Living Large: America and Its Energy Use aka We're on a Treadmill but Getting Fatter

People, houses, cars, and energy use have grown substantially in the past few decades. According to the National Association of Home Builders, the average size of a new home now tops 2,400 square feet, up from 1,645 square feet in 1975. Today, adult men and women are roughly an inch taller than they were in 1960 and nearly twenty-five pounds heavier on average. The average weight for men rose from 166.3 pounds in 1960 to 191 pounds in 2002, while the average weight for women increased from 140 pounds in 1960 to 164.3 pounds in 2002.

We aren’t just getting bigger; there are more of us as well. Incredibly, in a little over my lifetime, the U.S. population, at about 300 million, has doubled since 1950. There are more than 120 million homes in the U.S., up from sixteen million in 1990 and forty-three million in 1950. These homes account for about 22 percent of the energy used in the U.S. and 74 percent of the water. In the last several decades, the number and size of new houses and the land area taken up by new houses have increased. More than 3,000 square miles of land is converted annually to residential development over one acre in size. One could argue that the lifestyles that were envisioned by entrepreneurs, government planners, and business leaders at the beginning of the twentieth century when there were so many less of us are not appropriate for twenty-first century America.

According to James Howard Kunstler in his documentary The End of Suburbia, “The project of suburbia is the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. America has squandered its wealth in a living arrangement that has no future.” Suburbs in the U.S. have grown by low-density development that rigorously separates people’s homes from where they shop, work, learn, pray, eat, and socialize. As America grows, its sprawl increases. Each American effectively occupies about 20 percent more developed land (for housing, schools, shopping, roads, and other uses) than they did 20 years ago. With the dearth of public transportation infrastructure, this form of development has forced us to rely almost entirely on automobile transportation to lead our lives. Doing so costs more, because homes, offices, utilities, and other features are farther apart (requiring more roads paved with more asphalt, more pipe for public water and sewer, more power lines, more wires, more street signs, and on and on), because each commercial and institutional structure requires its own acres of parking and because much of the utility infrastructure duplicates the existing infrastructure in nearby older communities. Society’s overall consumption of metal, concrete, asphalt, and energy is higher than it has to be. Worse yet, this design forces us to spend great amounts of precious time commuting from place to place.

My husband and I sometimes work out at our local gym. We drive eight miles round-trip in his American gas guzzler to burn off, if we are lucky, 400 calories apiece on the treadmill and Nautilus machines. As we head into middle age, both of us are fighting our weight (though I have a bigger battle to wage than he does). I can’t help thinking that if we would walk to the gym instead of drive we would burn an additional 400 calories each. In fact, we wouldn’t have needed to go to the gym at all. Had we walked to the gym, we could each have had a piece of chocolate cake as a reward without gaining any weight. Instead we spent approximately $3.88 (8 miles at the IRS mileage rate of @@@Is this still current?48.5@@@ cents per mile) to transport ourselves to the gym. On top of that, we pay for two gym memberships that we use infrequently. One of the reasons we don’t walk is that there are no sidewalks where we live. We would have to walk on the berm of a four-lane highway—a situation I find pretty scary. That’s also one of the reasons I ride my bike a lot less than I should.

The whole situation really doesn’t make any sense when you think about it. We seem to be caught in this trap of eating more, driving more, using more energy, getting fatter and more dependent on offshore sources of fuel, and not getting any happier. We are on a treadmill but getting fatter.

Would it really be better for us to walk to the gym instead of drive? To me, there is no doubt; but I have found arguments to the contrary. According to one analysis on the Internet, walking actually uses more fossil energy than driving, if the calories burned from walking come from a typical American diet. The essence of this claim is that the North American food system is so dependent on fossil fuels—for manufacturing fertilizer and pesticides, running farm machinery, transporting food from farm fields to stores and homes, and powering refrigerators and stoves—that walking a mile actually uses more fossil fuel than driving. (I found this tidbit of analysis so compelling that I have devoted a later chapter to the energy consumption in food production.) This claim doesn’t take into account the health benefits of walking or that, unlike cars, we don’t adjust our food consumption directly proportional to our physical expenditure of energy. If we did, we would probably be thinner, healthier, and have fewer food producers, thus using less fossil fuel. But the premise has some validity: the energy efficiency of walking is not that much different than that of driving.

