From Notes from a Big Country (Bill Bryson, 1998) pp 235-8
ONE OF THE MOST ARRESTING STATISTICS THAT I HAVE SEEN IN A GOOD while is that 5 per cent of all the energy used in the United States is consumed by computers that have been left on all night.
I can’t confirm this personally, but I can certainly tell you that on numerous occasions I have glanced out of hotel room windows late at night, in a variety of American cities, and been struck by the fact that every light in every neighbouring office building is still on, and that computer screens are indeed flickering.
Why don’t Americans turn these things off? For the same reason, I suppose, that so many people here let their car motors run when they pop into a shop, or leave lights blazing all over their house, or keep the central heating cranked up to a level that would scandalize a Finnish sauna house keeper — because, in short, electricity, petrol and other energy sources are so relatively cheap, and have been for so long, that it doesn’t occur to them to behave otherwise.
Why, after all, go through the irksome annoyance of waiting 20 seconds for your computer to warm up each morning when you can have it at your immediate beck by leaving it on all night?
We are terribly — no, we are ludicrously – wasteful of resources in this country. The average American uses twice as much energy to get through life as the average European. With just 5 per cent of the world’s population, we consume 20 per cent of its resources. These are not statistics to be proud of.
In 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the United States, along with other developed nations, agreed to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2000. This wasn’t a promise to think about it. It was a promise to do it.
In the event, greenhouse emissions by the United States have continued relentlessly to rise — by 8 per cent overall since the Rio summit, by 3.4 per cent in 1996 alone. In short, we haven’t done what we promised. We haven’t tried to do it. We haven’t even pretended to try to do it, which is the way we usually deal with these problems. All that the Clinton administration has done is introduce a set of voluntary standards which industries are free to ignore if they wish, and mostly of course they so wish.
There are almost no incentives to conserve here. Alternative energy sources like windpower are not only very low, but actually falling. In 1987 they accounted for about four-tenths of one per cent of the total energy production in the country; today just two-tenths of a per cent.
Now, as you will have read, President Clinton wants another fifteen or sixteen years before rolling back greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels. It is hard to find anyone here who is actually much bothered about this. Increasingly there is even a kind of antagonism to the idea of conservation, particularly if there is a cost attached. A recent survey of 27,000 people around the globe by a Canadian group called Environics International found that in virtually every advanced nation people were willing to sacrifice at least a small measure of economic growth if it meant cleaner air and a healthier environment. The only exception was the United States. It seems madness to think that people would rate a growing economy above an inhabitable earth, but there you are.
Even President Clinton’s inventively cautious proposals to transfer the problem to a successor four terms down the road have met with fervent opposition. A coalition of industrialists and other interested parties called the Global Climate Information Project has raised $13 million to fight pretty much any initiative that gets in the way of their smokestacks. It has been running national radio ads grimly warning that if the President’s new energy plans are implemented petrol prices could go up by 50 cents a gallon.
Never mind that that figure is probably inflated. Never mind that even if it were true Americans would still be paying but a fraction for petrol what people in other rich nations pay. Never mind that it would bring benefits that everyone could enjoy. Never mind any of that. Mention an increase in petrol prices for any purpose at all and – however small the amount, however good the reason – most people in America will instinctively recoil in horror.
What is saddest about all this is that a good part of these goals to cut greenhouse emissions could be met without any cost at all if Americans merely modified their extravagance. It has been estimated that the nation as a whole wastes about $300 billion of energy a year. We are not talking here about energy that could be saved by investing in new technologies. We are talking about energy that could be saved just by switching things off or turning things down. According to US News & World Report, a weekly news magazine, the United States must maintain the equivalent of five nuclear power plants ‘just to power equipment and appliances that are on but not being used ~ video recorders left in permanent standby mode, computers left on when people go to lunch or home for the night, all those mute, wall-mounted TVs that flicker unwatched in the corners of bars.
I don’t know how worrying global warming is. No one does. I don’t know how much we are imperilling our futures by being so singularly casual in our consumption, but I can tell you this. Last year I spent a good deal of time hiking the Appalachian Trail, a long-distance footpath. In Virginia, where the trail runs through Shenandoah National Park, it was still possible when I was a teenager — not so very long ago – to see Washington, DC, 75 miles away, on clear days. Now, in even the most favourable conditions, visibility is less than half that. In hot, smoggy weather, it can be as little as 2 miles.
The Appalachian Mountains are one of the oldest mountain chains in the world and the forest that covers them is one of the richest and loveliest. A single valley in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park can contain more species of native trees than the whole of western Europe. A lot of those trees are in trouble. The stress of dealing with acid rain and other airborne pollutants leaves them helplessly vulnerable to diseases and pests. Oaks, hickories and maples are dying in unsettling numbers. The flowering dogwood – one of the most beautiful trees in the American South, and once one of the most abundant — is on the brink of extinction. The American hemlock seems poised to follow.
This may be only a modest prelude. If global temperatures rise by 4 degrees Centigrade over the next half-century, as some scientists confidently predict, then all of the trees of Shenandoah National Park and the Smokies, and for hundreds of miles beyond, will die. In two generations one of the last great forests of the temperate world will turn into featureless grassland. I think that’s worth turning off a few computers for, don’t you?
14 December 1997
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