Whether it is a new fuel efficiency standard for cars, bans on incandescent light-bulbs, or those commercials touting businesses’ commitment to lowering their carbon footprint, the idea that we can reduce carbon emissions by using energy more efficiently is a mantra of our age.
In fact, energy efficiency is considered to be so important that it is sometimes said to be a “fifth fuel” along with coal, petroleum, nuclear, and “alternative” energy. And who can forget Amory Lovins’s term negawatt in this regard?
But as New Yorker staff writer David Owen details in his new book The Conundrum, the idea that we can reduce our energy use by buying the right products is based on flawed economic reasoning.
Better 157 years late than never…..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
I would not term it a ‘paradox’.
Imagine that a technology was developed that allowed people to use nicotine more efficiently than by smoking tobacco. Smoking would certainly decline, byut the adverse effects of smoking would decline even faster as more people maintained nicotine use without the adverse effects using the new technology.
The less on is that the way to reduce consumption of a resource is not by fiat, but by making its use LESS economical than some alternative.
The side effects of this (often unforeseen by the naive policy-makers) is that reduced consumption often drives a reduced standard of living.
Bogus all the way. People will do amazing things to save energy, and don’t need a government to force them to do it.
In their frantic quest to “save the planet!” will they dim the gaudy lights on Times Square?
In order to save energy, the light at the end
of the tunnel has been turned off.
Reliable energy located locally would save more “energy” than any of the energy saving schemes promoted by all of the others. Most of the produced energy is lost in transmission. Of course, the profitability for “Big” energy would be lost, and the speculators would lose even more, as shuffling power around, wouldn’t be needed as often, if at all.