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.
Technology for many serves the role religion used to play. Like God, technology is expected to always provide.
This is unscientific, as science understands the notion of local maxima, diminishing returns, and so on, whereas people worshipping technology as some non exhaustive resource, don't.
And let's not even go into resource depletion, or the odds and difficulties space travel (e.g. when talking about colonizing Mars and so on), which are waved away because "technology will find a way".
The idea that in this or that large-scale problem technology might not find a way, because it depends on limited resources (our cognitive skills, laws of physics limitations, scarcity of materials, energy costs, etc) is not considered at all, even though it's totally possible. The attitude is "surely, since we went from the caves to cars and the moon, we can go anywhere and everywhere".
> 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.
"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_..., 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... 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I talk to strangers on planes, in restaurants and bars, while surfing or skiing, or on a shared lyft line, at conferences, etc. Its not rare for me to eventually be talking about energy and renewable energy because it's one of my favorite topics. Never has anyone brought up a solar plane!
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.
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.
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):
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.
They'd just have to use at least six times more lights. Or leave them on more often. That does not seem impossible to me.
That being said, I may just be misremembering it. Maybe it was just about light pollution, but I do think it was about electric consumption. I'm just not sure.
I have to say that the amount of new light installed is truly huge and interfering with astronomical viewing. Don't bother telling someone to remember to turn off the lights anymore either... they'll look at you like you're a martian.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The impact of removing this energy from circulation is absolutely tiny compared to the impact of CO2. There is a local environmental impact to all structures, yes, but it's absolutely not zero-sum.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you think such a private individual's behaviour holds for all society?
First example: if lots of people had that free hot water, there would pretty soon be companies offering them money for the use of it. A bitcoin miner hooked up to a stirling engine under the hot tap, perhaps?
Second example: shoe materials are probably fungible for other petrochemical products. Reduced-wear elastomers might result in fewer pairs of shoes wearing out but higher demand in other markets.
The parent does miss the point of market saturation, but I think that's on purpose, since it makes the question more complicated.
For example, a reversal: nobody would drive their cars at all if the fuel prices would be the same for 5 seconds of driving as it is for a distance of 1000 miles now.
Introducing energy efficiency measures does cause usage to go down in the short term, but assuming demand is elastic, then it will go up over time as people consume more.
Where Jevons Paradox has most utility is showing the futility of unilateral individual action. Don't think you are doing anything to help the environment by turning off that light switch.
Turning off a light switch isn't futile, it's just not optimal. What you're describing can happen, but isn't common. In that situation, someone using less decreases price such that someone else uses more to the point where price recovers.
In the real world, efficiency increases aren't perfect, and we do use something more if it's efficient, but the vast majority of the time, the efficiency increase still reduces usage. It's usually not a maximal reduction because of the redbound effect (except for some appliances), but in every recent case, overall emergy use does drop.
If you look at the inelastic demand graph, in the "cause" section of the wiki, it answers your question. Even if there's increased use of a resource, total energy consumption often still goes down, because each resource now consumes less energy.
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.