The below was originally written with reference to this thread:
http://www.cleanmpg.com/forums/envir...-usa-3274.html
Besides gasoline, I believe much of the US’s status as front runner can be attributed to the recent acceleration of energy and resources going to residential and commercial construction, and a much greater volume of goods and electronics. We build so much bigger structures these days that require more lumber, wire, nails, pipes, plastic, and concrete—and more heating, cooling and maintaining. And then we stuff them with so many more energy-using and -intensive consumer goods that didn’t exist before. I think in the last 10 years the US seems to have eclipsed even the giant leap it made after WWII. So I’m talking about the energy this construction and goods cost us directly or indirectly, apart from “just” vehicle gasoline consumption. Most of the below is from personal observation, not from any official source but I’m sure it’s not a new concept to anyone, either. I think maybe we’ve just underestimated the extent of space-creep and power-creep that’s happening in our personal lives, and the standard this is setting for the rest of the world.
First, look at the typical new housing development that I’ve seen sprouting everywhere the last few years. A 2500 sq ft house is now considered at the small or “starter” end. I haven’t seen one without at least one bathroom per bedroom. Every master bedroom seems to have 2 walk in closets and usually a dressing area. Master bathroom, don’t even ask, is going to have 2 sinks and sometimes the toilet gets its own room. Children don’t share a room anymore because they each need their own TV, PC and stereo, so got to have a bedroom per kid plus a separate office or hobby room for the parents’ activities. With that you usually get a living room no one uses with a high cathedral ceiling, plus a “family room” where we prefer to hang out. The family room is going to have a flat screen plasma or LCD TV and probably a home theater system and satellite dish—that alone probably needed a separate circuit breaker. In the kitchen the cook wants a commercial Wolf-type range with 30,000 btu burners, granite quarries are pillaged for a kitchen counter we can set a hot pan on and we won’t go into the side-by-side that delivers hot and cold running water and ice without opening the door—noted as an energy saving convenience. (I know refrigerators and other appliances have gotten more efficient over the years but I don’t care if everything has an “energy star” label on it, check off a couple extra circuit breakers just for the kitchen.)
Now—I better say up front that I’m not knocking the person who feels they’ve earned their right to buy the house, the space, the conveniences and the toys they’ve worked hard for, they can afford, and their family undoubtedly deserves. We are in fact blessed to be so fortunate that we
can afford them, as opposed to 90% of the rest of humanity. Just pointing out how Americans have so many choices available, that they don’t seem like “choices” anymore, but necessities. We’ve now all been taught to buy the biggest house we can afford, and that to be discriminating consumers we must buy only the best. So long as you have the space and the money, that mind-set is irresistible.
American-style houses aren’t prevalent (yet) even in First World cities in Europe, Asia and South America. But it’s not taking long—TV and movies always had a way of making whatever they are showing seem like the "norm". The message from Aquos in those cute “lost the golf ball” commercial spots is that their TV is already the cool brand in Europe. The UAE and Malaysia clearly seem to have no hesitation building their astounding commercial, residential and office construction projects the second they have the checkbook to pay for it. Luckily for the world, they have only a fraction of the space and population we do. But it may not be long before Chinese and Indian housewives think their kitchens need a Subzero refrigerator and Wolf range too. Madison Avenue is not going to stand in their way.
It’s not just the new housing to blame for all this energy consumption; it’s the existing ones also. In fact I started thinking about all this last summer when many parts of Los Angeles started having blackouts never seen before—mostly in older neighborhoods like mine that have gentrified. The utility companies tell us the shortages aren’t so much due to a supply shortage, but unexpected demand that occurred within a few short years. It’s what we’ve done to our houses in those few years. LA homeowners have been busy tearing down all their dinky WWII era 1500 sq ft 2 bdrm/1 bath houses and replacing them with the biggest possible house that will legally fit on that lot, usually by building upwards. And it’s not just the extra space added on, it’s all the other goodies that didn’t exist then or were considered too expensive: central a/c, alarm system, electric driveway gate, flat screen, satellite dish, PC, wi-fi, fax, halogen lights, convection oven, wine cooler, trash compactor and whirlpool tub. I can see this for myself. My house is one of the remaining originals (going on almost 100 yrs old) and while the electrical was updated in the ‘60s, I can trip the breaker for the entire upstairs just by using my blow-dryer while the bathroom heater’s on. It’s clear the power substations built around these old neighborhoods never anticipated this happening when these tracts were built 60-90 years ago, and updating that power supply infrastructure is going to be slow and expensive. Still, the home equity boom wasn’t just in LA; that was pretty much national. The rise in home prices over the last 10 years made hundreds of thousands of home owners able to afford updating their homes in previously unimaginable ways.
Sometimes I think of just the small things like how many cell phones we recharge every night that we didn’t have 10 years ago. This data I looked up. The US had 34 million cells in 1995. In 2004 it jumped to 163 million, a five-fold increase. Sure, Hong Kong is #2 in cell phones per capita (after the UAE) and the US is way down the list (#57) but consider—Hong Kong has only about 7 million people.
Now, let’s leave the house and go shopping.
