Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
While I was eventually able to get off the treadmill without too much of a stumble, I think human society is facing a similar dynamic, and I don’t know how graceful our collective dismount will be. More than anything, I want my friends, family, and neighbors to understand the consequences of our collective trajectory. The technical name for the ratcheting-up, “curse of competence” dynamic is the Jevons Paradox.
In a new paper, published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, we examine the economy-wide impact of these effects and find they may erode more than half of the potential energy savings from improved energy efficiency.
My milk package, the electric cars, agriculture land use and the wood saving stoves are all examples showing why overall reduction in resources use or emissions (absolute decoupling) through substitution and efficiency is a pipe dream in a growth economy.
Once free from the efficiency mindset, we see that setting legal limits is not the only solution to the Jevons phenomenon. If efficiency makes growth, maybe inefficiency makes degrowth.
Are investments in energy transition, especially for public dollars in the form of incentives or subsidies, worth it? Do investments in energy efficiency truly pay off, or does efficiency just make energy cheaper because we’re using less of it, encouraging customers to use more of it—a phenomenon known as the rebound effect, the backfire hypothesis, and the Jevons Paradox?
Oil could have provided all the substitutes needed to end the whale industry, but instead fossil fuels energized the killing.
Several climate change deniers in the Texas political establishment aren’t deniers after all. They just don’t want the industry which got them elected (and could get them defeated just as easily) to pay anything to protect itself from the very dangers to which the use of the industry’s products exposes the entire globe.
Debates about the so-called rebound effect go back to William Stanley Jevons’ work in the 19th century, although they had been forgotten for too long. Rebound effects occur if a reduction of inputs per unit of output (efficiency) generates an absolute increase in output (growth).
The records show that efficiencies can indeed foster per-capita decreases in consumption, but it may come as a surprise to many that, at the community level, the drive to enhance efficiency usually results in an increase in overall water consumption!
“It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth….no one must suppose that coal thus saved is spared-it is only saved from one use to be employed in others”.