A study by the University of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems and the Earth Policy Institute found the U.S. food system consumes about 10.25 quadrillion British Thermal Units (Btus) in fossil fuels per year, equivalent to about three quarters of a gallon of gasoline for every American every day. This means that the food system burns six to seven times as many calories of fossil fuel as are in the food supply itself. A 150 pound person walking a mile burns about forty-three calories above and beyond what the body would burn lying in front of the TV set. Doing the math and accounting for the fact that about three food calories are wasted for every seven that are actually consumed, the 150 pound person who walks a mile burns the equivalent of about seventy-five mpg, or about 160 percent of what the average Prius burns per mile.

If you look at it another way, walking is actually less efficient in per-passenger terms than driving a car. An SUV that gets fifteen mpg with all five seats filled has the same fuel efficiency as five people walking together. Of course, this is a very misleading way of exercising the facts and points more to the problems in our food production system than anything else. But while we’re at it, let’s consider the fuel efficiency of my horse, Boozer. Assuming he carries a 165-pound rider with a saddle and all the associated gear and covers fifty miles in six hours, he will burn 18,300 calories. Typically, a horse is approximately 60 percent efficient in processing its feed, so Boozer would have to eat 30,500 calories to replace the energy he expended, meaning he would require 610 calories per mile. Converting this into an equivalent mpg, a gallon of gasoline has 31,000 calories; so to trot fifty miles in six hours, Boozer’s fuel efficiency is fifty mpg. This isn’t necessarily analogous to the previous analysis comparing humans to cars because I am not sure of the fossil fuel required to produce the food Boozer eats. But I am an equestrienne and find the analysis interesting. Given that I drive a good deal of the time alone, Boozer does get better mileage than my Lexus RX400h.

Unfortunately, riding Boozer isn’t an option for most of my transportation needs. Modern life in America requires more than a horse for transportation in most communities. Our lifestyles, which have been crafted over the past century, offer us little choice but to consume fossil fuels in ways both obvious and not at all obvious to us. And while I will try to avoid saying that I think this lack of choice is bad in and of itself, I think it is bad in that we have little real understanding of the options and alternatives to this lifestyle and how to value them.

Speaking of valuing energy alternatives, I should share a story about my own approach to analyzing the data that I present. I am not an economist; I was educated as an engineer, with a bachelor’s degree from Duke University and a master’s in business administration from Harvard University. The MBA provided me a sufficient understanding of economics to realize that there is a lot I don’t know about that science. One of my engineering professors, though, taught me about the difference in how engineers and economists look at things by relating this story: An engineer and an economist were standing on the beach in North Carolina. They were told that a beautiful naked woman was waiting for one of them on a deserted island not from the shore. Whoever got to her first could “have” her, but to get to her they would be able to advance to her successively at half the distance they had previously advanced. The economist declined the offer because according to those rules he would never reach her. The engineer, on the other hand, accepted the challenge, thinking that he could get close enough to her for “all practical purposes.”

That, in a nutshell—as sexist as it sounded to me—pretty much summarizes my approach to analysis. I am motivated to analyze to get close enough for my purposes, recognize the limitations of my analysis, and, when necessary, dig further. But I am definitely not into analysis for the sake of analysis. And unlike the economist above, I am not afraid to dive in. America’s energy situation is critical and we all need to take part in the dialogue—economists, engineers, business people, and the educated general reader. This blog aims to help that process.

Getting back to energy consumption, the U.S. government develops and maintains data for all varieties of purposes, from tracking terrorists to understanding how U.S. households spend their money. As a way to see how much money we spend on energy versus other household needs, I checked the Department of Labor’s U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Spending report published in June 2005. According to this report, U.S. households on average spent $44,300 annually on all their household needs in 2003. Of this amount, $1,064 was for electricity, $424 for natural gas, $121 for other household fuel, and $1,598 for gasoline and motor oil.

Of those total expenditures of $44,300, which doesn’t include taxes, the cost of all the energy we buy to run our homes and the gasoline and motor oil we buy to run our vehicles each amounted to about 3.7 percent, or in total about 7.4 percent of our household expenditures. That was a lot less than other expenditures, like food. Maybe that’s why we haven’t been too worried about energy efficiency.

