Most modern suburban houses have 200 amp connections to the grid that allow them safely to consume a peak of 48kW or about 64 horsepower. That’s an incredible amount of energy when figure out that the peak output of a human is about 900 watts or 1.2 hp and that most humans can only put out about 75 watts or 0.1 hp sustained. Even if the typical suburban household uses about 897 kWh a month, that still works to an average draw of 1.22 kW or 1.6 horsepower. No single human can produce that kind of power.

Yet, somehow we expect that amount of electricity to flow to our modern suburban homes, thanks to vast reserves of coal and natural gas, to say nothing of the electricity produced by burning refined uranium using nuclear fission, the damming up of major rivers, and to a much lesser extent wind turbines the size of skyscrapers and those 100 watt and 250 watt solar panels that are seen on the homes of green minded consumers, and some former farm fields and landfills. But those renewable sources are tiny compared to burning coal, natural gas and uranium.

Some in the green community want society to become more electrified, on grounds that electricity generation doesn’t always produce large carbon dioxide and other stack emissions, even if it does consume natural resources, no matter how it is generated. From an engineering standpoint, electricity is an elegant way to power engines, as it’s the most refined source of energy and can be carefully controlled and turned into useful work with minimal waste. But it’s hard to make the numbers add up when you talk about increasing the size of energy grid, and moving it off fossil fuels. You can step up voltages further on grid, to allow it to carry more energy, but that requires expensive changes throughout the grid and there is no natural, low impact source of energy that can produce that amount of energy. Simply said, we need to conserve.

Efficiency is part of conservation, but many of big gains in efficiency have long been worked into the system. Incremental increases are important, but they are not enough. People need to learn how to scale their lives so that their energy consumption is more consistent with what is available naturally. The problem is these changes aren’t easy to adopt because they require often radical changes to lifestyle and rethinking how they live their lives.

I am not hopeful that we will ever address the climate crisis facing our nation, because it turns out consumption and energy is fun. Everybody likes big houses and big cars. They like their houses filled with electronic devices, they want to be warm, have lots of toys. Green activists aren’t getting as much further by just pushing electrification and just greater efficiency gains. Until we adopt a national strategy of much less energy consumption, one that puts us closer to living under much less then a kilowatt hour per capita per day, we aren’t going to make much progress at addressing the climate crisis that will eventually kill off humanity.