Reducing Carbon-Based Energy Consumption through Changes in Household Behavior

Individuals and households make many decisions that are critical in shaping our energy future. As citizens, people favor some policies and oppose others, support some candidates for elective office and not others, write op-eds, comment on blogs, and otherwise engage in political action. They attempt to influence decisions that help determine which kind of local, state, federal, and international policies are adopted, and such policies in turn shape the energy system of the future. People sometimes engage in more direct politics by organizing to support or oppose proposed technological changes, especially the siting of new facilities. For example, the use of nuclear power in the United States stopped expanding in the 1980s largely as a result of massive public opposition to new nuclear power plants.1 Current proposals for developing wind power facilities often face serious local opposition, as do efforts to develop unconventional shale gas deposits and to implement smart electrical grids and smart home metering.2

Such political actions are critically important to the energy futures of democracies. We focus here, however, on the decisions made when individuals and households act as consumers. These consequential decisions are diverse: selecting a car and deciding when to use it, how to maintain it, and how to drive it; buying and using appliances; and modifying and using the basic space and water heating and cooling systems of dwellings. In some cases, these are “nondecisions,” in that actions are taken without much conscious reflection. Often when reflection does occur, it takes no account of energy use per se or is based on poor understanding of the energy consumption and related (for example, climate) consequences of choices and actions. We limit our discussion to decisions that directly affect energy use. Many other consumer decisions, such as food choices or residential location, also have immense consequences for the energy system, although these are harder to analyze. The energy consequences of a dietary choice, for instance, depend on not only the food chosen but how and where it was produced and processed. Some quantitative estimates of the carbon emissions impacts of consumer food choices are beginning to appear; they suggest that at least in Europe, these emissions approach the magnitude of those from direct energy use.3 In this review, we stick to simpler cases, where the actions taken have direct and easily identifiable impacts on energy use.

.  .  .

Endnotes

• 1Eugene A. Rosa and William R. Freudenburg, “Nuclear Power at the Crossroads,” in Public Reactions to Nuclear Power: Are There Critical Masses? ed. William R. Freudenburg and Eugene A. Rosa (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press/American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1984), 3–37.
• 2Eli Kintisch, “Out of Site,” Science 329 (5993) (2010): 788; Denise P. Ferguson and Michael F. Smith, “No Frackin’ Way: Activism in the Marcellus Shale Region,” in Business Research Yearbook: Business and Global Social Responsibility, ed. Margaret A. Goralski and H. Paul LeBlanc III (International Academy of Business Disciplines, 2012), 497–504; David C. Lineweber, “Understanding Residential Customer Support for–and Opposition to–Smart Grid Investments,” The Electricity Journal 24 (2011): 92–100; Ann Cavoukian, Jules Polonetsky, and Christopher Wolf, “SmartPrivacy for the Smart Grid: Embedding Privacy into the Design of Electricity Conservation,” Computer Science 3 (2010): 275–294.
• 3Alejandro D. González, Björn Frostell, and Annika Carlsson-Kanyama, “Protein Efficiency per unit Energy and per unit Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Potential Contribution of Diet Choices to Climate Change Mitigation,” Food Policy 36 (2011): 582–570; M. Berners-Lee, C. Hoolohan, H. Cammack, and C. N. Hewitt, “The Relative Greenhouse Gas Impacts of Realistic Dietary Choices,” Energy Policy 43 (2012): 184–190.