The rain was falling sideways when I landed last week at Logan Airport from Colorado, where I live. The January thaw had arrived in the guise of a major tropical storm, with high winds and temperatures near 60. Dressed for winter, I was sweating as soon as I got off the plane. For the two days that followed, I spent most of my time asking people to turn down their thermostats. Though the weather was balmy, the places I visited, from a Boston restaurant to a business in Waltham to the friends’ house in Belmont where I was staying, were still being heated as if it were freezing outside. That it was in fact nearly thirty degrees warmer didn’t seem to matter.
Which is why I was heartened to see that also last week Massachusetts launched one of the most ambitious energy efficiency programs in the country. Part of the state’s 2008 Green Communities Act, the new initiative puts energy efficiency front and center as Massachusetts’s “first fuel,” dramatically expanding consumer outreach and incentives for conservation measures like home insulation and efficient appliances. With $1.6 billion committed to the program and a target reduction of 2.4 percent in electricity use over the next three years, the state is positioned to overtake California as the nation’s efficiency leader.
While this is great news for energy conservation, the Massachusetts program also highlights a lingering gap in the debate about energy consumption in the U.S. For the most part, policymakers and energy advocates have focused on technical or economic solutions like energy audits, weatherization and product rebates. Each is important, but ignores the most obvious conservation challenge: human behavior.
What I experienced during the thaw last week was neither a technical nor an economic problem; it was a behavioral one. Nobody was turning down the dial on their thermostats. Simple actions like this by U.S. homeowners and property managers could result in energy savings of between 25-30 percent. This is the equivalent of the energy produced by 240 medium-sized coal-fired power plants and would prevent the emission of 500 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, even when high efficiency technologies are installed, 30 percent or more of the energy savings that could potentially be achieved through such technologies is lost because of human behavior.
But the challenge isn’t just about adjusting our thermostats. It’s about our expectations for comfort and relationship to nature itself. Most of our buildings in cities like Boston, New York and Chicago are very warm in the winter and very cold in the summer; we tend to inhabit extreme indoor environments, even when outdoor temperatures are moderate. Our homes, offices, hotels and airports are often their own micro-climates, with little resemblance to ambient conditions, let alone operable windows. We have become the victims of our own clever engineering. HVAC and other modern building systems have conditioned us to expect extremes of hot and cold in our buildings. This has resulted in a variation on what the journalist Richard Louv calls “Nature Deficit Disorder.” We’ve lost our connection to the outdoors while becoming dependent on technology to make us comfortable.
Thirty-one years ago, President Carter donned his famous cardigan sweater in a speech in which he urged Americans to conserve energy by turning down their thermostats. Unfortunately, his message fell on deaf ears. Carter and his cardigan simply weren’t cool. But Massachusetts has the opportunity to succeed where Carter failed. Public awareness about energy use and climate change has never been greater. Nor has people’s desire to take action. Governor Patrick and civic leaders across the Commonwealth should take a page from Carter’s sartorial strategy. They should start wearing their beefiest fleece pullovers to work and, come summer, their lightest cotton knits, adjusting their office thermostats accordingly. The Governor and others can help make cold cool and warm hot.
Just a few degrees up or down in the State House and buildings across Massachusetts could make a big difference, not only in energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions, but our relationship to the environment which, after all, is why we’re doing this in the first place.
A former Cambridge resident, William Shutkin is a Founding Partner of Urban Sustainability Associates and a Visiting Scholar at the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder. | 
