James K. Glassman doesn’t pull any punches in Energetic Ignorance:
There’s no public-policy topic more prone to intellectual abuse than energy.Take conservation. Refrigerators, automobiles, houses, factories? They’re more than twice as efficient in using energy than they were 50 years ago.
Fine. But, despite the conventional political wisdom, conservation has not cut our energy use. To the contrary. “The more efficient our technology, the more energy we consume,” write Peter Huber and Mark Mills in their brilliant new book, The Bottomless Well. Energy becomes more desirable if it works faster and better. “To curb energy consumption, you have to lower efficiency, not raise it.”
Anyway, why on earth would we want to curb energy consumption? Energy abounds, and the leverage is incredible. It’s a tiny proportion of the economy, yet without it, we’d grind to a halt.