The Inevitability Of DeGrowth

[charleshughsmith]

Even though we don't know precisely how the future will unfold, we know a few things about it:

1. Of the 7.5 billion humans on the planet, virtually every individual wants to enjoy a high-energy consumption “middle-class” lifestyle. As a generous estimate, 1.5 billion people enjoy a high-energy consumption lifestyle today; the remaining six billion are aspirants hungry for all the goodies enjoyed by the 1.5 billion—all goodies based on affordable, abundant energy.
2. Our dependence on debt to fuel growth—more extraction of resources, more energy, more manufacturing, more consumption and more earned income to pay for all this expansion of debt and consumption—has built-in limits: debt accrues interest and principal payments, which reduce the remaining income available to spend on consumption.  Our dependence on fast-rising debt just to maintain low rates of growth eventually limits our ability to pay for more consumption/growth. When most income is devoted to servicing debt, there isn’t enough left to buy more stuff or support additional debt.
3. The debt needed to move the growth needle is expanding at a much higher rate than the growth it generates. While growth is stagnant, debt is expanding by leaps and bounds to unprecedented levels. (Global Debt Hits A New Record High Of $217 Trillion; 327% Of GDP)
4. Wages are stagnating for the bottom 90% of the workforce. We can quibble about the causes, but there is no plausible evidence to support a belief that this trend will magically reverse.
5. The cost of the most valuable energy--high-density, easy to transport—will slowly but surely become more expensive as the cheap, easy-to-extract energy sources are depleted, notwithstanding the temporary boost provided by the fast-depleting wells of the fracking “miracle.”
6. There are limits on our exploitation of resources such as fresh water and wild fisheries. Humans can print currency (money) but we can’t print fresh water, energy, wild fisheries, etc. If one unit of currency currently buys one liter of petrol, printing 10 more units of money doesn’t create 10 more liters of fuel.  
7. Creating currency out of thin air isn’t free in our system: all new currency is loaned into existence and accrues interest. As a result, all currency is a claim on future earnings. If we borrow enough from the future, and earnings remain flat or decline, eventually there’s not enough income left to support the debt service and the expanding consumption the status quo needs to keep itself glued together.

What’s the result if we add these up?

Simply put, debt-dependent consumption in a world in which wages stagnate for the bottom 90% and energy costs increase as demand outstrips supply is a system with only one possible end-point: collapse.

The Energy-Debt-Growth Connection

If we accept that energy will get increasingly scarce and costly, and real earned income for the vast majority of households is in structural decline, that means the global economy is in terminal trouble. As this chart shows, energy consumption per capita and GDP (gross domestic product, a measure of growth) are in near-perfect correlation: rising energy consumption per person is the foundation of economic expansion:

If energy consumption per person declines, so does GDP. If GDP/ economic expansion stalls, the global financial system--dependent as it is on the permanent expansion of debt and income to service that debt--has a problem.

In other words, energy, growth and debt are intrinsically linked. Analysts Gail Tverberg and Chris Martenson, among others, have been discussing the causal connections between energy, debt and the financial system for years. Here are recent examples of their work:

- The Looming Energy Shock (PeakProsperity.com)

- The Next Financial Crisis Is Not Far Away (OurFiniteWorld.com)

Simply put, the extraction of fossil fuel energy and the development of alt energy on a vast scale both require an equally vast expansion of interest-accruing debt, both to fund the actual extraction, processing and transport of energy and the consumers’ purchases of all the energy-intensive goods and services that keep the economy expanding.

Right now, oil and natural gas are relatively inexpensive compared to historical peaks, especially when prices are adjusted for inflation. Broadly speaking, the fracking “miracle” (based on expanding debt) has pushed supply temporarily higher than demand. (By temporary I refer to a timeline of a few years.)

The resulting collapse in energy prices, while welcome to consumers, negatively impacts energy companies' ability to seek new reserves (exploration and production), tap existing reserves that cost a lot to extract or build new alternative energy facilities on a large enough scale to matter.

As we witnessed in the 2008 spike in oil prices to $140 per barrel, soaring energy prices crush consumer spending, triggering stagflation and recession.

The solution is a Goldilocks price structure—energy prices that are not too high (for consumers), and not too low (for producers). The problem is that as energy costs ratchet higher while wages stagnate or decline, the financial capability of households and businesses to pay higher energy and debt-service costs and expand their consumption vanishes.

Something has to give: either consumption declines (triggering structural, permanent recession) or the energy sector goes bankrupt as its production costs cannot be covered by the price of energy consumers can afford to pay.

