I'm a Stranger Here Myself (22 page)

One of the most arresting statistics that I have seen in a good while is that 5 percent of all the energy used in the United States is consumed by computers that have been left on all night.

I can’t confirm this personally, but I can certainly tell you that on numerous occasions I have glanced out hotel room windows late at night, in a variety of cities, and been struck by the fact that lots of lights in lots of office buildings are still burning, and that computer screens are indeed flickering.

Why don’t we turn these things off? For the same reason, I suppose, that so many people leave their car engines running when they pop into a friend’s house, or keep lights blazing in unoccupied rooms, or have the central heating cranked up to a level that would scandalize a Finnish sauna housekeeper— because, in short, electricity, gasoline, and other energy sources are so relatively cheap, and have been for so long, that it doesn’t occur to behave otherwise.

Why, after all, go through the irksome annoyance of waiting twenty seconds for your computer to warm up each morning when you can have it at your immediate beck by leaving it on all night?

We are terribly—no, we are ludicrously—wasteful of resources in this country. The average American uses twice as much energy to get through life as the average European. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, we consume 20 percent of its resources. These are not statistics to be proud of.

In 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the United States, along with other developed nations, agreed to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2000. This wasn’t a promise to think about it. It was a promise to do it.

In the event, greenhouse emissions in the United States have continued relentlessly to rise—by 8 percent overall since the Rio summit, by 3.4 percent in 1996 alone. In short, we haven’t done what we promised. We haven’t tried to do it. We haven’t even pretended to try to do it. Frankly, I’m not sure that we are even capable of trying to pretend to try to do it.

Consider this: In 1992, Congress decreed that before the end of the decade half of all government vehicles should be able to run on alternative fuels. To comply with this directive, the Postal Service bought ten thousand new trucks and, at a cost of $4,000 each, modified them to run on ethanol as well as gasoline. In May 1998, the first of 350 such trucks ordered for the New York City area began to be delivered. Unfortunately, none of these vehicles is ever likely to use ethanol for the simple reason that the nearest ethanol station is in Indianapolis. When asked by a reporter for the
New York Times
whether anyone anywhere at any level of government had any intention of doing anything about this, the answer was no. Meanwhile, the Postal Service, along with all other federal agencies, will continue to spend $4,000 a pop of taxpayers’ money modifying trucks to run on a fuel on which almost none of them will ever run.

What the administration
has
done in terms of greenhouse emissions is introduce a set of voluntary compliance standards that industries are entirely free to ignore if they wish, and mostly of course they so wish. Now President Clinton wants another fifteen or sixteen years before rolling back emissions to 1990 levels.

Perhaps I am misreading the national mood, but it is hard to find anyone who seems much exercised about this. Increasingly there is even a kind of antagonism to the idea of conservation, particularly if there is a cost attached. A recent survey of twenty-seven thousand people around the globe by a Canadian group called Environics International found that in virtually every advanced nation people were willing to sacrifice at least a small measure of economic growth for cleaner air and a healthier environment. The one exception: the United States. It seems madness to think that a society would rate marginal economic growth above a livable earth, but there you are. I had always assumed that the reason to build a bigger economy was to make the world a better place. In fact, it appears, the reason to build a bigger economy is, well, to build a bigger economy.

Even President Clinton’s cautiously inventive proposals to transfer the problem to a successor four terms down the road have met with fervent opposition. A coalition of industrialists and other interested parties called the Global Climate Information Project has raised $13 million to fight pretty much any initiative that gets in the way of their smokestacks. It has been running national radio ads grimly warning that if the president’s new energy plans are implemented gasoline prices could go up by fifty cents a gallon.

Never mind that that figure is probably inflated. Never mind that even if it were true we would still be paying but a fraction for gasoline what people in other rich nations pay. Never mind that it would bring benefits that everyone could enjoy. Never mind any of that. Mention an increase in gas prices for any purpose at all and—however small the amount, however sound the reason—most people will instinctively resist.

