America‘s-New-Calling.docVIP

America’s New Calling Stephen R. Foster J. Thomas Rogers Robert S. Potter Southwestern University Georgetown, TX Advisor: Richard Denman Summary The ongoing cellphone revolution warrants an examination of its energy impacts—past, present, and future. Thus, our model adheres to two requirements: It can evaluate energy use since 1990, and it is flexible enough to predict future energy needs. Mathematically speaking, our model treats households as state machines and uses actual demo graphic data to guide state transitions. We produce national projections by simulating multiple households. Our bottom up approach remains flexible, allowing us to model energy consumption for the current U.S., determine efficient phone adoption schemes in emerging nations, assess the impact of wasteful practices, and predict future energy needs. We show that the exclusive adoption of landlines by an emerging nation would be more than twice as efficient as the exclusive adoption of cellphones. However, we also show that the elimination of certain wasteful practices can make cellphone adoption 175% more efficient at the national level. Furthermore, we give two forecasts for the current U.S., revealing that a collaboration between cellphone users and manufacturers can result in savings of more than 3.9 billion barrels-of-oil-equivalent (BOE) over the next 50 years. TheUMAPJournal30 (3) (2009)367–384. !c Copyright2009by COMAP, Inc. Allrightsreserved. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice. Abstracting with credit is permitted, but copyrights for components of this work owned by others than COMAP must be honored. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists requires prior permission from COMAP. Problem Background In 1990, less than 3% of Americans owned cellphon