your household; and whether or not your house is protected from the weather by insulation, for instance. Paradoxically also, the better off you are, the more likely you are to have equipment that saves energy as well as a house and equipment that uses a great deal of energy.

Another key finding is that almost all households have a circumscribed choice, especially about the most energy related features of their house: the architectural design, the furnace, and the water heater. The structure and built-in equipment are there when almost every household buys or rents a dwelling. If you judge energy use on the basis of the number of major appliances in a home (as many do) you would be right, but only because the presence or absence of major appliances is a key indicator of total energy consumption and is linked chiefly with income. Appliances, which are usually bought separately and not built in, do not use much energy by themselves. Therefore, what one chooses and buys separately is less important to the energy consumed at home than are the basic features of the structure—about which a household has had little to say.

Limited choice is reflected also in the degree to which households use automobiles. Whether poor or rich, few workers felt they had a choice in how they commuted to their jobs. Either they used a car or had a time , inconvenient struggle with public transportation. Therefore, the chief breadwinners in American families use a car to get to work.

Lack of choice reaches far and deep. Exclusionary housing patterns affecting lower income and black households leave them even less choice than others in the dwellings they live in, and therefore in the energy using features of their homes. Automobiles are becoming heavier and more expensive, and the increases have been greatest among compacts that cost and weigh the least. Those who produce homes and the facilities in them that determine how much energy people use have been making their products more energy consuming and costly.

The costs are increasingly burdensome on those at the lower end of the income range, who have fewest options. They are least able to afford the sharply rising prices for every energy source. In addition, both electricity and natural gas prices are ordinarily higher the less you use. Low income households, who use least, pay more per unit (million Btu's) than the well off.

The inevitable conclusion is that households may be able to play only a modest role in energy conservation by themselves. Possible exceptions are the well off, who have most options. But even they are locked into a given housing stock and certain transportation alternatives. Conservation, then, is everybody's business if the public is to save energy. To a large extent the buck passes to commerce and industry; to state and local governments, which can modify land use, zoning, and building permit regulations; to various arms of the federal government that administer or enforce housing laws and utility and environmental regulations; and, finally, to the Congress. The Congress could provide legislation to remove some large remaining roadblocks that hinder fre