What is saddest about all this is that a good part of these goals to cut greenhouse emissions could be met without any cost at all if we merely modified our extravagance. It has been estimated that the nation as a whole wastes about $300 billion of energy a year. We are not talking here about energy that could be saved by investing in new technologies. We are talking about energy that could be saved just by switching things off or turning things down.

Take hot water. Nearly every household in Europe has a timer device on its hot water system. Since people clearly don’t need hot water when they are at work or fast asleep, there isn’t any need to keep the tank heated, so the system shuts down. Here in America I don’t know how to switch off my hot water tank. I don’t know that it is possible. There is piping hot water in our house twenty-four hours a day, even when we are far away on vacation. Doesn’t seem to make much sense.

According to
U.S. News & World Report,
the United States must maintain the equivalent of five nuclear power plants just to power equipment and appliances that are on but not being used—lights burning in rooms that are unoccupied, computers left on when people go to lunch or home for the night, all those mute, wall-mounted TVs that flicker unwatched in the corners of bars.

In England, we had something called an off-peak energy plan. The idea was to encourage users to shift some of their electricity consumption to nighttime hours, thus spreading demand. So we bought timer devices and ran our washing machine, dryer, and dishwasher in the middle of the night and were rewarded for this small inconvenience with big savings on the electricity consumed during those hours. I would be pleased to continue the practice now, if only some utility would offer it to me.

I am not suggesting that the British are outstandingly virtuous with regard to conservation—in some areas like recycling and insulation their behavior is nothing to write home about—merely that these are simple ideas that could be easily embraced here.

It would be really nice, of course, to see a wholesale change in direction. I would dearly love, for instance, to be able to take a train to Boston. Every time I travel to Boston now, I have either to drive myself or sit in a cramped minibus with up to nine other hapless souls for two and a half hours. How nice it would be to speed across the New England land-scape in the club car of a nicely appointed train, like Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Once, not so long ago, it was possible to travel all over New England by train. According to a body called the Conservation Law Foundation, the whole of the rail system in northern New England could be restored for $500 million. That’s a lot of money, of course, but consider this: As I write, Burlington, Vermont, is spending $100 million on a single twelve-mile loop road.

I don’t know how worrying global warming is. No one does. I don’t know how much we are imperiling our futures by being so singularly casual in our consumption. But I can tell you this. Last year I spent a good deal of time hiking the Appalachian Trail. In Virginia, where the trail runs through Shenandoah National Park, it was still possible when I was a teenager to see Washington, D.C., seventy-five miles away, on clear days. Now, in even the most favorable conditions, visibility is less than half that. In hot, smoggy weather, it can be as little as two miles.

The forest that covers the Appalachian Mountains is one of the richest and loveliest on Earth. A single valley in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park can contain more species of native trees than the whole of western Europe. A lot of those trees are in trouble. The stress of dealing with acid rain and other airborne pollutants leaves them helplessly vulnerable to diseases and pests. Oaks, hickories, and maples are dying in unsettling numbers. The flowering dogwood—one of the most beautiful trees in the American South, and once one of the most abundant—is on the brink of extinction. The American hemlock seems poised to follow.

This may be only a modest prelude. If global temperatures rise by four degrees Centigrade over the next half century, as some scientists confidently predict, then all of the trees of Shenandoah National Park and the Smokies, and for hundreds of miles beyond, will die. In two generations one of the last great forests of the temperate world will turn into featureless grassland.

I think that’s worth turning off a few computers for, don’t you?

Our subject today is convenience in modern life, and how the more convenient things supposedly get the more inconvenient they actually become.

I was thinking about this the other day (I’m always thinking, you know—it’s amazing) when I took my younger children to a Burger King for lunch, and there was a line of about a dozen cars at the drive-through window.

We parked, went in, ordered and ate, and came out again—all in about ten minutes. As we departed, I noticed that a white pickup truck that had been last in line when we arrived was still four or five vehicles back from collecting its food. It would have been much quicker if the driver had parked like us and gone in and gotten his food himself, but he would never have thought that way because the drive-through window is
supposed
to be speedier and more convenient.

