Does improving energy efficiency actually increase the carbon footprint.

This is a very thought provoking article about how increases in energy efficiency may lead to increases in energy use:
The Jevons Paradox

It is followed by some interesting commentary.

The Jevons Paradox
How Efficiency Improvements May Be Undermining Sustainability
Posted on Sep 4 by Martin Holladay

U.S. energy consumption continues to rise. In spite of continuing efficiency improvements that allow manufacturers to reduce the energy required per unit of production, we’re using more energy every year.

Let’s say you’ve sold your old, leaky house and moved into a new, well-insulated home with Energy Star appliances. With all of its efficiency improvements, your new home requires 30% less energy than your old home. That’s got to be good for the planet, right?

Well, maybe not — especially if you save so much on your energy bills that you decide to fly to Florida for your next vacation.

A new book, The Myth of Resource Efficiency, casts serious doubts on the idea that efficiency improvements will lead to lower levels of energy consumption. The book focuses on the “rebound effect” — the increase in energy use that often follows energy efficiency improvements. (For more on the rebound effect, see “Getting More Efficient, But Using More Energy”.)

The authors of The Myth of Resource Efficiency — John Polimeni, Kozo Mayumi, Mario Giampietro, and Blake Alcott — identify William Stanley Jevons as the first economist to describe the rebound effect. In his 1865 book, The Coal Question, Jevons explained the mechanism whereby energy efficiency improvements lead to increased energy consumption: “If the quantity of coal used in a blast-furnace, for instance, be diminished in comparison with the yield, the profits of the trade will increase, new capital will be attracted, the price of pig-iron will fall, but the demand for it increase; and eventually the greater number of furnaces will more than make up for the diminished consumption of each.”

“Let's Use More!”
One hundred and forty-four years ago, Jevons wrote, “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.” Economists now refer to this principle as the Jevons Paradox.

The Jevons Paradox takes many forms:

* Because of improvements in refrigerator efficiency, consumers can afford more and larger refrigerators.
* Because of improvements in vehicle efficiency, car owners can afford to drive more miles per year.
* Because of improvements in airtightness, window performance, and insulation techniques, homeowners can afford to build larger houses.
* Savings resulting from energy-efficiency improvements — or even savings resulting from giving up meat in one’s diet — allow consumers to take more vacations, resulting in greater energy use.

As Joseph Tainter explains in the forward to The Myth of Resource Efficiency, “An action taken to conserve resources reduces the cost of daily life to such an extent that entirely different kinds of environmental damage become affordable.”

In 1865, Jevons correctly predicted that the development of more efficient ways to harness the power of coal would lead to an increase in coal burning. Worried that Britain’s supplies of easily mined coal would be exhausted, Jevons suggested that Britain prepare for coming fuel shortages by (in Tainter’s words) “using the coal-given prosperity for posterity and for a sort of soft landing at coal’s limits.”

Is Efficiency Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem?
The Jevons Paradox represents a serious challenge to the energy efficiency community. “The Jevons Paradox questions the pervasive assumption — common in colloquial discourse and even in many academic discussions — that sustainability emerges as a passive consequence of consuming less,” Tainter writes. “This assumption comes in two versions. The pessimistic version suggests that it is necessary for people voluntarily to reduce their resource consumption in order to become more sustainable. Examples might include taking shorter or colder showers, using public transportation, drinking tap water rather than bottled, or eating less meat. … The optimistic version…is that a future of technological innovations and the shift to a service-and-information economy will reduce our consumption of resources to such an extent that we will become sustainable without requiring people to sacrifice the things that they enjoy. … This is exactly the assumption that Jevons showed to be false.”

Communities that have a low environmental impact and live in harmony with nature are not particularly efficient. Our planet’s future is being threatened not by traditional rural communities with old-fashioned methods of livelihood, but rather by industrial economies where efficiencies are highest.

The authors of The Myth of Resource Efficiency note, “The idea that ‘an increase in energy efficiency always promotes sustainability’ is very simplistic.”

In Praise of Higher Taxes
If efficiency won’t save us, what will? One possible response to the Jevons Paradox is to enact higher energy taxes. According to Tainter, however, such taxes will never fly in the U.S.: “The Jevons Paradox cannot be circumvented through voluntary restraint or any other laissez-faire approach. Giampietro and Mayumi suggest that taxes could make up for any savings introduced by efficiency improvements, thereby avoiding the paradox. In the United States, at least, this approach is politically infeasible, but the general principle is sound.”

