[MonteQuest]

Jevons' Paradox at work.

EU electricity consumption grows despite efficiency drive: report

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'D')espite measures to improve energy efficiency and curb carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in Europe, a study has found that these efforts are being outstripped by the growing economy where electricity is more and more in demand....

[rumspringa]

A new book on Jevons' Paradox is coming out soon:

Jevons' Paradox and the Myth of Resource Efficiency Improvements
By John M. Polimeni, Kozo Mayumi, Mario Giampietro and Blake Alcott
NOT YET PUBLISHED

Hardback £65.00 ISBN: 1844074625 / 9781844074624
Publication Date: January 2008
192 pages

I posted the publisher's blurb on the Book/Media Reviews forum a while back. It's expensive so you might want to have your local library borrow it for you once it's published.

[JPL]

One of the things that disconvivulates me about this place at the moment, is the fact that you can spend all day thinking about a topic, post your careful thoughts up, and then nobody responds. Not even to say that you are wrong, because of this, this, and that.

Hello, tap tap on the monitor, is anybody out there???

JPL

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JPL', 'O')ne of the things that disconvivulates me about this place at the moment, is the fact that you can spend all day thinking about a topic, post your careful thoughts up, and then nobody responds. Not even to say that you are wrong, because of this, this, and that.

Hello, tap tap on the monitor, is anybody out there???

JPL

[yesplease]

Wait, what? Free market? I mean, I suppose this is great as an exercise, but there are no free markets I know of we could apply any results or conclusions we draw from it to.

[gg3]

Key question:

Monte, do you already have an answer in mind and you're trying to get us to thik it through to see if we come to a convergent conclusion? Or are you starting with no answer in mind and trying to get us to go at it until we come up with something we'll all recognize is viable?

---

Whoever it was who suggested "walking away from civilization": That's neoprimitivism, see also Jason Godesky at www.anthropik.com, who makes some very intelligent arguements for that position. Problem is, unless everyone does it, all you get are some tribes that can easily be treated in the same manner as other nonindustrial tribes, which is to say, wiped out; with the exception of tribes that are sufficiently militarily skillful as to be able to successfully defend themselves from outside invasion. Lengthy digression omitted here to save space....

---

I tend to side with "relocalization" and "deliberate inflation."

The deliberate inflation strategy has an important practical limitation, which is that it requires an entity with suffcient wealth to engage in diachronic (across-time) competition on behalf of the future.

Also the fact that the resources are running down, so even with increased conservation in the conventional sense, if someone else "tries" to use up the surplus, it won't matter because every year there is less and less to use up. The conservers end up ahead of the wasters because the conservers have become progressively more resilient (learning how to make do with less: adapting in the darwinian sense) whereas the wasters have become progressively less resilient (failing to gain practice at adapting).

Also climate change is going to put a lid on it for us whether we like it or not, speaking of demand destruction, a near-extinction event will do a darn good job of that.

---

Re. Escher's visual paradox: However, the illusion of growth still feeds the idea that growth is possible and even good.

Whereas, in reality, growthism is the cancer that has to be killed off mercilessly.

In the end there are only limited resources, so all of economics ultimately reduces to the question of distributing slices of a pie that is of fixed size. What you end up with is zero overall growth, but shifts in the relative size of different elements or individuals or sectors within the economy. This year X grows by "n" amount, but Y and Z each contract by "1/2n + q" where "q" is entropic loss. Or X contracts by n, and Y and Z each grow by 1/2n - q. So long as you can prevent accumulations of heredetary wealth to the point where they jam the system, you can keep this going.

---

"There are no free markets" only means, there are no physical systems of interaction among humans that are as frictionless (lacking entropy) as the process of thought itself.

All markets operate within rule-sets, and all rule-sets limit the "freedom" of a subset of the potential actors within the market. After all, Ford and GM don't compete by blowing up each others' factories.

Thus, the practical extent of a free market is one that is based on a Kantian rule-set: rules that are established as universals, rather than as arbitrary expedients selectively applied on behalf of interest groups or subsets of the whole.

At its core, a (Kantian) free market only requires that producers have freedom of enterprise (the freedom to start business entities and manage them by their own principles for their own goals), and that consumers have the freedom to buy from the producers of their choice.

Nowhere is there a requirement that any given producer or consumer must be able to derive a net advantage or net gain: merely that they have the opportunity to do so based on their smarts, strengths, and so on. That is, you have the right to engage in cooperation, competition, and symbioses, but you are not guaranteed a successful outcome.