You see my point, of course. We have become so attached to the idea of convenience that we will put up with almost any inconvenience to achieve it. It’s crazy, I know, but there you are. The things that are supposed to speed up and simplify our lives more often than not actually have the opposite effect, and this set me to thinking (see, there I go again) why this should be.

Americans have always had a strange devotion to the idea of assisted ease. It is an interesting fact that nearly all the everyday inventions that take the struggle out of life—escalators, automatic doors, elevators, refrigerators, washing machines, frozen food, fast food, microwaves, fax machines—were invented here or at least first widely embraced here. Americans grew so used to a steady stream of labor-saving advances, in fact, that by the 1960s they had come to expect machines to do pretty much everything for them.

The moment I first realized that this was not necessarily a good idea was at Christmas of 1961 or ’62 when my father was given an electric carving knife. It was an early model and, like most prototypes, was both bulky and rather formidable. Perhaps my memory is playing tricks on me, but I have a clear impression of him donning goggles and heavy rubber gloves before plugging it in. What is certainly true is that when he sank it into the turkey, it didn’t so much carve the bird as send pieces of it flying everywhere in a kind of fleshy white spray, before the blade struck the plate with a shower of blue sparks, and the whole thing flew out of his hands, and skittered across the table and out of the room, like a creature from a
Gremlins
movie. We never saw it again, though we used to sometimes hear it thumping against table legs late at night.

Like most patriotic Americans, my father was forever buying gizmos that proved to be disastrous—clothes steamers that failed to take the wrinkles out of suits but had wallpaper falling off the walls in whole sheets, an electric pencil sharpener that could consume an entire pencil (including the metal ferrule and the tips of your fingers if you weren’t real quick) in less than a second, a water pick that was so lively it required two people to hold and left the bathroom looking like the inside of a car wash, and much else.

But all of this was nothing compared with the situation today. We are now surrounded with items that do things for us to an almost absurd degree—automatic cat food dispensers, electric juicers and can openers, refrigerators that make their own ice cubes, automatic car windows, disposable toothbrushes that come with the toothpaste already loaded. People are so addicted to convenience that they have become trapped in a vicious circle: The more labor-saving appliances they acquire, the harder they need to work; the harder they work, the more labor-saving appliances they feel they need to acquire.

There is almost nothing, no matter how ridiculous, that won’t find a receptive audience so long as it promises to provide some kind of relief from effort. I recently saw advertised, for $39.95, a “lighted, revolving tie rack.” You push a button and it parades each of your ties before you, saving you the exhausting ordeal of making your selection by hand.

Our house in New Hampshire came replete with contraptions installed by earlier owners, all of them designed to make life that little bit easier. Up to a point, a few actually do, but most are just kind of wondrously useless. One of our rooms, for instance, came equipped with automatic curtains. You flick a switch on the wall and four pairs of curtains effortlessly open or close. That, at any rate, is the idea. In practice what happens is that one curtain opens, one closes, one opens and closes repeatedly, and one does nothing at all for five minutes and then starts to emit smoke. We haven’t gone anywhere near them since the first week.

something else we inherited was an automatic garage door. In theory, this sounds wonderful and even rather classy. You sweep into the driveway, push a button on a remote control device, and then, depending on your sense of timing, pull into the garage smoothly or take the bottom panel off the door. Then you flick the button again and the door shuts behind you, and anyone walking past thinks: “Wow! Classy guy!”

In reality, I have found, our garage door will close only when it is certain of crushing a tricycle or mangling a rake and, once closed, will not open again until I get up on a chair and do something temperamental to the control box with a screw-driver and hammer, and eventually call in the garage door repairman, a fellow named Jake who has been taking his vacations in the Maldives since we became his clients. I have given Jake more money than I earned in my first four years out of college, and still I don’t have a garage door I can count on.

You see my point again. Automatic curtains and garage doors, electric cat food dispensers and revolving tie racks only
seem
to make life easier. In fact, all they do is add expense and complication to your existence.

And therein lie our two important lessons of the day. First, never forget that the first syllable of convenience is
con
. And second, send your children to garage door–repair school.