I agree with the authors of The Myth of Resource Efficiency that we need higher energy taxes, but I disagree with their dismissal of voluntary restraint. Higher taxes will help, but a solution to our global climate crisis will also require a movement towards voluntary simplicity, as advocated by Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi.

À la recherche des loisirs perdus
A move toward voluntary simplicity would not only benefit the planet — it might also provide us with more leisure time. (An excellent short video by Peter Smith explores the link between the Jevons Paradox and the disappearance of leisure.) As anthropologists point out, every improvement in economic efficiency — including the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and the transition from agriculture to factory work — has been accompanied by a decrease in leisure. In The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light, William Irwin Thompson noted, “With a labor of a mere fifteen hours a week, hunters and gatherers can provide for all their needs.”

The “disappearing leisure” problem was memorably described in an essay, The Original Affluent Society, by American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. Sahlins wrote, “Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter’s — in which all the people’s material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognize that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.”

Needless to say, I’m not calling for a return to hunting and gathering. I’m calling instead for the voluntary adoption of a simpler lifestyle: one with less work, fewer possessions, and more leisure time. A graceful transition to such a lifestyle would be the greatest possible gift to our children and grandchildren.

Tags: energy efficiency, Jenson, paradox, rebound, snapback
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I think eventually all
by Marshall Sohne

I think eventually all consumers of fossil fuels will need to pay the full cost of these fuels including the external costs to society. This probably will bring the true cost of a gallon of gasoline to more than 15 dollars a gallon or maybe double that. I dont think we should consider this a tax but the withdrawal of a subsidy. By artificially keeping the price of the fossil fuels low we have sent a signal to consumers to buy the larger house and to be wasteful with respect to these subsidized resources. I think if we reflected the true cost of these fuels in their price the cost of using more sustainable alternatives would comparatively make a lot more sense. Whenever I see the pay back periods calculated here for PV or for Solar Hot Water we always come up short because we are comparing the highly subsidized price of hydrocarbons against additional cost associated with alternative or sustainable energy.
I guess also as a society we need to be educated to understand wasteful consumption is wrong. Sort of like its not cool to smoke. We also have to make sure our financial system incentives are not slanted towards infinite expansion in order to sustain ourselves as a society. I dont know if it is true but I was told in school that the reason that wine is 12.5% alcohol is result of the fermentation process. Apparently when yeast breaks down the sugar and converts the same to alcohol (the waste product of their consumption) they will continue this process until this waste product becomes toxic to them (12.5%). Lets hope we can do better and not have to rely on natures self regulating
mechanisms. I seem pretty clear a a society we need to radically change our values and the way we do things. We dont have the luxury to continue they way we have in the past and we dont have the luxury to continue on a path towards unlimited human expansion and I have to assume reality will eventually create enough discomfort to provide the political will to change.
Sep 4, 2009
5:21 PM EDT

Exceptions to Jevons
by Brent Eubanks

Jevons' Paradox is real, and a real problem for people interested in sustainability. But there is a way around it, which highlights the (in my opinion) fundamental difference between incremental and radical efficiency.

Savings in the 10-30% range, typical of what green buildings typically try to achieve, are what I think of as incremental efficiency improvements. These are worthwhile, no question, but they don't change the long term story because these savings are readily eaten up by Jevons, and also by simple increases in population and/or prosperity.

Savings in the 70-90% range, on the other hand, can change the nature of the game. Radical efficiency can reduce your energy use intensity to the point where it is possible to rely on renewable energy. That means current solar income to the site, in the context of low energy use applications, or imported energy in the form of biogas, offsite solar, etc in the context of higher intensity buildings.

Note that I said "can" not "will". It's still possible to be unsustainable at very low energy use intensities. My point is that radically reducing that intensity is a necessary precondition to real sustainability. It's really hard to do, but it does get you around Jevons.

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About the Author

Martin Holladay has worked as a plumbing wholesale counterperson, roofer, remodeler, and builder. He built his first passive solar house in northern Vermont in 1974, and has lived off the grid since 1975. In 1980, Holladay bought his first photovoltaic module, which is still producing electricity after 29 years of service.