Adding by subtracting

Third in a series

ON VETERANS Day last year, an armistice was announced between two sides that had fought bitterly over how the United States would build air conditioners in the future. The agreement forged between air conditioner makers and advocates of efficient energy stands to spare US electricity producers the need to build 25 extra power plants by 2020. Higher efficiency standards like this will always be the least polluting and often the least costly way to meet the nation's power needs. In the United States, which gets more than 50 percent of its electricity from coal, the fuel that emits the most carbon dioxide, the ''negawatts" of conservation deserve a high priority in any effort to slow climate change.

Battles like the one over air conditioning are being waged in many state capitals as well. Frustrated by the pace of progress at the federal level, activist organizations like MassPIRG are trying to get state legislatures to set efficiency standards for a wide range of appliances. A hearing was held on such legislation on Beacon Hill last week. Legislators should insist on efficiency standards rigorous enough to put a brake on the state's annual 1.6 percent increase in electricity use.

In theory, mandated standards should not be necessary: Consumers should buy the most efficient appliances on their own to keep their electricity bills down. Appliances, though, are often bought not by the consumer but by a developer or a landlord who wants to keep his initial outlay down, whatever the operating costs.

As useful as appliance standards are, states should also be much more aggressive in using either tax or utility revenues to buy conservation. This can take the form of aid with insulation or subsidized discounts for anyone buying a more efficient major appliance like a refrigerator. But Massachusetts annually collects just $125 million from electric ratepayers for this purpose, with the result that conservation trims just 0.7 percent off total power consumption. With a bigger conservation fund, the state could help subsidize more than just the 2,700 efficient new refrigerators purchased last year. Publicly supported discounts could also be used to make the new compact fluorescent light bulbs as affordable as the much less efficient incandescent ones.

The public would be more motivated to support such initiatives if Congress enacted a tax or cap on carbon dioxide emissions, like the one in the McCain-Lieberman global warming bill before the Senate, raising the cost of power from fossil fuels. Such an action would bring home the real cost of continuing to rely on CO{-2}-emitting power before the catastrophic effects of climate change show just how high that price may be.