A bolder vision for American energy

I had an odd dispute with an energy policy wonk a few months ago in which I was saying that electricity is expensive in California — meaning that the price of electricity is high — and he was saying that it’s cheap, by which he meant the average household’s monthly electricity bill is not particularly high.

His point is true because the average California household uses a below-average amount of electricity compared to residents of other states. That’s in part because of energy efficiency standards, but it’s in part a function of weather and infrastructure.

They don’t use a lot of electricity for air conditioning in California because in large swaths of the state it’s generally not that hot in the summer. In the South, where you might think the mild winters would balance out the incredibly hot summers in terms of relative energy use, people tend to have inefficient, “good enough” electric resistance heaters for the occasional cold snaps (compared to places where it’s really cold, where people tend to burn gas or oil for home heat). So even though electricity is much cheaper in Alabama than in California, the average monthly electricity bill in Alabama is a lot higher.

Why does this matter?

Well, it’s a reminder that influential elements of the environmental movement are driven by their roots as a conservation movement. The core desire expressed here is to shrink the human footprint: to use less energy, build less stuff, and live more humbly and in harmony with a somewhat superstitious conception of “nature.”

You also see this in the Sierra Club’s strange journey on immigration, which they used to be very hostile to because of their degrowth values. They eventually dropped their anti-immigration stance and later became good progressive allies to the immigration advocates because of the awkward coalition politics.

But the Sierra Club and many other environmental groups didn’t drop the degrowth ideology.

They often say that they’ve dropped it, and I think they sometimes genuinely believe they’ve dropped it. But whenever the rubber hits the road, they are fundamentally more interested in learning to get by with less than in developing abundant clean energy.

And this is popping up in a serious way as the movement wrestles with rising electricity demand. Building a clean