Meanwhile, the skyrocketing debt required to keep the entire status quo glued together is sapping income, reducing the every participants’ ability to pay for future growth.

These realities leave three possible futures:

1. Energy prices move beyond what’s affordable, and the system breaks.
    
2. Debt service costs rise above what’s affordable, and the system breaks.
    
3. Both energy and debt service costs rise in tandem, and the system breaks. 

Magic Technology and Wishful Thinking to the Rescue

The consensus solutions to increasingly unaffordable energy are technological: new technologies are going to make energy abundant and so cheap it’s practically free.

While it’s true that there are many alternative energy technologies in development, the reality is few make financial sense and few have the potential to scale up rapidly enough to replace oil/coal/natural gas.

Take liquid fluoride thorium reactors. The consensus is that this form of nuclear energy is reliable and safe. Yet not a single working thorium reactor is in operation. (An update on the potential of LFTR power - PeakProsperity.com)

How about all those solar power technologies that are going to make electricity abundant and cheap everywhere? Magical thinking is appealing, but the reality is wind and solar make up roughly 2% of all energy consumed globally. These could double, triple, quadruple and then double again, and they wouldn't even begin to replace fossil fuels.

Even if wind/solar became dirt-cheap to manufacture, install and maintain (in the real world, we have to measure total life-cycle costs, not just the initial purchase price), these alt energy sources are intermittent, and that's a big problem for two reasons:

1. Batteries are not “free” and current technologies rely on scarce resources (lithium, etc.)

2. Utilities need to maintain significant power generation capacity to replace these sources during night, cloudy days, when the wind decreases, etc.

This means the entire infrastructure of fossil-fuel generated electricity must be maintained--a very costly requirement.

The other problem with the “electricity and storage will be nearly free” line of magical thinking is much of our transport system can't be switched to electricity--aircraft, container ships, etc.

Virtually every optimistic vision of a cheap, abundant energy future overlooks these problems, or assumes each will effortlessly be solved with some new whiz-bang technology that just so happens to be dirt-cheap.

But not all technologies that work on in lab are affordable and not all technologies scale from the lab to production on a global scale.

Maybe some lab will invent a battery based on a cheap, abundant resource like silicon, but the process of manufacture may still be horrendously expensive, i.e. require a lot of energy and costly machinery. Even if batteries can be manufactured at a low cost, they’re only serving the 2% of total energy being generated by intermittent sources.

Technological solutions are always the "answer," but the actual costs of scaling up new technologies to offset the decline in conventional oil is ignored or glossed over.

If scaling up a new energy source bankrupts consumers and producers alike, is it a solution?

Magical Thinking: Debt Doesn’t Matter

The other line of magical thinking is that debt doesn’t matter, because future growth will always provide us with enough income to service debt.  As noted above, the structural stagnation of earned income means this assumption is no longer valid.

The next line of defense is that super-low interest rates will make debt practically weightless.  But back in the real world, we find even interest rates near zero eventually burden governments and economies. Consider Japan, which has been running a 25+ year experiment in “debt doesn’t matter.” In 2015, the cost of servicing its astronomical debt was the largest single item in the government’s budget:

 

If this is the result of near-zero .1% interest rates, imagine the eventual impact of 1% or (gasp) 2% interest rates—never mind 4% or higher.

Let’s also consider the central bank balance sheet and policy that undergirds this hyper-expansion of debt.  This is a chart of the Bank of Japan’s balance sheet. If this looks sustainable to you, hmm, you might want to dial back your happy-meds:

And what good came of this unprecedented expansion of central bank “monetary easing”? The net result is a near-zero growth stagnant economy burdened with exploding debt remained glued together, arguably rescued not by the central bank but by the collapse of energy prices and the one-off expansion of China’s economy.

These realities force fact-based observers into pondering a future that consumes less energy per person and generates less income and debt per person--a DeGrowth economy.

The status quo—highly centralized, dominated by self-serving elites gorging on a highly unequal distribution of wealth and income--cannot survive a structural decline in earned income and the resulting collapse of debt, or a reduction in energy consumption per capita.  But humanity could do just fine.

In Part 2: A Blueprint For DeGrowth, we provide the blueprint for a DeGrowth economy that’s more sustainable than the status quo, and that leaves magical thinking at the door.

The economic/political paradigm of rising energy consumption and debt required to keep the whole status quo glued together is going away.  We can’t retain the existing socio-political-financial structures of this paradigm and expect to get different results; that’s a pretty good definition of insanity.

