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Page added on March 5, 2012
Reviewing Jevons’ Paradox
Wired has a look at the accuracy of Jevons Paradox and the implications for energy efficiency strategy – Clive Thompson on Unsaving the Planet.
We put a lot of stock in energy efficiency. It is regarded as the quickest and easiest way to reduce carbon emissions. Al Gore even ended An Inconvenient Truth with a plea for everyone to install low-power lightbulbs and appliances.
But in 1865, British economist William Stanley Jevons offered a skeptical take on efficiency. In The Coal Question, he wrote that energy-efficiency technology has a backlash effect. By increasing efficiency we make energy cheaper, thus spurring people to use more of it. As Jevons pointed out, when steam engines became more efficient, the consumption of coal (for steam production) didn’t decrease—it expanded, because steam engines became cheaper to run and thus attractive for more and more things.
Adherents call this the Jevons paradox, or rebound effect. And the idea is at the heart of David Owen’s new book, The Conundrum, which argues that not only will efficiency fail to solve global warming—it’ll actually make things worse. The good news is that Owen’s analysis is likely off target. But it’s worth hearing him out.
Owen makes a number of grim observations that ring true. Automobile engines have become much more efficient, but we’ve responded by demanding larger cars loaded with more electrical gewgaws. Air-conditioning has become more efficient, but we’ve made it a cultural norm that every room and vehicle nationwide must be cooled in summer.
Or consider lighting. As a source of illumination, light from modern bulbs costs just 0.03 percent of what candles did in 1800. But a recent study funded by the US Department of Energy found that the amount of global GDP spent on lighting has remained at about 0.72 percent over the past three centuries. The astonishing increase in lighting efficiency merely drove an explosion in the number of things we light up—like kids’ sneakers. Efficient power usage has made it “so that there’s almost nothing you can do that doesn’t require power,” as Owen tells me.
But if efficiency will just make things worse, how can we avert climate disaster? Owen says we need to start living smaller, quickly and dramatically—by traveling less and consuming less and taxing energy much more. It is not, he admits, a pleasant message.
Assuming he’s correct. The Jevons paradox has long been controversial, with economists arguing that Jevons got it wrong. Rebound effects are real, they say, but much smaller than he believed.
That’s because we modern folk spend very little on energy—only around 9 percent of GDP in the US. Plus, if we save money through energy efficiency, we don’t immediately spend those savings solely on more energy. We spend it on more food or movies or clothes, where energy accounts for only a small part of creation cost. As a result, economist James Barrett calculates, rebound probably decreases the total amount of energy saved by at most 30 percent—hardly the catastrophe predicted by Jevons and Owen.
There’s also evidence that efficiency standards work. After California imposed them in 1974, per capita electricity consumption stopped growing, even as it rose throughout the rest of the nation. Yes, globally we chew through more power every year, but that’s due to economic growth, argues Amory Lovins, an environmental scientist with the Rocky Mountain Institute.
Owen and other rebound Cassandras “have a critique of growth, which they then blame on energy efficiency,” Lovins tells me. But perhaps we’re buying two air conditioners simply because we’re wealthier, not because air conditioners are more efficient.
8 Comments on "Reviewing Jevons’ Paradox"
MrEnergyCzar on Mon, 5th Mar 2012 6:30 pm
It’s not a coincidence that the more efficient your car is the more miles you drive….
MrEnergyCzar
Kenz300 on Mon, 5th Mar 2012 6:46 pm
It is also a fact that energy efficiency will save you money. When people are strapped for cash they will not drive more just for fun.
DC on Mon, 5th Mar 2012 7:11 pm
Sigh, here we go again. Another talking head invoking Jevon as if he was talking about casual jet-travel,i-junks and hybrid cars.
He wasnt.
He was talking about primary resource extraction, mainly coal, but it applies to every other resource as well. He simply noted that improved technology that increased the RATE of resource extraction, would lead to depletion faster, and he was right.
He never talked about how making a billion wasteful gas-burners slightly more ‘efficent’ would wreck the planet, how could he? Its not ‘efficency'(however defined) that drives the spread of energy sucking consumer ‘goods’ these days, but subsides. Or put another way, its not how ‘efficent’ a device or its planned replacement is that drives there spread, but how ‘cheap’ they are. Not even remotely the same.
