Energy Perceptions

I have joined livingtheamericangreen.org as a contributor. So, when appropriate, I will be cross-posting on both this and that blog.

There certainly is a lot of talk about being green these days. A lot of publicity on a lot of different fronts. Given the media exposure, I think it would be prudent to see how well perceptions match up with reality.

As I am sure many a commentator has noted before, there is a truly disproportionate amount of attention being paid to three letters in particular: M-P-G. A lot of people seem to regard the mpg of your vehicle as a merit badge, a barometer for just how "green" you are. The unfortunate truth is that mpg represents but a small slice of the energy pie, even when considering the transportation sector in isolation. First, we should be concerned not about miles, but about passenger miles. Five people carpooling in a gas-guzzler surely beats five people each driving their own hybrid car. Second, we need to account for the embodied energy in the production of a new vehicle. With regards to transportation, we should ultimately be thinking about how to take cars off the road, and how to get people to share cars, bike, walk or use public transportation.

The outsized attention being paid to vehicular fuel efficiency ought to give us pause. How else do the various loci of media scrutiny skew public attention on energy issues? There are a lot of commercials these days about the wondrous possibilities of a smart electric grid and smart devices (vehicles included). Is all the hoopla deserved? Does it crowd out other energy interests? By many estimates, agriculture accounts for fully one-fifth of U.S. petroleum consumption. But is one-fifth of our attention being directed towards increasing the energy efficiency of agricultural practices? I don't have any numbers to back me up on this, but I would guess not.

Media scrutiny is important because it plays a role in shaping the public conscious and directing public as well as private funds towards the development of various initiatives. It would behoove the "green movement" to think about how the allocation of media attention matches up with underlying realities.