I hope it was clear to everyone that Rick Tarara and I are not talking about
the same thing. This topic arose when someone questioned the greatness of the
US. Someone subsequently questioned how this topic was related to Physics.
My suggestion is that in the area of energy efficiency the US is something
less than a world leader. Furthermore, physics, or at least the application
of physics can substantially improve this situation. The defense industry has
for decades been a major employer of physicists and with these jobs shrinking
physicists are going to have to seek other employment. More efficient use of
energy appears to offer the potential for interesting and productive
employment. In fact my own son is employed in this area, working on the
development of a potentially more efficient electric motor.
Rick challanged my interpretation of GNP/energy figures so let me first
offer some more statistics to support my view. The estimates I have seen
generally suggest that in the US 92% of the energy we use is wasted. Obviously
thermodynamics limits the improvements we can make, but even conservative
estimates suggest that we could easily improve this figure to 84%, effectively
doubling the energy available for productive use, or reducing by a factor of
two the energy necessary to maintain our GNP. Some interesting figures to
support this claim: Germany uses 42% less energy than the US to produce a ton
of paper and 32% less to produce a ton of steel.
Rick's figure on total energy use seems to be off. He quotes 1.9*10 exp13 kWh
which comes out to about 65 Quads. However, from the mid 70's to early 90's
we've been in the high 70's to low 80's and are currently around 90 Quads/yr.
His 22 Quad transportation figure is about right and transportation generally
runs around 25% of the total. Of this 60% of the transp. budget (15% of the
total) is from private cars. The remaining 10% of the total is used by
public and commercial transportation, just as I posted earlier. Rick claims
that our so so GNP/energy ratio is because we have a large country with low
population density. I still maintain that this factor alone costs us only a
few %, and is not enough to significantly change our international ranking.
I claim that the real reason our efficiency is not higher is because we are
rich and don't see a real need to improve. We do things we don't need to do,
like live miles from our jobs and commute in private cars, and we do almost
everything we do in a less than optimally efficent fashion. It is this last
issue that I am suggesting the physics community is equipped to address.
I have tried to present this in a moderate version. If you want the full
blown, pull no punches, version read Amory Lovins. I feel he is a bit
extreme and unrealistic, but when 5% of the people account for 22% of the
energy consumed, it's worth thinking about.