| While I don't disagree with the need to make commercial and industrial industries more efficient, I don't think ignoring residential/consumer choices is a good move. Industrial and commercial energy usage accounted for about 50,000 trillion BTU of energy consumption in the US in 2019. Residential used about 21,000 trillion BTU in the same time. [0] Definitely not insignificant in any way. However! Transportation used about 28,670 trillion BTU that year. Somewhere around 50-55% [1] of that is from people driving around. I include that in residential/individual choice even if a lot of it is for commuting, because a massive amount of that number is driven by vehicle choice (people have switched to gas guzzling SUVs and trucks in droves as fuel efficiency has crept up, negating efficiency increases), housing type/density and location, etc. This puts residential/individual energy usage at ~35,000 trillion BTU and commercial/industrial at 71,000. So individual usage is a full _third_ of total energy consumption. That's massive, and a huge amount of that could easily be cut out if we stop subsidizing people driving trucks, SUVs, etc 45+ minutes each way to work so they can live in some mediocre suburb. We could also not listen to a minority of NIMBYs and throw out the awful zoning laws that have swept the US over the last 50+ years to make it legal to build more traditional styles of homes and apartments to reduce sprawl and reduce infrastructure costs massively. Industry still needs to be made far more efficient, but individuals are still a huge factor in energy usage. Other parts of the world have different energy numbers, but a lot of first world countries look fairly similar to what I just laid out. 0: https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T...
1: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/transporta... |