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Jevons Paradox

• cproctor 9y ago
  This offers an interesting take on Moore's law.
• anonytrary 9y ago
  If you make it easy for someone to take an inch, they take a mile, even if they only took a foot before.
• hodl 9y ago
  Processor speeds are probably a good example of this. Also developer efficiency. All kinds of biz can now afford developers, not just software houses.
• roenxi 9y ago
  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.
  • topbarcolor 9y ago
    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.
    • heavenlyblue 9y ago
      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.
    • rm445 9y ago
      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.
    • roenxi 9y ago
      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.
      • srtjstjsj 9y ago
        If hot water were free, you couldn't sell it. There is a point at which people don't need more water; they aren't Singularity-minded water maximizers.
        • Isinlor 9y ago
          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.
  • danieltillett 9y ago
    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.
    • omgwtfbyobbq 9y ago
      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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand#Effect_on_total_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand#Eff... 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. https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20010730_RS20981_bebfb5655ab124bbbc7f8e4a7791e4316b7ed83f.pdf https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20010730_RS20981_bebfb5...
  • qubex 9y ago
    That’s not true, actually: it strictly depends on which is the effective constraint in play at that particular point in the configuration space.
  • whack 9y ago
    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.
• empath75 9y ago
  Which is why you need an energy tax to actually reduce consumption.
  • darkmighty 9y ago
    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.
    • pygy_ 9y ago
      Renewable energy has an environmental cost as well. The solar and wind energy that isn't currently used by humans is dissipated by atmospheric, marine, geological and biological processes. It is a zero-sum game, and increasing our consumption will disrupt other processes.
      • darkmighty 9y ago
        > 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.
• grondilu 9y ago
  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): https://www.cbsnews.com/news/light-pollution-increasing-around-globe/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/light-pollution-increasing-arou...
  • gameswithgo 9y ago
    > There was an article lately about how electrical consumption for city lights increased despite the switch to LEDs. Its something like a 6x reduction in electric usage vs incandescent, how would people manage to use 6x more light? OR was this a switch from CFL to LED that led to more usage?
    • grondilu 9y ago
      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.
    • amalcon 9y ago
      Most streetlamps had been HID lamps for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_discharge_lamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_discharge_lamp 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.
  • oftenwrong 9y ago
    http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/10/led-light-cfl-b.html http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/10/led-light-cfl-b.html this?
    • 9y ago
• spodek 9y ago
  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.
  • coldtea 9y ago
    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".
  • epistasis 9y ago
    > 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.
• erebus_rex 9y ago
  A related concept in microeconomics: The Giffen Good [0] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good
• graeme 9y ago
  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.
• kingofhdds 9y ago
  To the best of my knowledge, coal consumption reduced eventually, and exactly technology apparently did play some role.
  • pmcg 9y ago
    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.
• soniman 9y ago
  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.
• philipkglass 9y ago
  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.
• woodandsteel 9y ago
  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.
  • pmcg 9y ago
    I don't think this applies to division by zero. But I expect that in general, for most things humans consume, as efficiency has increased, consumption has increased too.