We need new models; not just for energy consumption and distribution, but for the creation and distribution of currency and political power. The good news is: they're out there.

Click here to read the report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://peakprosperity.com/the-inevitability-of-degrowth/

[richcabot]

Most things that use fossil fuel such as engines and boilers are built out of steel (iron). It’s plentiful and relatively cheap.
Shifting to an electrically based energy infrastructure will require motors using copper (or perhaps aluminum) which is comparatively scarce and relatively expensive. This ignores the secondary requirements for magnets or storage devices using cobalt, nickel, lithium or other exotic materials.
Converting any significant fraction of the iron based infrastructure to copper/aluminum/nickel/lithium will rapidly hit the limits of those elements availability. This is further complicated by the energy costs of mining these materials as they become progressively more scarce.

[grover]

I’ve used the analogy of a room to describe commerce. The producer sets floor prices and the consumer sets ceiling prices. As long as the ceiling is above the floor, there is room to live. Try living in a room where the ceiling is below the floor.
Producers set the floor price. If the price falls below the floor, the producer can’t profitably operate. Eventually, (without external financial support) they will have to throw in the towel (ie. claim bankruptcy.)
Consumers won’t buy a product if it is too expensive. Of course, a consumer may have different price points for different activities. I may feel that gasoline at current prices is worth buying to transport myself to and from work. I may not feel that it is cheap enough to drive cross country to see the other ocean. When gasoline prices go up further, I may try to ride share or use public transportation to get to and from work. It mostly depends on my available expendable income (after paying for all the commitments - housing, food, vehicles, minimum payments, charbuck’s, etc.) and how desirable the result of consuming appears. The consumer “ceiling” price isn’t as fixed as the producer’s floor price. I wouldn’t balk at $50 per gallon fuel to run my chainsaw (although, I wouldn’t buy much) - I’ve used manual “misery whip” cross cut saws before.
So, what happens when the producer floor is above the consumers’ ceiling? There isn’t any room for commerce to live. Consumers forego the benefits of consumption and producers lack the income from selling a product. Both are poorer as a result. If the cost exceeds the perceived benefits for enough folks, we have a recession. If it persists long enough, we have degrowth.
We may have enough “cheap” energy to avoid the finale this round, but eventually, the wells will run dry enough and we will reset to a new temporary set point. Avoid the last minute rush and prepare for the low energy day that is coming.
Grover

[uncletommy]

Until we stop squandering what we have, perhaps we’ll look to new sources of raw materials. E-waste is the first thing that comes to mind, amongst others:

[ejhr]

Point 7 above is completely wrong. Monetary sovereign nations can create money to buy debt. They do NOT lend it into existence. [Commercial banks create credit and that lending creates a liability which needs to be repaid so that it eventually cancels out]. Sovereign currency is directly injected into the economy as a permanent resource. It is not repaid. Too much money is regulated through taxation.
Buying the debt in this way cancels all claims on future liabilities. This is why saying our debts will be a burden on our children is also false. Our children will have their own debts in their own time.
Private debts are a problem. However when the SHTF moment comes along they will all be zeroed out by government fiat. The government may or may not choose to reimburse the banks. Time will tell on that choice. Steve Keen says the banks will be compensated, and so will people who are not mortgage burdened. They will get a matching bonus.
This will do wonders for the economy.
It’s highly likely financial considerations will not cause the economy to crash. It will be resources scarcity etc.

[jtwalsh]

