2000 Watt Society

Good Magazine has a great article about the 2,000 Watt Society. What is the 2,000 Watt Society you ask? In a nutshell, they propose that everyone use their fair share of energy--2,000 Watts. A lot of people in other parts of the world use a lot less than this, but the average American uses 12,000. TWELVE THOUSAND.

I've excerpted some of the article below, but you can read the full story here.


A particularly distressing factor in the ranking is the data about energy use by country. Bangladeshis, for example, use about about 380 watts per person; Africans are a blip above that; the Chinese: 1,500; Western Europeans: 6,000. Americans, meanwhile, use more than twice what even Europeans use: 12,000 watts per person. The biggest obstacle in curbing energy use, says Roland Stultz, the director of the 2,000 Watt Society since 2001, is human behavior. “It’s what we call trägheit—being stuck in the old way of thinking. The majority of people don’t want to change their way of life, even if the new way is no less comfortable. Until it starts hurting, like gasoline getting expensive, people don’t like change.”

A word about the comfort thing: According to the numbers, the people of Basel use less than half the amount of energy I—and other over-air-conditioned Americans—do. So it follows that they should be about half as comfortable. But walking around Basel, riding their trams, visiting their warm homes, drinking mocha lattes in their cafes, it was hard to imagine these people were suffering.For Stultz, this is the point: “No one is suggesting we go back to the Stone Age,” he says. “It’s about responsibility and fairness.” Stultz, who was trained as an architect, has spent most of career tracking sustainability in developing countries. “Climate change is only hurting the people who did not contribute to the problem—the floods, rising sea levels, droughts,” he says.

“We’ve become megalomaniacs,” says Hans Ruh, an environmental ethicist who works with the Society. “We’ve overstepped our borders, produced a disaster, and refuse to face the music. These are ethical questions: How much is one human being allowed to use? How do we distribute the benefits and the risks? How do we deal with nature?” Humans are the only species to ever produce garbage, and, says Ruh, it is our moral duty to work with the natural world."