indicate that investments in energy efficiency yield higher returns and thus have a more positive effect on economic growth than almost any method of providing comparable amounts of additional energy. It will also take time to turn over obsolete assets and to reorganize wasteful social patterns. Virtually all the capital assets of the United States (its houses, office buildings, factories, machinery, automobiles and appliances) were designed in an era of cheap and abundant energy. The nation made enormous social and political accommodations to high energy use — in the location of homes in relation to jobs, in the interstate highway system and the deterioration of railroads and mass transit, in the shape of cities and patterns of regional specialization. There are distinct limits to what can be accomplished in energy-efficiency improvements over the near term, but the direction in which American society is now moving is clear. Union and minority opposition to an all-out program of energy efficiency, while never unanimous (see 54), was based on the belief that energy conservation would necessarily result in slower growth and greater economic deprivation, especially for lower-income groups. Experience suggests that conservation projects may turn out instead to be workable, job-creating alternatives to the costly development of additional energy supplies (55, 56). New industries are beginning to develop around the rising demand for such conserving technologies as cogeneration equipment, heat recuperators, materials recycling, computerized energy management systems, insulation, and weatherizing. “All these conservation schemes,” Barbara Ward (57, p. 129) has written, “could stimulate the demand for labor while actually reducing resource consumption — an almost classic definition of uninflationary growth.” Meanwhile, the economy as a whole is making a gradual adjustment to escalating energy prices by accelerating its ongoing tendencies toward services and information systems and away from the dominance of such energy-intensive heavy industries as steel and aluminum, automobiles and petrochemicals (58). As Daniel Bell (59, p. 26) suggested in his depiction of the United States as a “postindustrial” society, “One can say, without being overly facile, that U.S. Steel is the paradigmatic corporation of the first third of the twentieth century, General Motors of the second third of the century, and IBM of the final third.” More and more of the world's business is being conducted through computer printouts and microprocessors, satellite communication systems and information retrieval. New modes of wealth-generation and technological growth are being developed in electronics and biotechnology, industries that require much less energy input than traditional twentieth-century enterprises (60, 61). The economy of the year 2000 will not be the 1981 economy expanded by some constant. Ongoing developments in technology, resource use and demographics, as well as in social values and human aspirations, indicate that economic activity will expand in more diverse and less energy-intensive ways than was the case during the quarter-century that followed World War II (see also 12, 62). The growth requirements of the next decades can (and probably will) be met by far less per capita energy use than most projections have anticipated. There can be little doubt that this recognition, coming at a time of slowed economic growth, expanding budget deficits and persistent inflation, has severely compromised efforts to gain support for major investments in new energy options such as the SPS system.
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