Charles Hugh Smith’s articles usually take me to a mental place where his explanations of the big picture make me to look at my surroundings to see anecdotal situations in my own life that tie into the larger reality. The “degrowth” economy is already occurring if we stop to look for examples.
The malls and big box stores of the past forty years are emptying and falling into disuse. The luxury of having buildings full of stock, in the hope that someone will purchase, is dissolving in the face of just in time delivery on the consumer level. Merchants can no longer afford to have a multi thousand square foot store, full of goods, in every neighborhood. “Amazon” type delivery systems do away with the need for such stockpiles in so many places. Consumers save time and fuel not having to drive to the “mall” to search through bins and racks in the hope of finding what they want or need. My expectations have to narrow as I can no longer run to the store to buy a new shirt or tie for tonight. I have to plan ahead (even the overnight delivery is still a day away.).
Grocery chains are in hot competition for market share and to preserve their narrow profit margins. In New England, the German food chain, Aldi’s, is rapidly gaining popularity. Their stores primarily have only their house brand goods, whatever fruits and vegetables are in season and certain popular cuts of fresh meat. We have found the quality of Aldi’s house brands to be equal to or better than many “advertised brand name” products. The stores are one third the size of the giant, multi-service, chain stores and are bare of any frills. (In true German fashion, the ones I frequent are so clean you could eat off the floor and are organized such that by the third visit you know where to find anything and those locations do not change.) Without trying, my grocery costs are cut by a third when I shop there. The trade for lower costs is that I may not always get everything I had on my list. I have to lower expectations of supply, learn to buy certain things when they are present, and to arrange my weekly menu to what I find as opposed to what I feel like right now. I also have to accept that my food shopping stop will not let me refill my prescriptions, put gas in my car, rent a movie for the weekend, purchase a ready-made birthday cake, or a bouquet of flowers, have a butcher cut meat to order, or let me sit in the coffee shop drinking a latte. All of that supposed convenience does seem to pale in attraction when I see the total for my grocery bill.
Fast food chains are having trouble keeping market share. The costs of real estate, energy, supplies and labor have reached the point that fast food and chain restaurant prices are no longer “cheep” (unless you buy only the “special deals” which I would bet are loss leaders). In the face of expensive “fast/manufactured food” a whole industry of farm to market restaurants and local breweries are appearing. They fill a perceived need for good, healthy food and beverages not produced by mass farming/brewing that has to be industrially processed and then shipped thousands of miles. Again, if you frequent a farm to market restaurant, or a local brewery, you will not always find what you are looking for at the moment. You must adjust to the flow of the seasons as the supply of ingredients change.
Colleges have reached the point of forcing would be students to seriously examine the cost to benefit ratio of attending. For the first time in forty or fifty years people are seriously questioning the value of a college education. I am an instructor at a two-year community college. We are certainly not at a loss for students, often very smart, capable, students who could gain admittance at any number of four-year colleges. When I ask such students why they are with us, the most common answer is that they appreciate the ability to get college credit and be able to pay for the same by working part time. Most will cite examples of friends and siblings who came out of school with over six figures in debt and either cannot find a position in their field, or who discover that entry level positions pay little and most of their income goes to service their student loan debt.
The number of young adults living with their parents into their thirties is higher than at any time in my life. The cost of housing has risen so fast, and at a rate that greatly outpaces any rise income, that many young people have little choice but to remain in the family household. This has tremendous “degrowth” ramifications for the future. When households are not being formed there is less need for new home construction, for appliances, for furniture, for trades people (carpenters, plumbers, electricians.)
I look at all these “trends” and see that a shift from the ever expanding, credit driven economy of the past fifty years is beginning to occur. This is partly the result of unplanned market forces and, I believe, partly a conscious, or semi-conscious decision on the part of the consuming public. The author of an article I was reading about the decline of “malls” raised the point that changing delivery systems and maxed out credit limits may not be the only reason for the retail collapse. He posited that perhaps the days of “shopping as entertainment” are over for much of the population. Going out to eat, going to the gym, watching Netflix, spending time with family and friends, playing sports, are perhaps becoming more desirable ways for people to spend their time than to be traipsing from store to store at the mall.
Watching this evolution, I sometimes think that we may be able to gradually move to a situation of “degrowth” and reach a point of sustainability without turmoil or chaos. Unfortunately, this is in all likelihood wishful thinking on my part. The more probable reality is that we will only accept sustainability when the same has been forced upon us violently by circumstance.
Thank you Charles for another thought provoking article.
JT

[pipyman]

Confused! Nations, including my own, have to pay interest on their debts. If what you say is correct, why would that be? Wouldn’t they just use their magic wand? That being said, we are already seeing that we are heading toward negative rates, what happens then? Clearly, it is possible for nations to acquire “free” currency, but surely there will be consequences…? If a negative rate is introduced, can we just use our new “income” to pay back earlier debt burdens. In theory, that seems reasonable, in practice? My confetti is on £$

[pipyman]

Confused! Nations, including my own, have to pay interest on their debts. If what you say is correct, why would that be? Wouldn’t they just use their magic wand? That being said, we are already seeing that we are heading toward negative rates, what happens then? Clearly, it is possible for nations to acquire “free” currency, but surely there will be consequences…? If a negative rate is introduced, can we just use our new “income” to pay back earlier debt burdens. In theory, that seems reasonable, in practice? My confetti is on £$

[lesphelps]

richcabot wrote:

Converting any significant fraction of the iron based infrastructure to copper/aluminum/nickel/lithium will rapidly hit the limits of those elements availability. This is further complicated by the energy costs of mining these materials as they become progressively more scarce.

