Geotimes deadlines dictated that I write this column in July, while
vacationing in Chamonix, France, a picturesque town of 10,000 that sits at 1,036
meters above sea level, directly beneath the 4,807-meter summit of Mont Blanc.
Being surrounded by the Alps and spoiled by inexpensive red wine, frogs legs
and fleeting glimpses of Lance Armstrong’s legs as the Tour de France streams
past, fortuitously add a French accent to my views on energy and the environment.
Mont
Blanc looms over Chamonix, France. Photo by Claudia Schwab.
Cars and houses are smaller and more energy efficient in France. My six-speed
Renault is diesel-powered as are 60 percent of newly registered French cars
(compared with 3 percent in the United States), according to BBC News. Diesel
fuel is 20 percent cheaper than gasoline. I am paying $5 per gallon in Chamonix,
but getting 45 to 50 miles per gallon (mpg). The fleet average fuel efficiency
for European Union vehicles is 42 mpg, for Japan, 47 mpg, and for the United
States, a measly 24 mpg (down from 26 mpg just a few years ago), according to
a 2004 report prepared for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. In the United
States, 97 percent of the people who drove to work in 2000 did so alone, according
to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, compared with 62 percent in 1980.
Americans drove their vehicles almost 10,000 miles each in 2001, compared with
less than 7,000 miles in 1980.
Why these differences? After the oil shocks of the 1970s, the French government
imposed high taxes on petroleum in an effort to decrease the role of oil in
its economy. As a result, there are now countless tangible signs of conservation.
My most recent fill-up in Chamonix was at a sparkling clean, energy-efficient
BP station powered by solar panels. Our Chamonix apartment has a master switch
that we flip whenever we leave to eliminate energy waste. Corridors are typically
unlit. A timer briefly illuminates them as occupants enter and exit. Central
air-conditioning is rarer than the hot, muggy days of this summer’s “canicule”
(dog-days heat wave). In many French homes, individual room thermostats and
space heaters make it possible to only heat areas when people are actually in
them.
France has 59 nuclear installations scattered about the country, which generate
80 percent of its electricity. The United States’ 103 nuclear plants actually
produce more electricity, but less than 20 percent of our total electrical need.
As a result, French per capita carbon dioxide emissions are roughly one-third
of ours in the United States.
The French obsession with electricity is evident in the continued expansion
of its long-distance, high-speed rail system, its growing network of municipal
tramways and its ubiquitous electrically powered buses. The bottom-line: Oil
use in France is 10 percent lower today than it was three decades ago, whereas
it’s almost 20 percent higher in the United States. Total energy consumption
in France per capita is roughly half that of the United States.
Two big international competitions have been decided during our stay. France
lost its bid for the 2012 Olympics, but won the competition to build the International
Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). This $12 billion to $15 billion project
is jointly funded by France, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Russia and the
United States. At the ITER site in Cadarache, a small town in southern France
50 kilometers northeast of Marseilles, scientists will try to technologically
master the process of harnessing nuclear fusion, which produces no greenhouse
gases, generates only easy-to-handle waste and relies on abundant fuel sources
such as water rather than uranium-235.
The French have chosen a different direction. Can we learn from them? Have we
deemphasized nuclear power and conservation prematurely? The energy bill passed
at the end of July makes some concessions to help reboot our nuclear power program;
it fails to resuscitate conservation. We burn 20 million barrels of oil per
day; 60 percent is imported, and 40 percent is consumed by cars and trucks.
If Congress were to tax $2 per gallon of gasoline, the United States could eventually
reduce its oil consumption by as much as 10 million barrels of oil per day,
according to an energy plan by economist Philip Verleger (The Washington
Post, June 1, 2004). Other strategies could include requiring light trucks
to be as fuel efficient as cars and reducing the national speed limit (a strategy
employed during the 1970s oil crisis — see story, page
57).
The balcony of our apartment provides a to-die-for view of the “roof of
Europe,” the summit of Mont Blanc. The Bossons glacier flows down its slopes,
directly fed by snowfall on the peak. As my wife and I hiked to the glacier’s
nose, which lies at 1,180 meters (the lowest altitude for a glacier in the Alps),
we examined the series of trailside photos and paintings that dramatically document
repetitious waxing and waning of the ice front over the past few centuries.
This candid exhibit strengthens my conviction that the French government, together
with the daily print and broadcast media, provides its citizens with more mature
and sophisticated information on energy use, natural climate cycles and anthropomorphic
climate change than is the case in the United States.
The French perspective is enlightening, but they too have made mistakes. As
reported in the July 10 International Herald Tribune, directly beneath
the Mont Blanc Massif lies the 11.6-kilometer-long highway tunnel to Italy.
Opened in July 1965, it funnels tourists and trucks through the Alps year-round.
Pollution and haze now scar the Chamonix Valley as 1,500 trucks a day pass through.
As I write, a 9-kilometer-long double-lane queue of trucks awaits passage in
convoy. Some carry shrimp from Denmark to be cleaned by lower-wage workers in
Morocco. The shrimp will then be shipped back to Denmark for consumption. That’s
as foolish as some of the ways we in the United States use and abuse energy.
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