That's an important question, and I suppose I'd look at it in two ways. The first is that when people invest in a cost-effective energy efficiency measure, they actually are wealthier, if you look at the net value or the present value of their energy savings. That's what makes it cost-effective. The savings are greater than their investment, so they're wealthier, and they're going to spend that money one way or the other. Sometimes they're going to spend it on a second refrigerator or on a trip to the Caribbean, or if it's an efficient car, maybe they'll drive farther. In a sense, I actually want to embrace that. They have made an investment in efficiency, and they should, and they should be expected to. It's a perfectly normal thing. They're wealthier now. They should spend that money on certain kinds of services. It's a sign of the success of the efficiency measure.
The problem arises if we have a government or a utility or a community that has said okay, we're going to encourage you to make this efficiency measure, and then we're going to use those energy savings for some purpose. We're counting on them in some way, either to reduce our carbon emissions or to avoid building a power plant or another oil refinery or something like that. Then we have a problem, because the person now is not saving as much energy as expected. And these are your unintended consequences.
We just have to be very careful and make sure that we have taken into account the fact that, basically, people are going to be wealthier with these new conservation measures that are cost-effective. The only possible way to balance that is to say okay, not only are you going to be allowed to invest in this conservation measure, or we're going to encourage you to invest in it, but guess what: the price of energy is going to go up. So you'll be more reluctant to take your more efficient car and drive it farther after you have it, because you want to save money.
There are two parts to that. I think we should embrace the fact that people will spend some of their savings. The problem, though, is in terms of policies and counting on savings.