Houses use energy and even President Bush now seems to be aware of the need to conserve some of it. In fact he recently claimed that US households were actually already succeeding. He said that US household energy use in 2001 was 50% lower as compared to 1978 levels.
This seems surprising, but evidently he was referring just to household space heating on a per-household consumption basis, and the US Dept of Energy’s Annual Energy Review 2003, does indeed suggests that there was a 50% reduction between 1978 and 2001. But overall energy use continued to increase, and that meant that overall carbon dioxide emissions continued to rise, for example, there was a 3% rise in 2000-2001. Interestingly this was followed by a 1.8% fall in emissions, presumably due to the impact of 9/11 on the US economy, but subsequently they began to rise again, for example increasing by 1.7% in 2003-04
Even so it’s interesting that, in relative terms, there have been reductions in demand for heat. It would be nice to think that this was due to better building design and greater concern for energy conservation. But it’s more likely to be due to a range of other factors: changing utility rates, size of households, as well as the weather. Another factor is that many US households now have large numbers of electrical devices which also, incidentally, provide heating, very inefficiently of course, and sometimes even when tokenly switched off ...
