杏吧原创

IN THE late 1970s, the aftermath of the massive rise in oil prices, we were often told that without nuclear power we would be left 鈥渇reezing in the dark鈥�. And in the public mind, energy conservation was associated with austerity, the three-day week and that impeccable piece of ministerial advice to clean your teeth with the lights out. As a result, energy conservation consultants, notably Walt Patterson, faced an uphill trek persuading the public that energy conservation need not be like this. The answer was not that we needed to do without the benefits of energy use, but that we should use it more efficiently.

There were still nagging problems, though. One impeccably efficient use of energy, at least in technical terms, is combined heat and power. With this method, instead of warming the Trent Valley and the North Sea with the waste heat from centralised power stations, the hot water is piped from smaller units into district heating schemes for homes. At the time, however, I lived on the edge of one of the larger district heating schemes in England, and whenever there was a breakdown, which was often, the neighbours would come round to warm themselves in front of a real fire.

In the 1980s, word leaked out that Romania had been turned into the epitome of what certain proponents of high energy production were warning us about. While the Ceausescu regime obsessively poured the country鈥檚 economic output into paying off its foreign debt, district heating and electricity were turned off, leaving the populace freezing in the dark. 鈥淚t鈥檚 true that you are standing in the cold, but remember that we have a larger per capita steel production than England,鈥� read one of the less inspired of the official slogans. These left 鈥渆nergy conservation鈥� with the association 鈥渇rostbite鈥�, just as Thatcher and Reagan left 鈥渇reedom鈥� meaning 鈥渦nemployment鈥�, and the Soviets left 鈥減eace鈥� meaning 鈥渢yranny鈥�.

Then came the changes. Inflation in Romania hovered around 10 per cent a month for three years. 鈥淚ndividual responsibility鈥� somehow got linked with losing your savings in fraudulent pyramid schemes. It turned out that no one knew how much of anything had been produced before 1989, because frightened managers had falsified every statistic in sight. The currency went bananas, and investment in imported equipment changed from being forbidden to being impossible.

And under these conditions you want to talk about energy conservation in Romania? Patterson does, and does so impressively. Despite sections which occasionally glissade into apparent literal translations from the Five-Year Plan, his study is readable and essential.

Amid the economic and social rubble of a society reinventing itself, the urgent tasks are to ensure that the worst excesses of Victorian capitalism are not simply copied. Just one of those excesses is the wasteful use of energy, which if repeated would leave the country under a pall of filthy brown-coal smoke and make a mockery of any idea of restricting the world鈥檚 output of carbon dioxide.

Romania has a vast stock of badly insulated public housing, constructed by authorities who had lost sight of citizens鈥� needs and mistakenly believed that manufacturing insulation used more energy than it would save. But perhaps where difficult policy decisions must most urgently be taken is avoiding the danger, as Patterson puts it, 鈥渢hat old plant 鈥� cheaper, but with low energy performance 鈥� will be imported; the phenomenon is already happening elsewhere in Eastern Europe鈥�.

This book is, you will gather, not solely for those with a special interest in Romania; similar conditions can be found anywhere between the River Oder and the Pacific. And the need to press the logic of conservation policies is not, alas, restricted to the ex-Soviet bloc. Patterson observes that 鈥淪ome senior [Romanian energy authority] staff believe that efforts to increase the efficiency of energy use would lead to a continuing fall in sales, and would therefore be contrary to the interests of the company 鈥� a view also frequently found in utilities in OECD countries.鈥