
Jevons Paradox - dedalus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
======
spodek
People view technology as a deus ex machina that will enable them to keep
doing what they're doing but magically it won't pollute any more.

For example, many think that solar powered planes will enable flying without
pollution, which somehow justifies their current flying. The "logic" doesn't
work, but they just want a story to help them sleep at night while they read
that the arctic is 45 degrees above normal, knowing somewhere in the backs of
their minds that the jet fuel they paid to burn to move their share of a plane
around the world and back contributed more to that climate change than nearly
anyone in hundreds of thousands of years of human existence.

Technology has helped humanity out of many problems, as have markets and
economic growth. Now we're facing problems that technology, markets, and
growth are _causing_ (extinctions, resource depletion, pollution, litter,
climate change, etc), Jevon's paradox contributing significantly (the tragedy
of the commons and principle agent problem being others) and people haven't
realized that applying more of what solved other problems isn't helping but
_exacerbating_ current problems.

Technology can buy us time, but systems change generally requires changing the
goals and beliefs driving the system, which are social and emotional issues,
not technological.

~~~
epistasis
> many think that solar powered planes will enable flying without pollution,
> which somehow justifies their current flying.

That's an incredibly silly thing to think, where do you come across such
people?

>applying more of what solved other problems isn't helping but exacerbating
current problems.

While possible in principle, I don't see that happening. Installing LED lights
doesn't lead to people using _more_ electricity. Driving electric cars doesn't
lead to more driving. And it seems that switching jets to synthetic/biofuels
won't lead to more flying.

Jevon's paradox does not apply everywhere, just where there's supply
restricted usage.

Further, technology is disconnecting carbon intensity and even energy
intensity from GDP. The connection between these was an article of faith for
prior generations, both from conservationists and economic conservatives, but
it is changing now.

We need to rethink plans in light of these changing fundamentals: Jevon's
paradox happens many places but not everywhere, and economic activity is going
to be disconnected from carbon intensity.

~~~
spodek
> Installing LED lights doesn't lead to people using more electricity.

My quick research suggests otherwise.

The first result when I searched on "people with led lights use more
electricity" was _The Lighting Paradox: Cheaper, Efficient LEDs Save Energy,
and People Use More_ [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20082015/lighting-
paradox...](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20082015/lighting-paradox-
cheaper-efficient-led-save-energy-use-rises).

It linked to research results including:

"A 2010 study looked at lighting use around the world for the past 300 years
as lighting technology improved from whale oil lamps to gas and kerosene lamps
to electric incandescent bulbs. The study
[http://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/tsao_jy_2010_04_app_for_light_...](http://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/tsao_jy_2010_04_app_for_light_LEUKOS.pdf),
conducted by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New
Mexico found a direct relationship between decreased cost and increased
consumption."

and

"A study published earlier this year in the Journal of Industrial Ecology
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.12281/abstra...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.12281/abstract)
concluded we will likely see a drop in energy use for residential lighting in
the short term, but energy savings will likely be reduced or perhaps
eliminated entirely as the amount of lit space increases.

"It's not just a question of turning on a light to read a book or to see
something on your kitchen counter, you can do lots of stuff with LEDs that you
really couldn't do very well with other kinds of artificial light sources,"
said Theis, a co-author of the study. "They are being incorporated into
wearable lighting now, there is just no end to it.""

I didn't look up electric cars, but I expect to find similar research there.
I'm pretty sure I read in HN that ride sharing is leading to more traffic.

I agree Jevon's paradox doesn't happen everywhere, but it looks like it does
in your first proposed counterexample. It happens a lot.

~~~
omgwtfbyobbq
The authors of that paper are estimating that energy use for lighting will
eventually reach past levels because of the rebound effect and population
growth, not Jevon's paradox.

Jevon's paradox occurs when an increase in efficiency results in so much
additional use that per capita energy consumption increases. If the average
car is made twice as efficient and that leads to it being driven three times
it's annual mileage, that's Jevon's. If it's driven one and a half times it's
annual mileage, that's the rebound effect.

~~~
spodek
> Jevon's paradox occurs when an increase in efficiency results in so much
> additional use that per capita energy consumption increases.

They also describe that we are lighting things we didn't use to light, keeping
the lights on longer ( not just households but decorative building lights,
decorative bridge lights, etc), and other per capita increases.

The quote above states per capita increases clearly:

> "It's not just a question of turning on a light to read a book or to see
> something on your kitchen counter, you can do lots of stuff with LEDs that
> you really couldn't do very well with other kinds of artificial light
> sources," said Theis, a co-author of the study. "They are being incorporated
> into wearable lighting now, there is just no end to it."

