Somebody recently showed me an interesting article by Matt Yglesias called “The case for more energy.” In it, Yglesias suggests that we’ve spent too long focusing on energy austerity—how to get by with less—and efficiency, when a much better goal is to focus on energy abundance. That is, creating so much damn renewable energy that it’s “too cheap to meter.”
It’s a provocative read, and I encourage you to check it out. It really got me thinking—I try to be an optimist, and his vision of the future is one that sounds pretty great and that I hadn’t much considered. But if I’m being honest, part of the reason the article grabbed me was pure self-interest. I had to ask the question:
In a world of abundant, cheap, renewable energy, is it pointless to make your home greener and more efficient?
And not to put too fine a point on it: is this Green Old Home project a big waste of my time and yours?
After some thought, I really don’t believe so. I don’t think there’s anything incompatible about working towards a more efficient, low-waste home and also rooting for a world where the stakes are lower because we’ve found a way to produce way more energy than we need.
I’m fully aware that I might be engaging in some motivated reasoning here, but hear me out. I think there are three compelling reasons to keep pushing towards optimizing your old home for minimal energy consumption, regardless of what the future holds.
1. Your Sphere of Control
At the most basic level, if you care about energy issues, it makes sense to prioritize making your old home more efficient simply because it’s something you can control. On the other hand, odds are that creating technologies to produce a utopia of clean-energy abundance is probably not in your specific wheelhouse.
Whether you’re religious or not, there’s a lot of value in the Richard Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.
Sure, there may be concrete ways that you can work towards a future of limitless energy supply—investing in promising companies, or getting politically involved. But there are definitely ways that you can cut down on your own personal energy demand by making smart improvements to your habits and your home.
2. The Timeline
Probably the most compelling reason to keep working to reduce your house’s energy demands is that the vision of limitless supply may never happen. You’d hate to put all your eggs in that basket and be wrong.
More optimistically, maybe we will indeed reach a point where we have so much cheap renewable energy that all of today’s concerns about efficiency seem trivial. But how long is that going to take to happen? What if it takes 25, 50, or 100 years? While you’re waiting for that future to arrive, it doesn’t make any sense for your leaky old house to be wasting energy and money in the meantime.
Which brings me to my final point:
3. It’s Not Just about Saving the Planet
I hope we do end up in a universe where we’ve essentially solved the problem of energy scarcity. Maybe I’ll see it in my lifetime. But meanwhile, to borrow a line from the Sopranos: I have to live in the world. And although I said above that I try to be an optimist, I’m just cynical enough that I have a hard time imagining a world where I don’t get utility bills, at least as long as I’m on the grid.
If you do it right, making your house more energy efficient almost always aligns with the incentive of saving you money. And the sooner you start improving your old home’s performance, the sooner those improvements are going to pay themselves off and start paying you dividends. And if you’re smart about what you do with those savings, you’ll find yourself wealthier to boot. (Whether or not Einstein really said that compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe, it’s pretty damn amazing.)
Last but not least, don’t forget the other part of Green Old Home’s tagline: Be More Comfortable. A properly sealed and insulated home is always going to be a more comfortable place to live. When you have control over the air and heat entering and exiting your home, you and your family are simply going to enjoy living there more. And that’s going to be true regardless of whether we ever find a way to bring electricity down to $0 per kilowatt-hour.