Spitting In the Wind: Why Energy Efficiency Won't Solve Climate Change On It's Own
Posted: Tuesday, February 22, 2011
by Robin Whitlock
http://robinwhitlock.blogspot.com/
I was helping at a gig in Glastonbury (UK) not so long ago and suddenly found myself chatting to a friend of a friend of mine who subsequently became my friend on the subject of oil depletion. Ho hum, that old chestnut, people have been talking about it for ages. However, what came out of this was that he lent me a really interesting book on the subject that I hadn't seen before, which I still have. It's a book by David Strahan called The Last Oil Shock.
The crunch came on page 223 when Strahan suddenly announced the existence of a particular philosophical theory called 'The Jevons Paradox'. He introduced this topic by referring to a 2005 report from the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee which revealed that Britain's energy efficiency has doubled since 1970 and yet still total energy consumption has risen. Now this is actually quite concerning, and it made me sit bolt upright. It actually implies that current thinking regarding the best way to deal with climate change, that is to say waste reduction and energy efficiency is deeply flawed.
Strahan goes on in his book to talk about William Stanley Jevons who was a 19th century engineer and who observed that the counter-intuitive effect of Thomas Newcomen's increasingly efficient steam engines was to increase coal consumption rather than reduce it. This was later taken up by two economists named Daniel Khazoom and Leonard Brookes, which is why the Jevons Paradox is also sometimes called the Khazoom-Brookes Postulate. A further development of the same idea can be attributed to Professor Robert Ayres, who in the 1970's argued convincingly that efficiency gains are a fundamental cause of economic growth.
The way it goes is this: what can be called a 'rebound effect' works as a result of the fact that increased efficiency decreases price which in turn increases demand. In short, increased efficiency stimulates growth and therefore returns the individual or society attempting to make such efficiency gains back to the point from which he/they/it/whatever started from. In order to achieve such efficiency gains therefore, waste reduction and energy efficiency programmes must go hand in hand with government policies aimed at reducing demand.
A comment on a Treehugger forum concerned with this subject sums it up quite nicely. 'JPS' says that with regard to individual consumption, savings from more efficient refrigerators or cars might be spent on other consumer goods that might be even more damaging/energy intensive, such as foreign holidays incorporating jet travel. Secondly, the Jevons Paradox is even stronger at the level of industrial production, in the sense that savings as a result of efficiency gains will be reinvested as capital which is then used to generate more profit which of course means more growth.
Recently, I fell out with someone quite seriously on Facebook on this point. I quite legitimately in my view observed that she was seeking for excuses not to cut back on consumption, in other words to continue with 'business-as-usual', and that the whole energy efficiency approach was the bedrock of her strategy, as it is with most fairly well off citizens in western society. I stand by that criticism. If we are to prevent climate change becoming even worse than it is already turning out to be, and it is happening now, we need to switch rapidly from the idea that we can do something about it while continuing to lead our lives in the way we are doing at the moment.
Painful as it is, the Jevons Paradox has spoken, and all of us must listen. Otherwise nature itself will deliver an even more painful lesson - one from which we will not recover, not this time at least.
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Top-level comments on this article: (3 total)I've never heard of The Jevons Paradox, but I find it very interesting. I've heard people say that when people get more efficient lights, they tend to leave them on longer. I thought this was ridiculous until this past Christmas season was over. We replaced our old Christmas lights with new LED lights which use much less electricity. Normally when I put out the Christmas lights I put them on a timer so that they turn off at bed time. I didn't feel quite as motivated to do that this year because I knew that the new lights consumed much less power.
Before I knew it, the season was over and I never did hookup the timer, opting instead to just leave the lights on all night, every night. Now I have a better understanding of this and I agree, conservation is only part of the solution.Cheers for that Bruce. Yes a very interesting topic, when I have time I'm going to explore it further, but its certainly something that I think we should paying more attention to.
Think you might find this Blog post interesting from Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy -- "The Jevons Paradox and Energy Efficiency" search ssppjournal on blogspot for full textThanks for that, I've taken note and will revisit shortly to read in greater detail. Ta.
This was an eye opening article for me. I am a supply side capitalist by nature just because I truly believe that this ideal most closely obeys the laws of nature (survival of the fittest). However, your article truly speaks to the negatives of my beliefs which I no doubt know exist.
The problem is, the only answer to this dilemma is less people on the planet to consume. Your article illustrates this exactly without saying as much. The problem is the more people we "take care of" the more our population grows resulting in more consumption...
This planet can only sustain a finite amount of people and we are quickly reaching this point or may have even surpassed it already.
Great article Robin thanks for the insight and information.My pleasure Mark, glad you found it interesting. I hope to follow this subject further, so there may well be some more articles on this topic forthcoming. Cheers.
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