Another Way

Even as science teaches us, constantly, that we are part of the fabric of life, that we have a common genetic heritage with all other living things, we continue to hold nature at arm's length. Predation and cultivation and gathering and even preparation of food have all been outsourced.

Meat in the store has been carefully butchered and wrapped to obscure any association with an actual animal (hence the counterculture movement toward "food with a face"). Novelist Arthur C. Clarke said that when a technology becomes sufficiently advanced it becomes indistinguishable from magic, but he didn't go far enough: The final advancement comes when the technology ceases to register at all. Electricity, accessed through an outlet, becomes an intrinsic property of residential walls, as are the drywall and the studs. Power comes from a switch. We have the consciousness of small children. We can conjure power at will. It's a dream world, but one that might not be sustainable.

I'm guessing that for most of us, the only time we really concentrate on energy is at the gas station, because we can feel the fuel surging through the hose and can see the numbers spinning on the pump. The United States uses about 141 billion gallons of gasoline a year. A barrel of oil yields about 19.6 gallons of gasoline, not far off from the capacity of a typical automobile gas tank. If you were really conscious of your gasoline use, you'd say to yourself: There goes another barrel of oil.

Americans make up 5 percent of the global population, and use about 25 percent of the energy. You wake to an electric alarm clock. You grab your cellphone, which has been charging overnight. Your computer monitor is dark, but it's not really "off," because it's one of those vampire appliances that operate in standby mode all the time (the average house has 20 of them, a Cornell study says). Your hot water heater and air conditioning/heating system have been going strong all night, as has your refrigerator, which is a vintage appliance using 7,000 watts a day (and has been keeping the same half-empty jar of exotic mustard chilled since 2002).

You put coffee beans in an electric grinder that sits next to your electric coffee maker that is adjacent to your electric toaster that is struggling to make a frozen waffle edible. National electricity use has doubled in the past three decades. In 1978, 23 percent of American homes had central air; by 2001, 55 percent had it (the booming Sun Belt is also the AC Belt -- gone are the days when people cooled themselves by sitting six inches from the fan or by lounging on the porch with a glass of iced tea held to the forehead). Appliances are far more energy-efficient these days, but we make up for that by having more appliances. Only 14 percent of homes had a microwave oven in 1980, but two decades later, 86 percent had one. Your energy statistics are right there on your monthly bill, not that you pay attention. In 2004, the typical household in Washington used 757 kilowatt-hours of electricity a month; Maryland and Virginia, with a greater percentage of stand-alone houses, averaged 1,117 and 1,188 kWh, respectively. Where is your meter? Hidden.

So, too, is the meter that monitors the fuel you use for the hot water heater. It's easier to sing in the shower when you're not thinking about the Btus that went into it. The energy the United States used in 2005 came out to about 337 million Btus per person. One British thermal unit is roughly the amount of energy in the head of a match. Collectively, we all struck a lot of matches.

Most of the electricity we use comes from the burning of coal or natural gas, which heats water to create steam and turn turbines. Thus, when you flick on a light, you're responsible for a certain amount of carbon that goes into the air. You can go online and calculate your "carbon footprint." Compared with that of most people in the world, mine is Sasquatch-size. I like to drive in the countryside ("motoring," we call it), fly on business a lot, and although my home seems pretty modest, it's crammed with human beings, including teenagers who leave so many lights on the house can probably be seen from the moon. One Web site calculates that the combustion of a gallon of gas emits 19.55 pounds of atmospheric carbon, and using that standard, driving my six-cylinder Honda Accord for 450 miles from Washington to Earthaven puts about 338 pounds of carbon into the air. Every time my house burns through a kilowatt of electricity, add another 1.32 pounds of CO2. I ran the numbers (guesstimating my household energy use), and the calculator declared that we emitted 47,350 pounds of carbon annually. On a per-capita basis, that's less than the American average but a long way from being "carbon neutral."

"If everyone lived at the lifestyle of Americans," says Jim McMillan, who works on alternative energy for the Department of Energy, "we'd need five planets."

So how do we change? What's practical? Sure, we can lower the thermostat in winter, but do we have to wear a parka and a ski mask around the house? Is the right duration for a hot shower two songs, one song or a couple of stanzas? How much energy is "embedded" in each of our consumer decisions? How much fossil fuel did it take to truck that organic salad from California across the country? Does it make environmental sense to wash a glass instead of tossing a cheap Dixie cup in the trash? Desktop computer or laptop? Paper or plastic?

How should we live?

There are those who argue that using energy is, in fact, good. That the solution to the energy crisis will emerge naturally from a full-throttle economy filled with ingenious people, just one of whom has to invent the new thingamajig that yanks energy from the vacuum of space, or whatever. Believers in the genius of the free market will say we should not fret. It'll work out. Markets solve problems almost magically.

But the business world also tells us to use as much energy as possible. Oil companies are among the planet's largest and most politically influential corporations. The advertising industry pumps billions of dollars a year into what amounts to an organized campaign to make us into frenetic consumers. The implicit message is: Live it up. Keep buying. More is better.