Amory and Hunter Lovins: Spokespersons for a Sustainable-energy Future
(Page 9 of 15)
July/August 1984
By the Mother Earth News editors
COMMUNITY ECONOMIC RENEWAL
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Another project we're starting work on is local economic renewal. We haven't actually tried it, so our ideas are untested. But this is what we think for right now.
We hope to take the exact process that we've learned from successful community energy projects and apply that in health, food and water, housing, and finance ... so we can help people learn how to work through these problems for themselves.
Perhaps the best example of what a community can do when it sets its mind to it comes from Franklin County, Massachusetts. It's in the northwestern part of the state, an area that is very cold, cloudy, and economically depressed. It has some tenuous farms, old mill towns, a lot of people out of work. In 1975, a group of citizens sat down to look at their energy future. They first looked at their current situation and realized that each household was sending out $1,300 per year to pay for home energy. Added up, that was $23 million a year leaving Franklin County — in that case, going to Venezuela to buy oil. That figure was equal to the payroll of the ten largest employers in the county.
Then the folks took a look at the future. If they took the most optimistic forecast for energy needs and prices in the year 2000, they figured they'd be four times worse off. Each household would be sending out $5,300 per year just to pay for household energy ... in 1975 dollars. To generate enough money in the county to pay for energy, the single largest employer would have to duplicate itself every couple of years until the turn of the century. This was in a region that's losing jobs, not gaining them. It was at that point that the Chamber of Commerce and the utility people turned white and said, "The future's not possible. We can't get there from here."
But residents had worked out something else: how to insulate buildings and stuff up little cracks, to use active and passive solar heating, to provide liquid fuels for vehicles via methanol from the sustained yield of some unused public woodlots, and electricity from microhydro or wind power. They could make all of the devices they would need right in the county: They had machine shops with people crying out for work. The cost of the soft energy path would be $23 million a year, the same amount that they were then paying out , But the difference is that what had been a bucket with a hole in it, a community bleeding to death, became a bucket that's just had the hole plugged. The jobs, the economic multiplier effect, stay in Franklin County.
As we see it now, there are three principles for such economic renewal. The first is to reduce or stop the outflow of money ... in every area. For instance, health care is 9% of the GNP — it's an enormous figure — but it's not health care, it's illness care ... and not even very caring. We think there are least-cost analogies between wellness care and the kinds of things we are doing in energy.
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