I see Jevons' effect touted around a lot as if it's a law of nature when in reality it's just a name given an effect observed in very specific instances
Even within economics it's treated as a rare market effect and not as a given eventuality
It’s literally just a special case of the idea of price elasticity, a pretty core and uncontroversial idea in economics. For many (but not all) goods - if the price goes up, demand goes down. If the price goes down (due to efficiency improvements) the demand goes up.
If overall resource consumption stays the same or increases, then boom: Jevon’s paradox. And experience shows me that’s the norm, not an exception.
Have you heard of computers? Do you consider the development of computing power per Watt vs the total power consumed for computing over the last 70 years as an example of this rare market effect?
I agree that it's not a law of nature or economics, but it is a trap that we can fall into and that is why we have to be sceptical when we talk about technological solutions. Any efforts that try to make a harmful process less harmful can give a worse end result, because the improved processes will be used more than before because of efficiency gains.
Sounds like the same story as risk compensation. "If you let people wear seat belts, they'll drive recklessly and die more."
I don't believe it for the same reasons. Though I agree that what we actually need for climate change is a seemingly-impossible amount of political coordination. A global pollution tax (not just on CO2) which no country or state can race to the bottom to escape.
So many people are categorically "anti-globalist" (I don't know what this means, but that's the sentiment I feel from them) that I have no idea if we can pull it off.
A pollution tax is tool to increase the price in order to decrease consumption. Literally an attempt artificially cause the same effect as if polluting was LESS efficient.
I’m not saying efficiency isn’t valuable. I like an efficient process as much as the next nerd. What I am saying is that we can’t consume our way out of global warming. The total carbon cost of a tesla over it’s lifespan is in the same order of magnitude as that of a regular car (i.e. about half). The only choice that has a significant impact on climate change is to “consume less” driving. I.e. bikes, public transit, etc. those are 10x or 100x choices.
But if there isn’t good bike or transit infrastructure where you live - i.e. it’s not an available choice - then an electric is better than nothing.
I don't think it contradicts the article. They wrote: The energy consumption graph of data centers is basically flat. That's unexpected because big data, machine learning, etc have gotten popular in the last decade (or so). The way I interpreted this is that by improving efficiency, we kept the total energy usage close to constant.
I'm not saying that if you write Rust you save the planet, but in certain scenarios, the energy you save by having some parts of your services written in Rust can be significant.
> If you look at the graph of energy consumption, the top line is basically flat going back as far as 2010.
> There have been too many data center efficiency improvements to list
This seems consistent with jevon’s paradox. Efficiency improvements have not reduced the overall consumption.
Unless you believe that efficiency improvements have just randomly coincided with growth and they happen to cancel each-other out… but it seems more likely to me that cheap compute contributed to the huge uptick in machine learning / big data etc.
You can't efficiency your way out of climate change, but you can use efficiency to ensure people's living standards don't drop as a result of climate change mitigations.
Ah yes, the myriad ways cloud computing contributes to my standard of living /s
I wonder how much of that 200TWh is burnt trying to profile me, track me, and sell me stuff that has little or negative impact on my standard of living. I’d be willing to bet well over half. What’s facebook’s portion of that 200TWh?
The more efficient you make it the cheaper it is to use, the cheaper it is to use the more people use it. Efficiency just creates more consumption.
You can’t “efficiency” your way out of climate change. Sorry.