The Sandia article also states clearly about per-capita increases, " _No
empirical evidence is found for a saturation in per-capita consumption of
light_ "

> We have collected and self-consistently analyzed data for per-capita
> consumption of artificial light, per-capita gross domestic product, and
> ownership cost of light. The data span a wide range (three centuries, six
> continents, five lighting technologies, and five orders of magnitude), and
> are consistent with a linear variation of per-capita consumption of light
> with the ratio between per-capita gross domestic product and ownership cost
> of light. No empirical evidence is found for a saturation in per-capita
> consumption of light, even in contemporary developed nations.

~~~
omgwtfbyobbq
Per-capita light use does increase. In order for Jevon's paradox to apply, per
capita energy use would have to increase more than the decrease from improved
efficiency. So if LEDs are ten times more efficient, per capita light use
would have to increase by 10+ times for Jevon's to apply.

Putting it another way, Jevon's is just an example of the rebound effect where
more energy is used after the efficiency improvement than before. It can
happen, but it's not very common.

If people were to switch to LEDs and their energy consumption dropped to a
tenth of what it was, they could triple the number of lights in their house,
leave those lights on 24/7/365 (as opposed to for 8 hours a day), and still be
using less energy than with incandescents. That's the rebound effect. If they
quadruple the number of lights and triple the time those lights are on, they
would use more energy than they did before the switch to LEDs. That's Jevon's
paradox.

------
graeme
One can observe that, on a global level, CO2 emissions have never been higher.

In other words, not only have we not made progress, we have gone backwards. I
believe Jevon's paradox is a major cause, along with a lack of understanding
of it.

A clearer way of presentint Jevon's paradox is: price decline, usage
increases. Which is such a standard economic statement that it hardly needs
saying. The unintuitive part of the paradox is that we measure the price of a
unit of energy, not what we can do with it.

I think the best way to combat this is to negotiate for countries to implement
a tax on carbon.

Negotiating for emissions reductions directly causes problems: you are asking
countries to slow their growth. So, they will look for solutions. Increasing
efficieny is the natural way, to get more use out of the CO2 you're allowed to
use. But then....every unit of CO2 is suddenly more tempting.

Hence, our emissions have gone up, not down. There's just so much you can do
with it now!

If countries agreed to tax carbon, that tax would deal with the externality
caused by carbon emissions, and give an incentive to develop non-carbon
electricity.

This is so obviously the market based solution that I am baffled more people
don't advocate for it. It doesn't even have to raise overall taxes. You just
cut the income tax or corporate tax to compensate.

------
philipkglass
People sometimes confuse the Jevons Paradox with rebound effects in general.
Reminder: "The Jevons paradox occurs when the rebound effect is greater than
100%, exceeding the original efficiency gains."

"People save on electricity by replacing incandescent lights with LED lights,
and _also_ make their living rooms 25% brighter at the same time" is an
example of a rebound effect. Some of the efficiency gain on the input side is
offset by increased output consumption. But it's not an example of the Jevons
Paradox. If you replace light sources with ones that are 5x as efficient,
you'd have to also use _more than 5x as much_ lighting as before to qualify as
a Jevons Paradox.

The Jevons Paradox is a specific, fairly narrow, empirically observable
phenomenon. Fatalistic notions that technological efficiency improvements
can't reduce per-capita energy consumption, "because of Jevons Paradox," are
not empirically supported. Energy rebound effects are common, but when the
rebound is less than 100% (as it usually is) then there are real net energy
savings and it's not a Jevons Paradox.

------
grondilu
I suppose a nice example would be city lights. There was an article lately
about how electrical consumption for city lights increased despite the switch
to LEDs.

Can't quite find the article though, but here is one about light pollution
increasing (which does not necessarily correlate with electrical consumption,
but still):

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/light-pollution-increasing-
arou...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/light-pollution-increasing-around-
globe/)

~~~
gameswithgo
> There was an article lately about how electrical consumption for city lights
> increased despite the switch to LEDs.

Its something like a 6x reduction in electric usage vs incandescent, how would
people manage to use 6x more light?

OR was this a switch from CFL to LED that led to more usage?

~~~
amalcon
Most streetlamps had been HID lamps for a long time:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
intensity_discharge_lamp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
intensity_discharge_lamp)

Efficiency was one reason for this, but the bigger reason was just that (for
the duty cycle of a streetlamp) they require fewer installations and last
_way_ longer than incandescent bulbs. This means that the maintenance costs
are much lower.

------
erebus_rex
A related concept in microeconomics: The Giffen Good [0]

0:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good)

------
anonytrary
If you _make it easy_ for someone to take an inch, they take a mile, even if
they only took a foot before.

------
woodandsteel
So, if, for instance, the price of energy dropped to zero, people's
consumption of it would become infinite. And ditto for anything else that
people use. For some reason I find that rather improbable.

