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Health concerns get people to cut energy use more than saving money, UCLA study finds
The downtown skyline is enveloped in smog shortly before sunset on November 17, 2006 in Los Angeles, California. Earlier this month, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, southern California?s anti-smog agency, approved a $36 million program to reduce pollution from trucks operating at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. An estimated 12,000 diesel trucks travel to and from the ports each day, carrying freight through southern California metropolitan areas where their emissions are believed to increased risks of asthma and other illnesses among local residents and particularly children.
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Health concerns get people to cut energy use more than saving money, UCLA study finds
What gets people to cut their electricity use more: saving money or breathing cleaner air? A group of researchers at UCLA figured out that concerns about the health effects of air pollution better motivate people to cut back their energy use than do worries about saving money.
The finding is part of a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.
A team led by environmental economist Magali Delmas wired up UCLA student apartments so that their residents could see real-time information about how much energy they use – and get feedback about it.
“What we wanted to do was provide people with real time appliance level information about their electricity usage,” Delmas said, in a video about the study. “So they would know which appliances were using more electricity than others.”
The researchers told some renters that saving energy was a good way to save money. Other residents got the message that saving energy would cut down on pollution that causes asthma and cancer.
In a survey distributed at the beginning of the study, apartment dwellers predicted that cost savings would motivate them to change their energy use.
Over 8 months, the UCLA team found that telling people about pollution’s health and environmental impacts caused them to use 8 percent less energy. Households with children saved even more, about 19 percent.
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Money saving messages didn’t work as well. “It’s sort of an interesting disconnect, between what people think motivates them and what actually does,” said Stephanie Vezich, a Ph.D. student in psychology at UCLA.
One possible explanation, researchers say, is that an average apartment’s savings was small, just about $6 a month. That’s enough to get you one combo meal at a fast food joint, or a couple of gallons of milk.
The team hopes their research can be useful for shaping how utilities talk to consumers about cutting energy demand.
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