On average, gasoline is far from the biggest expenditure we make. The average household spent more on federal, state, and local income taxes, food, apparel, services, healthcare, shelter, furniture and equipment, and entertainment than it did on either household energy or gasoline and motor oil. Now it’s true that the cost of household energy and gasoline is more painful for lower-income households because, in part, those costs are inelastic; people with lower incomes have to drive the same distances and heat their houses the same as households that spend more overall. In addition, since energy-efficient equipment tends to be more expensive up front, lower income households can’t afford to install it. And in rental housing, landlords, who typically aren’t responsible for utility costs, have a tendency to install heating and air conditioning equipment that has a lower initial cost and a higher operating cost, mainly because the landlords don’t pay the operating costs, the tenants do. Statistics show that rental housing generally uses more energy on a per square foot basis than owner-occupied housing.

How do energy expenditures compare with other expenses that the government’s consumer spending survey does not track? The average cost of household energy in 2005 was $1,902; in 2004 it was $1,561. In comparison, in 2004, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, the annual sales per capita for lottery tickets in the U.S. was $183.20. On an individual state basis, the good people of Rhode Island spent $1,370.95 per capita on lottery tickets in 2004! In South Dakota the per capita expense was $874, Delaware $781, West Virginia $720, Massachusetts $621, and Georgia $312. That means that, using the Consumer Spending Report’s estimate of average household size of 2.5 person, the average household in Rhode Island spent $3,427 on lottery tickets in 2004! Each household spent more than double on lottery tickets than it did on gasoline and motor oil, with little if any complaint. Gambler’s Anonymous must be drooling.

Household spending on prescription drugs in the U.S. was $2,212.50 in 2005, again more than what was spent on household energy or gasoline and motor oil. The per capita federal tax burden in 2004 was $6,285. That amounts to $15,712.50 per household. However, a per capita determination of tax burden is misleading, because not everyone pays income taxes. That in itself is not surprising. What I did find surprising is how many people don’t pay any income taxes. During 2006, it is estimated that roughly 43.4 million tax returns, representing ninety-one million individuals, had a zero or negative tax liability. That’s out of a total of approximately 136 million federal tax returns filed. Adding to this, roughly 121 million Americans—41 percent of the U.S. population—were completely outside the federal tax system in 2006. This total includes those who pay no tax and those who pay some tax up front and are later refunded the full amount of the tax paid, or more.

Why look at these comparisons? Because it’s one way to understand our attitudes about energy use and energy efficiency. Though consumers (and politicians) are sensitive to gasoline prices, our energy costs haven’t been as high as other expenditures we routinely make, necessary or not. For those hoping to shock the American public out of driving by cranking up gas prices, how high do these prices have to get, compared to other expenses, to make people drive less? How much will those other expenses go up when gas prices go up so that the difference in cost does or does not become significant? And, of course, the ultimate question is how much is it really in consumers’ control to change their driving habits? Often, driving isn’t a choice, nor, for many, is public transportation.

Would we be so aware of the price of gasoline if the service station signs weren’t screaming them out at every corner? Probably not. I certainly can’t say off the top of my head how much I am paying on a per kilowatt-hour basis for electricity, though I do have a rough idea of our monthly bill. What rankles me about the cost of energy is our apparent lack of choice or control in what we do pay and to whom. We get angry when prices go up, relieved when they go down, and oblivious to them the rest of the time. And there are other costs associated with the consumption of energy that aren’t actually energy costs, like the type of car you drive or the type of heater in your home or the light bulbs you burn or whether you leave the light on when you leave a room or how old your refrigerator is or at what speed you drive your car, that we often ignore.

Mean Body Weight, Height, and Body Mass Index, United States, 1960-2002, Advance Data No. 347, October 2004 (PHS 2005-1250), www.cdc.gov

U.S. NATIONAL REPORT ON POPULATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT, 2006, by Victoria D. Markham with Nadia Steinzor, Center for Environment and Population (CEP), 7.

A household was defined as (a) occupants related by blood, marriage, adoption, or some other legal arrangement; (b) a single person living alone or sharing a household with others who is financially independent; or (c) two or more persons living together who share responsibility for at least two or three major types of expenses—food, housing, and other. Students living in university-sponsored housing were also included in the sample as separate households.

The North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries (NASPL) Web site, http://www.naspl.org/rankpercap.html

The Northeast-Midwest Institute Web site,