Jevons Paradox

People view technology as a deus ex machina that will enable them to keep doing what they&#x27;re doing but magically it won&#x27;t pollute any more.<p>For example, many think that solar powered planes will enable flying without pollution, which somehow justifies their current flying. The &quot;logic&quot; doesn&#x27;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.<p>Technology has helped humanity out of many problems, as have markets and economic growth. Now we&#x27;re facing problems that technology, markets, and growth are <i>causing</i> (extinctions, resource depletion, pollution, litter, climate change, etc), Jevon&#x27;s paradox contributing significantly (the tragedy of the commons and principle agent problem being others) and people haven&#x27;t realized that applying more of what solved other problems isn&#x27;t helping but <i>exacerbating</i> current problems.<p>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.

One can observe that, on a global level, CO2 emissions have never been higher.<p>In other words, not only have we not made progress, we have gone backwards. I believe Jevon&#x27;s paradox is a major cause, along with a lack of understanding of it.<p>A clearer way of presentint Jevon&#x27;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.<p>I think the best way to combat this is to negotiate for countries to implement a tax on carbon.<p>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&#x27;re allowed to use. But then....every unit of CO2 is suddenly more tempting.<p>Hence, our emissions have gone up, not down. There&#x27;s just so much you can do with it now!<p>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.<p>This is so obviously the market based solution that I am baffled more people don&#x27;t advocate for it. It doesn&#x27;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: &quot;The Jevons paradox occurs when the rebound effect is greater than 100%, exceeding the original efficiency gains.&quot;<p>&quot;People save on electricity by replacing incandescent lights with LED lights, and <i>also</i> make their living rooms 25% brighter at the same time&quot; is an example of a rebound effect. Some of the efficiency gain on the input side is offset by increased output consumption. But it&#x27;s not an example of the Jevons Paradox. If you replace light sources with ones that are 5x as efficient, you&#x27;d have to also use <i>more than 5x as much</i> lighting as before to qualify as a Jevons Paradox.<p>The Jevons Paradox is a specific, fairly narrow, empirically observable phenomenon. Fatalistic notions that technological efficiency improvements can&#x27;t reduce per-capita energy consumption, &quot;because of Jevons Paradox,&quot; 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&#x27;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.<p>Can&#x27;t quite find the article though, but here is one about light pollution increasing (which does not necessarily correlate with electrical consumption, but still):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;light-pollution-increasing-around-globe&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;light-pollution-increasing-arou...</a>

A related concept in microeconomics: The Giffen Good [0]<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Giffen_good" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Giffen_good</a>

If you <i>make it easy</i> for someone to take an inch, they take a mile, even if they only took a foot before.

So, if, for instance, the price of energy dropped to zero, people&#x27;s consumption of it would become infinite. And ditto for anything else that people use. For some reason I find that rather improbable.

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

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

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.

This offers an interesting take on Moore&#x27;s law.

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.