For example, SUV usage in amerika exploded for nearly 2 decades. Yet SUVs are grossly IN-efficent by every single metric, yet there numbers literally exploded! According to a lot of people that willfully (mis)-understand jevons central point, that should not have happened. If efficent devices cause energy use to increase, then why is the inverse not true. IN-efficent devices should be the cause of there owm demise. Yet the world we in-habit is FILLED with what can only be called criminally wasteful systems. So how does JP account for the huge spike in grossly-inefficent SUV usage? Well its doesnt, because that was never Jevons point.
‘Efficency’ in todays world has little connection to energy or resource use, but to how EXPENSIVE a given product is. To go a little deeper, the most successful ‘products’ happen to almost invarabily belong to global MNC that are heavily…..
Subsidized. Its cost, not efficency that drives the spread of energy sucking devices. Making the production AND consumption of anything will be successful when govts print fiat money, that they then thow at large corporations, who then turn around and elimate all alternatives, and remake society so there products appear ‘efficent’ but only in a way they define. Hybrid cars are ‘efficent’ in only a very narrow sense of the word. They are hardly better than SUVs when take at look at them in a broader context. If there #’s are going up, if more slowly than SUV’s! went up, we see again, the same forces that made SUV driving viable, cost. The companies that make hybrids and SuVS, are heavily subsidized both on the production end, and the drivers subsidize …well…themselives by allowing there taxes to maintain an poorly built elaborate purpose made road system for cars. People dont rate devices by there energy consumption, or if they do, its only a minor factor, but by how ‘convienient’,they are to them personally, but more importantly, how much they cost them out of pocket.
But if you go back to resource extraction, we can clearly see Jevon was right. So called ‘enhanced’ oil recovery and so on, IS leading to faster oil depletion. Its says nothing about how efficent we are once the oil is refined and how we go about about useing it. We keep wasteing the resources as fast as we extract them, because subsidies(money) make it ‘efficent’ (profitable) for us to do so. At the end of the day, if producers AND end users were forced to bear directly the real costs(in dollar terms) of there wasteful products and lifesytles, instead of them being under-written by massive subsidies, JP would be far less of an issue.
Only at the very end does he seem the grasp this essential truth with his A/C comment.Even he himself points out that if people ‘save’ money on energy, they invaruably will spend it on other goods. Those goods, despite this guys incorrect asseertion DO have high embedded energy costs. So yes, energy use increases no matter, so long as it cheap and proftitable to do so.
Im pretty sure if Jevons were alive today, I would hope he would say hes been fundamentally mis-quoted by a lot of people that should know better.
SOS on Mon, 5th Mar 2012 9:51 pm
LOL. More of the same. No matter what the news story so many of you wont see any light no matter how cheap energy might get. The self fulfilling prophecy seems to be our slow demise and we have the government regulations in place to prove it! LOL With the lefties running things energy will never be cheap, nothing will except government handouts. Unfortunately the vitrol from the left prevents any solution except theirs and any viewpoint but theirs is not tolorated. And to think most on the left are simply useful idiots to the real agenda, its a shame.
Poordogabone on Tue, 6th Mar 2012 12:31 am
Jevon paradox does not apply in the context of PO and economic contraction.
The price of energy will force us to be ever more efficient.
We won’t use more energy by being more efficient because:
1- efficiency will not longer lower but only “soften” energy cost.
2-we have already maxed out.
.
BillT on Tue, 6th Mar 2012 1:00 am
SOS, be patient, it is all about to collapse…and then those who survive can start again…without all the electro toys and gadgets we think we have to have today.
Windmills on Tue, 6th Mar 2012 1:19 am
SOS, thanks for posting a fact-free argument. You’ll win over a lot of people that way. I think what you need are even more ad homs rather than substantiated points. However, no matter how hard you try, I don’t think you’ll be able to politicize the fact that the Earth is finite. Doubtless, you believe that is a “leftie” conspiracy, too.
Windmills on Tue, 6th Mar 2012 1:20 am
Oops. I almost forgot to put in my derisive “LOL” so as to smugly prove how superior I am to others, despite being unable to correctly type or summon any type of evidence to my case.