Opinion: L.A. heatwave: Don’t be piggish about electricity use, and everyone can stay pretty cool

What are your air conditioning usage ethics? Are you in the “one for all” or the “all for me” camp?

The Department of Water and Power has been sending out pleas for several days, begging Angelenos to “conserve energy use where possible” because energy demands are, like the heat, breaking records. The DWP wants us all to “help minimize the risk of power outages due to strain on neighborhood power grids.”

In other words, don’t be piggish about electricity use, and everyone can stay pretty cool.

Does that argument persuade you? Do you think that everyone sharing a bit of the pain – setting the thermostat to 80 instead of 72 – will keep the AC humming for everyone during a heat wave? Or are you a me-firster who says, “Damn the grid and everyone else, it’s hot and I’m cranking the thermostat down to 70”?

During a heat wave three years ago in Japan, where energy production dropped after the Fukushima disaster, some people took the call to cut energy use too seriously; 26 people died from heatstroke in about six weeks.

The DWP is not asking for anything like that kind of sacrifice. But enlightened self-interest should make it obvious: If everyone cranks up the AC, the system could crash and take all of us down into the sweltering dark.

I wonder whether our air-conditioning behavior mirrors our freeway behavior? There are always a few drivers squeezing and nudging and cutting in, breaking the rules to get even a tiny advantage over the drivers who obey them, who seem to believe, like air-conditioning moderates, when everyone behaves well, we all get where we’re going just fine, and maybe faster.

Scofflaw behavior is what UC Irvine philosophy professor Aaron James details in a book whose title we cannot print here, but let’s call it “bad guys,” and here’s a link.

And here’s a paragraph summing up his premise:

“A person counts as [a bad guy] when, and only when, he systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.”

Could the DWP can analyze power usage data and let us know who those people are? Maybe the rest of us can turn up the heat on them, once we’re all back to 72 degrees outside as well as inside.

Follow Patt Morrison on Twitter @pattmlatimes