The grocery store is too far to walk to because most recently-built suburban tracts were designed as a winding maze of cul de sacs, with no direct path to a major boulevard. Plus you’d have to (unsafely) walk through an acre of asphalt parking lot just to get in the front door. So even living in a small town you need a car, often one for each driving member. You don’t see this situation in many places but the US. I haven’t yet seen a “small” WalMart, though I hear they’re now using greener construction techniques and hybrid trucks. Ralph’s and even Whole Foods are twice as big as the supermarkets I remember from the ‘60s. And they’re all putting in bakeries and Coffee Beans, even banking services in them. Every few miles down the road of course, expect to see a big box store like Home Depot, Costco or Target. All with high, high ceilings. I used to buy office supplies at this quaint place called a stationery store, usually located in the back of a print shop. Well they went on steroids too. And for some reason, no matter how big they build a Cheesecake Factory—and we have one in LA that’s so big it has an escalator to the 2nd level—I’ve yet to see one without a mob of people waiting outside (huddled around the heat lamps of course) all staring at their pagers.
Then there are the enclosed malls, with a department store anchoring each end, and dozens of stores in between. Because the malls, like our kitchens, fell into the trap of following the latest consumer trends, every 20 years they look outdated and have to be revamped. So we use more resources for those cosmetic updates, plus think of the extra energy impact each time they feel compelled to add an atrium, an indoor ice-skating rink or an IMAX theater. The way these malls are configured with their moat-like parking lots, nobody is going to be walking to one of these either. I’ve seen some fancy large indoor malls in Hong Kong, mixed in with the skyscrapers, but so far they are much more space-dense, go underground in a lot of cases, and most people get to them by public transit.
I recently walked through a new um, doll store in our local mall with my daughter over Christmas, called “American Girl”. I have to say our jaws were on the floor. Actually, calling American Girl a doll store is an understatement, almost a joke. Barbie (my previous standard for conspicuous consumption) doesn’t even begin to compare with AG. This doll store first off is on 3 levels and about the size of a small department store. To give you a better visualization, its predecessor in that space—FAO Schwartz—was half the size. AG has of course the usual room after room of their large plastic dolls for sale, and all their brothers, sisters, friends, clothes and accessories, but there’s also a room dedicated just to full-size girl’s clothing, so the owner can buy an outfit to match her doll’s. It has a beauty salon with 3-4 staff doing nothing but shampoos, blow dry and styling, uh—for the dolls. It has a bookstore devoted to all the books and games involving each character doll. There is also a café serving brunch, lunch, dinner, afternoon tea and separate rooms for birthday parties.
But wait, there’s more: There is a doll hospital where they take and fix/restore broken dolls back to their original condition. There is a museum dedicated to all the various dolls and their stories, arranged in little showcase vignettes. There is a photo studio where you can have your portrait taken with your doll in front of a variety of backgrounds. Finally, the store has its own Broadway-quality theater that puts on full-scale productions based on the dolls’ stories twice a day—complete with actors, music, costumes, lighting and sound. You can buy a whole day’s birthday package for your child, friends and their dolls, including beauty salon, lunch, cake, party and theater show. The word “pilgrimage” has often been used as a descriptor of such a trip. Makes FAO Schwartz look like rookies.
So I can’t begin to estimate the level of resources being consumed--just due to American Girl-- that were never consumed before it existed. Again, whether a store like this is good, worthwhile or necessary is in the eye of the beholder, but regardless, it exists, and appears to be popular with children, and (necessarily) their parents with $. (
Sarcasm leakage alert: that’s because AG’s genius marketing strategy positions their dolls as more “home spun”, historically accurate and even educational; thereby avoiding the appearance of any uh,
superficial materialism). Only three of these stores exist --so far. The current Chicago flagship store will however shortly (what else)
expand into 52k sq ft of space (the old Lord & Taylor department store). And there are two more planned for Dallas (22.5k sq ft) and Atlanta (only 12k sq ft)
Adults, I don’t need to mention, have their own retail therapy centers such as Bloomingdales and Nordstrom’s, Circuit City or Best Buy, which are far more numerous than AG. I can’t think of another European or Asian retail chain that compares with ours in numbers and size of stores. Another shrine of construction and consumption I’m tempted to discuss is Las Vegas but don’t think I can even begin to describe the resources I see being flushed—I mean, used—in its present incarnation. I may be flying close to the sun here, but considering its location in a desert, it’s hard for me not to see similarities between it and Dubai. No wonder the American consumer holds up not only the US’s but indirectly, the world’s economy when we have temples like these devoted to them. As far as the energy that has to service all this production however, it’s starting to remind me of the old joke about trying to pump gas into an idling Hummer.
So that’s why when I read about our “footprint” relative to other countries, I think of these communities of huge houses, kitchens and electronics, the retail centers filled with big box stores, the malls and super-sized restaurants…the cell phones plugged in every night…and consider how more of these are being born every day in suburb after suburb and state after state in this wide and vast country of ours.
It probably has something to do with why I get an irrational thrill when I can glide silently for the last 40 feet in autostop into a face-out parking spot.
but in reality, this is more then I need. My wife on the other hand doesn’t want to downsize in the least and has her mind set on expanding our current home which is already 3X’s the size it needs to be! Well insulated and efficient or not, it is still too big and a huge waste of resources today. I cannot wait to show her your exquisitely written piece so as to hopefully change her ideas. I have her attention when it comes to Global Warming and our complete waste of energy resources but this article might refocus her attention on the wants vs. needs question far better then I ever could.
Re: My Observations Regarding Why the US Leads in Energy Consumption
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