A novel approach to energy crises

Daniel Akst, a member of Newsday’s editorial board, is the author of “We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess.”

OK, show of hands. Now that Japan is battling to contain a reactor crisis, how many of us think nuclear power is too dangerous to use?

That's a lot of hands! Good, fine. Now how many decided, after the big Gulf of Mexico oil spill, that offshore drilling is just too risky? You folks feel the same about drilling in environmentally sensitive parts of Alaska, right?

OK, now how many oppose injecting water into deep wells, at the risk of contaminating aquifers, in order to tap natural gas reserves? The process is known as hydrofracking, and environmentalists hate it. Maybe you do, too. Did I mention that it would happen way upstate? Maybe that makes it OK; in general, the more distant our energy sources, the better we like them.

Perhaps that's why some Long Islanders objected to a plan seven years ago to put offshore wind turbines near Jones Beach. People often object that these big windmills will ruin the view and pose dangers to birds (although of course not as many dangers as cats, who kill birds by the millions.)

Turbines might be OK far off in the West, but then we'd need more transmission lines. That's the trouble with hydropower as well. Who wants these lines running through the neighborhood?

How about liquefied natural gas? Was anyone in favor of an LNG terminal in the middle of Long Island Sound? Hands up if you were opposed. Just as I thought, a forest of arms.

There's always coal, but most of it burns dirty. And getting at it requires sending miners on a risky daily journey underground. Anything about coal appeal to you, or are we against that, too?

But I'll bet there's one thing we can agree on -- that we all like electricity, as long as it doesn't involve nuclear power, coal, gas, oil or unsightly bird-killing turbines. Hands up if you agree that this is just the kind of power we need.

Your arm is tired, isn't it? But I'm sure you see what I'm getting at. If there's one thing we ought to take away from Japan's grim struggle with its nuclear facilities, it's the realization that, when it comes to energy, we're living in a dream world.

Cheap energy is the basis of modern life, but none of our major forms of energy is truly cheap. Nearly 20,000 Americans die annually from fossil-fuel pollution, the National Academy of Sciences has found, and globally the figure is many times higher.

Then there's climate change. Most scientists believe global warming from burning fossil fuels is causing serious environmental harm. And do we really like sending our hard-earned money to the kind of despotic regimes that produce a great deal of the world's oil?

Since we don't like the energy sources we have, and since solar and the like are years from helping much, what if we tried something different? Something economical, harmless and emission-free? What if we tried ... conservation?

It sounds like sacrilege, but in the past we've had a lot of success with this. Today we use half as much energy to produce a dollar of economic output as we did in the 1970s. And we could do much better. Germany and France use about a third less energy on this basis than we do. The United Kingdom uses half as much.

Conservation won't solve the problem, but it can make the problem quite a bit smaller. Unfortunately, we won't succeed in conserving much until we get higher energy prices -- preferably by raising energy taxes, so we pay the money to ourselves.

Doing so could underwrite research into finding the energy sources of tomorrow, even as it reduced our dependence on the troubling energy sources of today.