With oil prices stuck above $80 (U.S.) a barrel and utility bills rising to painful levels, Europeans are paying more attention to conservation. The good news is they are already much more sensible users of electricity, cooking gas, auto fuel and water than the gourmand North Americans, thanks to high energy taxes and sheer force of habit. We moved to Italy six months ago and we’ve picked up their conservation lessons in a hurry. We’re amazed at how fairly modest changes in lifestyle can add up to a lot of savings.

 Take shopping. When we moved into our apartment in Rome, the fridge made us laugh. It was tiny –  no more than a third the size of the swing-door monster we had in Toronto (imagine the rear doors of a Chevy Suburban). Our first thought was to fling midget fridge out the window and get one big enough to accommodate the usual 50 litres of milk and juice, 187 hamburger patties, dozen rotting heads of lettuce, full case of beer, six ice trays  and a bucket or three of ice cream.

 We decided to hold off. Good thing too, because the Italians practice just-in-time shopping. You buy what you eat that day, not tomorrow or a week from tomorrow. No one has heard of meal planning here. You go to the local market and whatever looks fresh  in small quantities. Eggs for example. I went to buy a dozen eggs. The old lady who sells eggs at the local market looked at me like I was wearing an omelet on my head. How many in your family, she asked. Four, I said. She handed me a pack of six eggs and instructed me to return for another six when the first six were gone. You cannot buy packs of a dozen here. You can buy eggs individually.

 The same goes for fruit and vegetables. They are bought for consumption today, maybe tomorrow, but never beyond that. The point being, you don’t need a great beast of a fridge. Chest-style freezers are unheard of. The U.S. Energy Information Agency says American fridges suck about 14 per cent of household electricity, second only to air conditioners. In Italy, I’ll bet the figure is half that.

 The other point about buying in small quantities is that you don’t need a huge car – make that any car – to haul your food home. Romans shop on the hoof. There are supermarkets in Rome, but they are about the size of a Mac’s corner store and never have parking. I wouldn’t exactly call Romans, Italians in general, green champions, but they’re not keen on plastic bags. They use shopping carts. Supermarkets often charge for bags.

 Italians know how to conserve on air conditioning too. AC is becoming more common in Italy, but it is still relatively rare by North American standards. So how do Italians deal with the African-style heat that wallops the country for much of the summer? The answer: Window shutters.

 Every window and exterior door in our apartment has slatted wooden shutters; pulleys are used to raise and lower them. We assumed they exist for security reasons, which is only partly true. Their other use is to keep the sun out. When the sun gets mean, the shutters go down. It works. We rarely used our air conditioner in the summer in spite of many days of mid-30s temperatures, though we capitulated in the high 30s (the temperature hit 42 one day in August). I can’t say we were entirely comfortable. But nor did we face an electricity bill that would have eliminated our next holiday.

 Italians save money on cars by buying small. We bought a Fiat Grande Punto, a clever design that packs a lot of room in a small body. The car is 4-metres long and weighs a bit more than 1,000 kilos (one tonne or 2,200 pounds). It is perfectly adequate for 99 per cent of our trips and a delight to park. Compare the Punto, say, to a popular American car like the Chrysler 300. The Chrysler is a full metre longer, about 750 kilos heavier and not significantly roomier inside. Engineers can tweak engines until their eyes melt to improve fuel efficiency, but the truth is reducing weight is the easiest and best way to cut fuel consumption.

 In Europe, fuel prices are about double North American prices. Yet our gasoline bill has not climbed because the Fiat, with its high-revving 1.4-litre, 4-cyclinder engine, goes about twice as far on a litre of gas than the V-6 pig we drove in Canada. Carbon dioxide emissions are lower too. (Incidentally, every car’s CO2 emissions per kilometre traveled have to be plainly listed. In Rome, cars that exceed a CO2 threshold cannot be driven  some days of the month.)

 Europe’s relatively modest energy use is no myth. A few years ago, the OECD measured  Canada’s per capita energy and was not impressed. It found that Canada ranked a lowly 27th out of the 29 countries measured. On average, each Canadian’s annual energy consumption was the equivalent of 6.2 tonnes of oil. The OECD average is half that.

 Italians would love to become energy pigs too. But they can’t afford it. And an enlightened few of them realize their cheapo ways are less environmentally destructive. So bring on the shopping carts, the window shutters and the tiny cars. They work a marvel.