~~~
pmcg
I don't think this applies to division by zero.

But I expect that in general, for most things humans consume, as efficiency
has increased, consumption has increased too.

------
empath75
Which is why you need an energy tax to actually reduce consumption.

~~~
darkmighty
But why would we need to reduce consumption? We need _emissions_ tax -- a tax
proportional to the environmental cost. If power consumption carried little or
no environmental cost, we'd want to use a huge amount, and that wouldn't be an
issue.

~~~
pygy_
Renewable energy has an environmental cost as well.

The solar and wind energy that isn't currently used by humans is dissipated by
atmospheric, marine, geological and biological processes.

It is a zero-sum game, and increasing our consumption will disrupt other
processes.

~~~
darkmighty
> It is a zero-sum game, and increasing our consumption will disrupt other
> processes.

You need to define what you mean by "being a zero-sum game". For example, in
terms of entropy (which is a possible metric in the context of "dissipation")
it isn't a zero-sum game -- certain processes increase entropy more, some
less. In terms of total instantaneous thermal absorption, which defines the
temperature of the Earth, it also isn't a zero-sum game -- If there was a
white surface and it is made black, then the temperature of the Earth will
rise; the same goes for emitting CO2 which in effect increases the global
absorptivity (energy that wouldn't be absorbed if the Earth didn't contain as
much GHG). Putting solar cells in barren deserts isn't going to disrupt local
lifeforms simply because there aren't any. So it seems in almost every
definition of zero-sum it indeed isn't a zero-sum game -- which is good!

Note that I didn't claim renewable energy has no environmental cost. It most
definitely has. Every activity will have certain impacts, greater or lower, on
resource availability, thermal balance, and on other lifeform habitats. The
key is pricing adequately those impacts so any damage could be repaired or
compensated. The effect of pricing is usually just impact minimization, since
the cost of repair or compensation is usually much greater than prevention.

So it is a matter of seeking technologies that give the greatest return (power
output in this case) for total cost (environmental and economic) -- and better
alternatives than current ones are constantly being discovered, thankfully.

~~~
pygy_
The sun output and the earth surface are constant, that's the zero sum
resources I was talking about.

> Putting solar cells in barren deserts isn't going to disrupt local lifeforms
> simply because there aren't any.

No, but it will cool down the places, which will affect winds patterns and
rainfall, which can in turn affect life forms at a distance. I suppose you
could paint the ground around the pannels black, and carefully chose the
panel/reflector density to have a neutral thermal effect.

------
kingofhdds
To the best of my knowledge, coal consumption reduced eventually, and exactly
technology apparently did play some role.

~~~
pmcg
Coal consumption increased steadily since 1865 and is almost at its all time
high right now. There was a tiny dip in the last few years, but oil
consumption is still increasing.

------
soniman
Are cars going to be an example of this? New electric cars are more fuel
efficient but they will have so much processing and laser power (for
autonomous driving) that they will actually consume more energy.

------
cproctor
This offers an interesting take on Moore's law.

------
roenxi
Applying this paradox in reverse (which is paraphrasing the wiki article) - if
introducing energy efficiency measures causes energy use to go down then
someone needs to ask probing questions about what is going on. Increased
efficiency should be linked, all else equal, to increased use of a resource.

~~~
topbarcolor
It's not hard to find examples where this "rule" doesn't seem to hold. If you
give me water heated for free, I may shower twice on some days, but I will not
take infinite hot showers. If you gave me shoes that cause less ablation of
the pavement I walk on, I wouldn't find other ways to remove the same amount
of material, I would simply use up less resources wherever I go, being none
the wiser.

~~~
roenxi
Actually, Jeveron's paradox would hold in the case you mentioned. Someone who
gave you heated water would give it to you _with an implicit quota_ otherwise
a rational actor use an infinite amount of it.

If I actually had free no-holds-barred heated water, I'd run a pipe down to
the local laundry and sell it at a profit. That is the rational response - the
reason you don't see people doing that is because nobody offers free heated
water at scale.

Your mistake here is thinking that resources have an implicit purpose (hot
water => warm showers). If that were true, Jeveron's paradox would not hold.
The paradox holds because once something becomes more abundant, it can be used
for totally new activities.

~~~
srtjstjsj
If hot water were free, you couldn't sell it. There is a point at which people
don't need more water; they aren't Singularity-minded water maximizers.

~~~
Isinlor
In communist countries, hot water was sort of free i.e. the cost was shared.
People were having open windows during winter in order to have fresh air and
heating in order to have warmth, also heating outside as a by-product :) . Hot
water usage went drastically down in building where capitalist rules were
introduced and water meters were installed per flat.