Remember the book "Limits to Growth?" Everywhere you go, these days, you see evidence that we are slamming into limits. We spend the winter in South Central Arizona. On our trip from Wisconsin to Arizona, we have two practical travel options. We can either drive though the heart of the Permian Basin fracking operation in West Texas, or alternatively, we can drive through the smaller Western Oklahoma fracking operation, followed by the cattle feed lots surrounding Amarillo, Texas. It's hard to describe the ugliness of what is happening in those areas. Both routes are peppered with giant windmills. Do you remember 10 or so years ago, when windmills were kind of an interesting novelty. Now, they are a growing eyesore, despite the fact that they produce less than 6% of US electricity. Can you imagine what the landscape will look like when wind produces 25% of US electricity?! Arizona accounts for 60% of US copper production. My recollection from a Bisbee, AZ museum visit a few years ago, is as follows. In the very early 1900s, shaft mining was following veigns of copper with content in the 25-30% range. When the mines were worked out, the tailings from the mine shafts were back filled into the shafts and the mines were closed down. Later, I believe in the late 60s or early 70s, when mining resumed, the best ore available was the tailings that were back filled into the mines. The tailings contained, I believe, somewhere around 3% copper. Today, mines are working ore that contains as low as 0.35% copper. Here are arial views of the copper mines just outside of Green Valley Arizona. There are townhouses literally withing 1/2 mile of the copper sedimentation tanks. The tanks are dams made out of mine tailings, where the waste watetr from the mining operation is pumped. The water evaporates and additional minerals are extracted from the sediment. You can see several sedimentation tanks in the satellite image below. Consider, for a minute, the amount of petroleum based energy that was used to dig the surface mines, in the image below and create the tailing dams. Agriculture and mining account for over 60% of the water consumption in Arizona, where water is a precious commodity indeed.

[charleshughsmith]

JTWalsh, your report really brings home the reality that we’re experiencing “stealth DeGrowth” in many sectors of the economy, sectors that are stagnating, shrinking or being hollowed out beneath the surface happy news about ever-higher GDP and credit expansion.
Heart-rending first-hand reports of homelessness and near homelessness (people living in vehicles that weren’t designed to be fulltime living quarters, to take but one example) are proliferating in social media.
I have long thought our healthcare system may not freeze up in a system-wide failure–it may just stop working in all sorts of little ways: care, meds, etc. will no longer be available without long waits or cash on the barrelhead, etc.
This is a sort of unmanaged DeGrowth, and unfortunately it tends to be what I called a Darwinian Distribution in my latest podcast with Chris-- which Chris pointed out was not quite accurate, as it implied the worthiest will survive, when in point of fact it is the “haves” with the advantages of money and power that will likely avoid the consequences awaiting the have-nots.
As I noted in my comments on that podcast, being “poor” (low income) doesn’t mean misery is necessarily guaranteed. Health, security, stability, community, paid work, local food and energy sources–this is what counts. Globally, many low-income communities manage to generate and maintain these qualities.
Pipyman, you raise an interesting point. What happens if we’re all “paid” with negative rate loans to borrow more? This is certainly one possibility, but who will absorb the losses incurred by paying tens of millions of households to borrow more? The central banks can purchase all the negative-interest loans, and then “print” money to pay us all to borrow more.
This is similar to the central banks buying and retiring all outstanding debt, or to “printing” $12.5 trillion and giving all 125 million US households $100,000 each.
All of these schemes are variations of one action: central bank creates money out of thin air and distributes it to households. This is “helicopter money” and many people expect it as the last-ditch policy “save”.
But if the central bank creates $10 trillion (or heck, make it $100 trillion!) and distributes it into households without generating an equivalent sum of goods and services, the net result will either be inflation of real-world goods or another extension of the current asset bubbles that are threatening to reveal the global financial systems’ intrinsic fragility.
High inflation and asset bubbles are self-destruction mechanisms. The central banks will have to buy every asset and every debt to keep the illusion of solvency alive. But unless they can also set private interest rates and prices, and force households to borrow more, the system will still implode.