---

That's all I have time to go into at the moment, I'll be back later (this evening).

[JPL]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MonteQuest', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JPL', 'O')ne of the things that disconvivulates me about this place at the moment, is the fact that you can spend all day thinking about a topic, post your careful thoughts up, and then nobody responds. Not even to say that you are wrong, because of this, this, and that.

Hello, tap tap on the monitor, is anybody out there???

JPL

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gg3', 'K')ey question:

Monte, do you already have an answer in mind and you're trying to get us to thik it through to see if we come to a convergent conclusion? Or are you starting with no answer in mind and trying to get us to go at it until we come up with something we'll all recognize is viable?

[firestarter]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MonteQuest', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JPL', 'O')ne of the things that disconvivulates me about this place at the moment, is the fact that you can spend all day thinking about a topic, post your careful thoughts up, and then nobody responds. Not even to say that you are wrong, because of this, this, and that.

Hello, tap tap on the monitor, is anybody out there???

JPL

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('firestarter', ' ')From a political standpoint how will this be implemented?

[gg3]

OK, I think I see where this is going. Monte, is this what you're looking for:

In essence the solution is to use surplus wealth to "invest in the future" by buying up resources but not using them.

For a radically oversimplified example: You cut back driving by let's say 2/3. But instead of allowing others to buy up that extra gas you've saved, you spend the same amount of money as you did before, and 2/3 of that money goes into a fund that is used to "lock up" the oil that would have produced that additional gasoline. So you're using 2/3 less gas than before, but the difference is simply not produced, rather than being produced and bought by someone else.

At present there's no way for the average person to do this for all relevant cases. You can do what Al Gore does and buy carbon credits and keep them off the market, but you can't do likewise for every resource you are conserving. Yet.

At present, business entities and wealthy individuals can probably find more ways to accomplish this, since they have acces to financial mechanisms that require larger unit-sizes of investment. For example a special fund could be put together to buy out oil wells and take them out of production, or to buy up water rights and take the water off the market. Participating in this type of activity wouldn't require a "Bill Gates fortune," just a net worth that qualifies an individual as a sophisticated investor under SEC rules. Last time I checked, that was net worth of $100k or greater, which is in the range of American upper middle class with decent equity in one's home.

So now consider the following as a social movement among privately-held businesses and wealthy individuals: voluntary simplicity combined with investment in those financial mechanisms to sequester resources. Eventually it becomes accessible to average people, as the relevant financial mechanisms are packaged into smaller unit-sizes of investment, so everyone can get involved.

This also translates to business opportunities.

For example, set up a corporation to run a gas station, charge $8 per gallon, and put the difference between that and the present market price of gas (approx. $3.25 in the Oakland California area at present) into buying carbon credits or sequestering oil wells.

Who would buy gas at that deliberately inflated price? The same market niche that presently buys other products that have a price premium for sustainability, business ethics, and so on. This niche already has a track record supporting such things as Working Assets Long Distance, organically produced locally grown foods, paper products made from recycled paper stock, fair trade coffee and cocoa, and so on.

Businesses could do likewise, and the expenses are tax deductible. For example, a company buys coffee to serve in its break room, and gets a writeoff for it as part of "office expenses." If the company buys fair trade coffee, it also gets a writeoff even if the cost is higher.

So: For example, at present my company writes off vehicle mileage to client sites at a standard IRS rate per mile. But there is also the option of taking a writeoff for the actual costs of running the vehicle: gas, oil, tires, repairs, etc. (most companies use the standard per-mile writeoff because it's simpler to keep track of). If we use the "itemized deduction" method, we can write off the actual cost of my hypothetical $8 per gallon gasoline. And if we're reducing miles driven per month (for example by using modem dialup to do routine service on clients' PBXs), we can afford the higher price per gallon: my increased efficiency using the dialup modems, instead of going into our bottom line profit, can in part be allocated to paying the higher price for gas just as if we was paying a lower price per gallon and driving more miles. Instead of lots of miles driven at lower cost per mile, we'd be paying the same amount of money for fewer miles driven at higher cost per mile, and either way the amount of the tax deduction is the same.

This works for us because we're privately held: we can take the decision internally to operate that way and we're not depriving external shareholders (there aren't any) of increased return on investment. Any closely-held corporation could do the same thing if the shareholders (a small group of external investors) took the decision to direct the management to do it.

