For All the Ecological Concern, Economy Drives Energy Use [View All]

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121185399739121799.html

For All the Ecological Concern,
Economy Drives Energy Use

By JEFFREY BALL
May 27, 2008; Page A14

Gasoline consumption is down. Hybrid-car sales are up. Wal-Mart is selling millions of squiggly energy-efficient light bulbs. Proof of a new wave of environmental consciousness?

For all the talk about global warming, what is prompting Americans to rein in their fossil-fuel use isn't the effect of their consumption on the planet. It is the effect on their pocketbooks.

The U.S. is at a "tipping point," with people beginning to factor energy use into everyday decisions, says Lee Schipper, who has studied energy consumption for decades, earlier for Royal Dutch Shell PLC and now as a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. But the driver isn't ecology, he says. "Sadly, it's economics. No pain, no gain."

The distinction between Americans' environmental and economic motives has important implications. It suggests that if energy prices fall again, as they did after the 1970s energy crisis, U.S. consumers might well return to sport-utility vehicles as fast as they are now trading down to smaller cars.

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