[blackeagle]

Not so long ago, I was in a Wal-Mart store. I realized that this store is the perfect example of how omnipresent oil is (or its multitude of derivatives). Look at every aisle, every shelf. What you see are oil products.
Imagine now how a post-oil Wal-Mart will look (assuming they are still there).
The difference between these two views, could be what help you gracefully degrow before everyone as you will consciously eliminate the useless and the superfluous from your life.
Voluntary degrowth is a welcome simplification, not a pain.

[robie-robinson-2 (robie robinson)]

for the stallion, Eyke Sovreign, for 2.5 days. A preg check will announce, my mare is settled.

[nate]

LesPhelps wrote:

On our trip from Wisconsin to Arizona, we have two practical travel options. We can either drive though the heart of the PermianBasin fracking operation in West Texas, or alternatively, we can drive through the smaller Western Oklahoma fracking operation, followed by the cattle feed lots surrounding Amarillo, Texas. It's hard to describe the ugliness of what is happening in those areas. Both routes are peppered with giant windmills. Do you remember 10 or so years ago, when windmills were kind of an interesting novelty. Now, they are a growing eyesore, despite the fact that they produce less than 6% of US electricity. Can you imagine what the landscape will look like when wind produces 25% of US electricity?!

Les - your bitching about traveling through US oil production while consuming oil. Did you stop along and use any electric? How can we fix the problem if we are part of the problem? Let's dig deeper. Aren't you a retired GE engineer?

[chipshot]

I’d be curious to see such a graph from 1960 to the present. Expect it would be uphill, thanks to trickle down economics. The majority of wealth of the 1% is from unearned income, coming at the expense of earned income for the 99%.

[lesphelps]

Nate wrote:

Les - your bitching about traveling through US oil production while consuming oil. Did you stop along and use any electric? How can we fix the problem if we are part of the problem? Let's dig deeper. Aren't you a retired GE engineer?

Bitching, really? Take the drives I mentioned. See if you describe what you see any differently. Sure, I use a car, when it's the only alternative, as it is when relocate for the winter. In order to keep my energy consumption at a level I am comfortable with, I take no other long vacations or trips. I don't use the airlines. When a car is not necessary, I use a bicycle or a scooter. When a car is necesary, one of mine is a hybrid that averages 42 mpg. Looking around me, I can comfortably say I've cut back far more than my neighbors, either in Wisconsin or Arizona. Despite all of that, when it comes to energy consumption, I still don't compare favorably with people from other countries. I have no idea where the retired GE Engineer idea came from. I'm a retired financial manager from a food manufacturing company. Since you brought it up, why don't you share how you have reduced your energy consumption.

[nate]

LesPhelps wrote:

Since you brought it up, why don't you share how you have reduced your energy consumption.

About 6 years ago we consumed ~2 KWh of electric per hour (100% electric). Over the next 4 years we installed an insert, energy efficient washer and drier, freezer and refrigerator. Our local area is firewood rich, so our winter heating bills are extremey low. Our electric consumption dropped to less than 1 KWh per hour. I have been part of a work van pool for over 20 years. Stuffing 10 riders in one vehicle is more efficient than one individual/vehicle. Food - we are the over the top in this area. Grow much of our own food 12 months a year. Share lots with friends, and receive eggs and almonds/walnuts in return. Please share how you have reduced your energy consumption.

[lesphelps]

Only one response per offensive post.

[nate]

LesPhelps wrote:

Only one response per offensive post.

Please share how you have reduced your energy consumption.

[mntnhousepermi]

I would love to have a thread in resilient life abut energy consumption what people use now, ideas of how to reduce. But, it seems like this group isnt into that much ? Or, maybe more people are but dont want to talk about it ?

[mntnhousepermi]

Nate wrote:

LesPhelps wrote:

Since you brought it up, why don't you share how you have reduced your energy consumption.

About 6 years ago we consumed ~2 KWh of electric per hour (100% electric). Over the next 4 years we installed an insert, energy efficient washer and drier, freezer and refrigerator. Our local area is firewood rich, so our winter heating bills are extremey low. Our electric consumption dropped to less than 1 KWh per hour. I have been part of a work van pool for over 20 years. Stuffing 10 riders in one vehicle is more efficient than one individual/vehicle. Food - we are the over the top in this area. Grow much of our own food 12 months a year. Share lots with friends, and receive eggs and almonds/walnuts in return. Please share how you have reduced your energy consumption.

Usually we talk about how many Kwh a day or a month, so you are using 24kWh a day, correct ? How many people in your household ?
Good job on cutting it in half, are there more gains to be made ?
For most of us, transportation is killer, so van pool is a great savings