One day he saw a notice on a message board announcing a meeting of the 2,000 Watt Society. He looked it up and decided to go to the meeting. It was held in the back room of a little Italian restaurant west of the Hauptbahnhof called Mamma Mia’s. By the time the meeting started, about fifty people had jammed into the room. They looked like any other Swiss people, perhaps a little more bohemian in style, but not much. The Swiss were extremely regular in their appearance, but then on consideration Frank realized that this was basically true everywhere.
The meeting began on time, of course, and it had a schedule that was gotten through briskly. Frank’s German was not up to the task, and this was Schwyzerdüütsch to boot, so he was completely lost and could only pretend to be comprehending, but no one seemed to notice. Their guttural looping sentences were calm, and they laughed pretty often. When they saw he was there, and that there were some other Ausländer there also, they summarized their proceedings in quick rough English. He liked the feel of the meeting, nothing dogmatic or virtuous about it, just people pursuing a project; something between a committee meeting and a party planning exercise. Like the local Swiss Alpine Club, no doubt, and in fact when he asked about that, he found that many there were in both clubs. Party planning— political parties— he wondered if the same word for both was the case in German also. Partei, yes. But birthday party? Maybe so. He wished he had brought along a translation earbud.
Back home he looked again at the society’s online information. Started in Basel and Zurich about forty years before. The idea was that the total global energy generated by people, when divided by the number of people on Earth, came to about 2,000 watts per person. So the people in the society had decided to live on that much energy and see how it felt.
The 2,000 watts were to cover food, transport, home heating, and home utilities. When Frank saw the breakdown, he realized that his lifestyle was already well within the limits prescribed by the society. That made him laugh.
Swiss citizens in general used about 5,000 watts. This was compared to 6,000 in the rest of western Europe. Chinese citizens about 1,500. 1,000 in India. 12,000 in the United States. His country, the great whale in this as in everything, slurping down the world.
In Switzerland, their current usage per person cost about 1,500 watts for one’s living space, including heat and hot water.
1,100 watts for food and “consumer discretionary.”
600 watts for electricity, which included power for a refrigerator.
500 watts for automobile travel.
250 watts for air travel.
150 watts for public transport (trains, trams, subways).
900 watts for public infrastructure (Frank wasn’t sure what that meant, but presumably in his case the cost of the library, the bahnhof, the sewer systems, and so on).
He considered the list for a while. The Swiss hoped to achieve the reduction from 5,000 watts per citizen to 2,000 mainly by swapping out their entire built infrastructure, to make it more energy efficient. They hoped that their economy would grow by 65 percent at the same time they were reducing their energy per person; and they wanted their people to live pretty much as they had before. No hair shirt, no saintly suffering. No Francis of Assisi mentality or behavior: this was Switzerland, not a monastery. Stolid burgher watch makers, cheese makers, made fun of by the rest of the world, or envied, or really both at once. In fact it was a bit mysterious how the Swiss had gotten so prosperous. Some still pointed to the deep past, including their mercenary soldiers and guards, their banks holding criminals’ money, and so on; but it had to be more than that. Chemicals, pharmaceuticals, engineering systems, all the minutiae of daily life that the rest of the world couldn’t be bothered to master— like Swiss watches in their day, but no one wore watches anymore, so they had moved on to something else. Manufacturing of almost anything was cheaper in China and India, so again, on to something else, or to the kinds of manufacturing that required exceptionally good quality control. On and on it went, with only 35 percent of their little country useful for agriculture, or even habitable by humans at all. It was strange.
And then there were the four language groups, the German speakers most numerous, then the French, then the Italians, then the Romantsch, who numbered only fifty thousand or so, and yet flourished in their little corner of the country. The Swiss were proud to assert that they had made Romantsch an official Swiss language in defiance of Hitler’s raving about Aryan supremacy, and as far as Frank could discover, there was some truth to this, even though the defiance had been rather indirect and symbolic, as the Swiss had also been allowing the German and Italian militaries free passage across Switzerland at the time. Still it was a nice gesture toward language diversity, right when national governments in France and other countries were crushing their local dialects. The Swiss had always slanted against the grain, always pushed against the received wisdom that tended to wash over the rest of Europe in waves of intellectual fashion, everything from details of fashion to participation in world wars.
So, fine; the Swiss were mysterious. But this 2,000 watt project was a good idea. Frank already had it covered, he used an almost Bangladeshi amount of energy per year. He lived in an apartment or a garden shed, he didn’t own a car and never rented one, he had stopped flying, he ate mostly vegetarian. There were websites on which one could calculate one’s energy burn quite closely, using electricity bills and estimates of mileage on various