A publicly-traded corporation would have a hard time doing it because its board of directors would have to convince a majority of shareholders, and at that point deal with a disgruntled minority who would have preferred to keep their efficiency savings as profits. However, over time, if this form of "market-based powerdown strategy" became popular, it would become a significant element in public relations and marketing, so publicly-traded corporations might feel obligated to do it at least to a degree (frankly I don't think we have time for that to occur on its own, but in theory it is at least possible).

Now consider a similar case for a large range of products and services. For example, a bottled water company that charges a premium price for bottled water and uses the difference to sequester water sources. For example, going outside one's own company's product category entirely: the "world price" gas station investing in sequestering water, the "world price" bottled water company investing in sequestering oil wells, and everyone buying up carbon credits like they're gold coins.

Now here's something about market psychology: When people pay a high price for something, they tend to believe they are getting higher value for money than with a lower-priced product or service. This is also an element in brand loyalty for premium-priced brands. So with the right branding and marketing, it can actually work. Look to existing premium-priced brands for examples and strategies, though keep in mind that this is not easy to "get" by simple emulation: it requires a fairly comprehensive understanding of the brand psychology of one's market segment.

And now comes the hard part:

Carbon credits and certain niche cases are presently available as routes for buying and sequestering resources and ecological impacts. However this has hardly become a universal market for all relevant cases of resources and impacts.

What is needed in order to make all of this work, is to "make a market" (in the technical sense) for each relevant case of resources or ecological impacts. This is outside my expertise and experience, so I'll stop here and I'm intrested in feedback and suggestions from people with relevant background .

[JPL]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gg3', '
')And now comes the hard part:

Carbon credits and certain niche cases are presently available as routes for buying and sequestering resources and ecological impacts. However this has hardly become a universal market for all relevant cases of resources and impacts.

What is needed in order to make all of this work, is to "make a market" (in the technical sense) for each relevant case of resources or ecological impacts. This is outside my expertise and experience, so I'll stop here and I'm intrested in feedback and suggestions from people with relevant background .

[Byron100]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SpringCreekFarm', 'I')'m going to offer up one of those answers that just comes to mind. My gut feeling says...

How about not conserving? How about using what is left to build an infrastructure of some sort reliant on electricity to help alleviate the pains of dieoff. This can all be done while powering down. Along with the electrical infrastructure buildup, we also build up a very efficient mass transit system to take us to key places around the country ( continent ). I say make efficiency work in our favour. Whatever we save we put back into a system that is renewable. All the while we try to reprogram people to powerdown and depopulate and perhaps we go so far as to mandate it. Any thoughts? Is this thinking naive?

[Pops]

I suppose I will reprise my earlier post, as it was obviously one or more illogical, logical, naive and/or too wise for a reply:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'I') guess I am thinking Jevon works to my advantage – the more folks conserve and the lower the price pressure; the easier it is for me.

Conserve away, ride your bike or drive your Pirus and keep tapping away. By doing so you reduce demand and keep the price of energy down…

[Aimrehtopyh]

MonteQuest wrote:$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'H')ow can you limit consumption and prohibit more efficiency gains?

[aflurry]

Wha???

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MonteQuest', '
')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('aflurry', 'I') know we aren't supposed to be debating Jevons, but this seems fairly relevant, especially in light of the conclusions you seem to want to draw from this, that conservation plays no part in a solution.

[yesplease]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('aflurry', ' ')But as i said, it is a comment about efficiency, not conservation. It is only later interpretations that lump in conservation.

[bshirt]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Aimrehtopyh', '
') With no public schools the workforce/populace would get inexorably dumber with every passing year.

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('aflurry', ' ')
Huh? Then what did you mean by this?

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MonteQuest', '
')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('aflurry', 'I') think there have probably been many observable efficiency gains, but very few genuine conservation gains. We have yet to know the effect of a genuine, sustained conservation effort.

[kaktus]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'And that is just what my question tries to elicit. What is the compromise?')

I can only think of three alternatives (except from doing nothing) to handle the failure of markets:
1 that EU and US together suddenly decides to effectively tax and/or to use quotas on the using up of natural resources (taxes on CO2 for example) and forces the rest to join.
2 a sort of war economy where the usage of resources are centrally planned on state level.
3 that the trend to secure resources by military means escalates so that those with money get what they want.

Perhaps alt 1 is so unlikely that one should work for alt 2? if one don't like alt 3 of course.