Forcing A Look at Carbon Addiction

Economics 101 teaches that a market’s “deadweight loss” occurs where supply and demand fail to meet, resulting in an available good that goes unseen. With Federal climate action dead and Americans increasingly overweight, we seem to be at a loss as to how to stoke an economy that recognizes the value of using less carbon. But we could start by making more elements of our carbon-addicted lifestyle more visible.

We should ennoble jobs in electricity management. A manager at a major Northeastern utility recently told me that his company comes up empty looking for people to fix power lines, install efficient equipment and monitor plants so they waste less power. “They want to stay inside and surf the Internet,” lamented the exec. While his lingo may have needed an update, his assessment needs a broader platform: if the Millennials intend to steer toward sustainable cities, they need to start by ripping out the unsustainable one we’ve inherited. Utilities like the one where my source works already run internships; they should target investment in community colleges and elite colleges, making sure students of chemistry and engineering spend part of the semester out in the field.

But that will produce a trickle of engagement, when the rising temperatures demand a surge. So utilities, landlords and governments should treat energy consumption as an area as fundamental to their mission as diversity or, you know, Wikis. A well-heeled range of diversity consultants and leadership trainers already plies corporate America with modules that teach people to collaborate.  A larger corps of engineers and architects should start teaching people who work in energy, buildings, public services and retail that energy is a variable cost. (Jeff Perlman, CEO of New York’s Bright Power, stirred my thinking in this direction.) Managers who methodically learn to monitor those costs will, if they’re diligent,  hit on higher profits.

And any training that makes a manager more literate in costs will encourage innovation: that’s what got us faster computer chips and better-stocked retail stores. By implanting the idea that energy costs can change with behavior, imaginative landlords and consultants trainers can encourage new displays, gadgets and online games that make it cool to know how to save energy.

I offer these ideas as blips in a gloomy energy outlook. Our problems- obesity that aggravates healthcare costs, sprawl that encourages obesity, oil-subsidy perversity that reinforces sprawl- constitute a self-feeding crisis. But most diseases get weaker when you expose them to light. If Congress won’t lead us to a price on carbon and old-guard industry won’t update itself, interventions like these can supply evidence of harm. That, the economics primer tells us, will lead buyers to demand a new approach.

Let’s turn the lights on and hope the textbook can see the future.