Less is the new more

Last Saturday, I mentioned that energy companies have traditionally priced their products like other commodities--trying to sell more, offering discounts to large consumers, etc. How to turn that business model around, so that there's an economic incentive to conserve?

Well, today's NYT reports on efforts in Sacramento to use status competition to encourage conservation among domestic consumers, by letting them know how they stack up against their neighbors.

Last April, it began sending out statements to 35,000 randomly selected customers, rating them on their energy use compared with that of neighbors in 100 homes of similar size that used the same heating fuel. The customers were also compared with the 20 neighbors who were especially efficient in saving energy.

Customers who scored high earned two smiley faces on their statements. “Good” conservation got a single smiley face. Customers like Mr. Dyer, whose energy use put him in the “below average” category, got frowns, but the utility stopped using them after a few customers got upset.

...

Competition among homeowners is still rare, but is becoming more widespread. In Massachusetts, the BrainShift Foundation, a nonprofit that uses games to raise environmental awareness, recruited towns to compete in a reality series, called “Energy Smackdown,” which is shown on a local cable station.

At the start of this year’s season, 10 families from Cambridge, Medford and Arlington formed teams and competed against one another in conservation categories that included waste, heating fuel, electricity and food. Patty Nolan, 51, who lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children, agreed to participate because, she said, although family members thought of themselves as “environmentally conscious,” they knew they could be doing more.

But her motives shifted after eight months of trash weigh-ins and comparative meter readings.

“At the beginning, the competition wasn’t what interested me,” Ms. Nolan said, “but then when we lost a challenge to Arlington by one pound of carbon, I realized I really wanted to win.”

This still isn't quite the shift we need: it's still about individualized savings, rather than pricing mechanisms. But it does move towards making consumption levels a social project.

Efficiency

Over at the Gristmill, Peter Meyer gives us a taste of the new environmental pragmatism:

"Yes, we can have economic revitalization that serves long-term sustainability in the process. But we need to transition carefully and to avoid generating unnecessary economic, political, social, and environmental costs as we change. Like it or not, that means:

• Not closing all coal mines and coal and nuclear generating plants tomorrow, or next week, or next year (Yes, we can stop building them, but we need to be building their alternatives.)
  

• Not calling for federally mandated congestion pricing or anti-sprawl measures or other actions as conditions for federal aid to states and cities (at least not yet ... the time will come)


• Not telling people to drastically change their lifestyles now (though eventually they will)


• Not spiking CAFE standards for auto fuel efficiency as far as we'd like and know to be technologically feasible, because U.S. manufacturers will find it harder to jump that high than will their competitors, and we can't afford more U.S. job losses right now


• Not taxing carbon or oil or gas anywhere near where it should rationally be taxed to include their externalities (economic as well as environmental), unless we can protect households and businesses from those additional costs when they don't have the capital to invest in avoiding them


• Recognizing that equity breeds efficiency by, at a minimum, lowering resistance from possible allies.

Change is coming, folks, and I'm all for that ... but it won't be easy, and ideological -- or environmental -- purity won't get us where we need to go, not without autocratic control. (Do you want that? We had a taste of tendencies in that direction for the past eight years.)