Energy efficiency appears to offer a perfect solution for our energy problems. Efficiency improvements not only reduce the energy consumption of appliances, cars and industrial processes, but typically pay for themselves. They are "not a free lunch, but a lunch you're paid to eat," Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins argued in their influential book, Factor Four. Their twin benefits make efficiency improvements politically more palatable than measures such as carbon taxes.
A recent story in The New Yorker magazine has cast doubts about the effectiveness of energy efficiency. "The problem with efficiency gains is that we inevitably reinvest them in additional consumption," argues David Owen in his article, "The Efficiency Dilemma." His story has triggered a heated debate in the blogosphere. The issue at stake is as complicated as it is important. Here is an overview.
David Owen illustrates his critique with the example of refrigeration. A study by the World Economic Forum found that the average refrigerator sold in the US today uses three quarters less energy than in 1975, even though it is 20% larger. This looks like the perfect win-win situation for the environment and consumers. Yet, says Owen, "the issue may be less straightforward than it seems." The cheaper use has allowed refrigerators to proliferate in ever new areas (such as hotel rooms). And it has helped boost the wasteful frozen food sector, which may cancel out the gains achieved through efficiency improvements. Such indirect impacts are called the "rebound effect" or, after a British economist from the mid-19th century, the Jevons paradox.
Charles Komanoff, an energy economist from New York, followed Owen with his own critique in the online journal Grist. He pointed out that in spite of important breakthroughs in energy efficiency, overall energy consumption in the US in 2008 was 38% higher and electricity consumption twice as high as in 1975. He concludes that "efficiency advocates have been winning the micro battles but losing the macro war. Through engineering brilliance and concerted political and regulatory advocacy, we have increased energy efficiency in the small while the society around us has grown monstrously energy-inefficient and cancelled out those gains. Two steps forward, two steps back."
Not so, argue energy experts such as Amory Lovins, the founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute. Energy demand has soared not because efficiency improvements have caused prices to drop, but because overall income has increased. Yet even with higher incomes and lower prices, demand for frozen food, car miles and other energy uses will eventually be saturated and taper off.
Responding to Komanoff's growth figures, Amory Lovins points out that while energy consumption grew by 38% 1975-2008, the US economy grew by 171% during the same period. If it had not been for efficiency gains, energy consumption would thus have grown 4.5 times faster than it actually did. In nine of the past 34 years, says Lovins, efficiency gains outpaced economic growth "without our even paying attention." This shows that if efficiency improvements were pursued more seriously, they could reduce overall energy demand.
But could they do so on their own? In a rejoinder, Komanoff argued that energy consumption fell during the years when prices jumped. "Contrary to your assertion," he reminded his friend Lovins, "we were paying attention: prices compelled us to." This suggests that the best way to reduce energy consumption - "the antidote to the Jevons paradox" in Komanoff's words - is to make energy more expensive, for example through a carbon tax. Energy efficiency, maintains F. James Handley, "seems to have offered a 'false short cut' around the hard path of pricing carbon."
At the end of the day, it is impossible to quantify to what extent gains in energy efficiency are lost to the rebound effect. But money saved through efficiency gains will almost always be spent on something else, with associated environmental impacts. In contrast, argues Blake Alcott, an environmental economist and old friend from my activist days in Zürich, emission caps, carbon taxes, consumption quotas and similar measures will translate into a direct reduction in energy consumption.
Does this make energy efficiency a useless or even counter-productive tool? I don't think so. The environmental impacts of efficiency improvements may indeed be limited, but their welfare benefits are important. They allow us to consume more for the same amount of environmental impact. My personal welfare is not improved by frozen food and additional car miles. But the situation in poor countries is different. Efficiency improvements allow poor societies to increase their use of much-needed goods and services without a commensurate increase in environmental impacts.
Energy efficiency should not be seen as an easy way around hard measures to reduce energy consumption. But energy efficiency measures and energy taxes are not mutually exclusive. To the contrary, efficiency improvements can make the required hard measures politically more feasible. We need to protect fragile ecosystems from oil exploration, coal mining and dam building. We need to drastically reduce our energy consumption through emission caps and carbon taxes. The vast potential of energy efficiency means that we can do so without sacrificing jobs, quality of life, and development for the poor.
Today we are losing the economic war to foreign nations, hungry people, increased unemployment, housing crisis, Trillions in deficits, various Cities and States on a verge of Bankruptcy.
Worse we cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Our education system is faltering. Values and morality are disintegrating.
This is a bigger war than World War II.
How do we overcome these crises? It is imperative we reverse the trend.
We must work together to overcome the current crises.
We have to be creative and resourceful.
We have to drastically reduce our fossil fuel consumption
Anyone has a logical and profound answer, I would like to hear.
I have a feeling it is going to get worse, before it gets better.
YJ Draiman, Northridge, CA
PS
“It is, regrettably, no exaggeration to say that we are living in an era of irrationality, deception, confusion, anger, and unfocused fear -- an ominous combination, with few precedents. There has never been a time when it was so important to have a voice of sanity, insight, and understanding of
We need honest government with integrity.
Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for.
As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end.
Burning any kind of fuel eats oxygen. Burn Nat. Gas, methane, ethanol, bio diesel, wood, and you will be burning MORE oxygen than fuel. If you are not moved....go do a google on atmospheric oxygen levels. Find how they are dropping. If nothing else will get you off the couch...decide whether or not oxygen is important to you. We are nearing levels where a fetus will not develop, even though an adult can struggle thru. Won't be long, since almost every chemical and energy reaction we utilize requires vast amounts of oxygen to complete the process. And we are killing off the things that produce O2 at ever increasing rates. Nice.
This may be way to simplistic, and probably has occurred to everyone....but energy needs to be supplied by non-lethal means. Electricity seems to be the only sustainable and least dangerous power source. It also is nearly unlimited, when you consider tidal, wind, solar sources. It is not toxic, nor does it require tanks, emissions transport, refinement, etc.
If we can produce this power with zero emissions and with the potential to always create more, we have sidestepped most of the devastating consequences of energy consumption. I am always rooting for a paradigm shift which shackles humanities greed for more power and resources, but if that isn't happening then we need to switch to power sources which do not kill us and everything on the planet.
To efficiency advocates like Messrs Lovins, Schipper and Barrett (Grist): One should not regard GDP, or 'the economy' or 'growth' as an exogenous, independent causal factor - which is then said to be responsible for increases in energy consumption. The whole point is that technological, institutional and organisational efficiencies are what is driving this economic growth and increased purchasing power in the first place.
And please, please quit discussing DIRECT rebounds, e.g. regarding refrigeration, or car-kilometres, or house insulation. The only important quantity is economy-wide rebound (direct + indirect). The Jevons Paradox is indeed extremely complicated, but unfortunately both low-rebounders and high-rebounders like myself must rely on theory rather than facts to make their case. To the rhetorical question 'Where is the rebound?' I reply, 'Where are the energy savings?'
Let's accept that any energy lying fallow after an efficiency increase will get snapped up for other uses by the same or different people.
Blake Alcott
James Handley
Carbon Tax Center
http://www.carbontax.org
Yes, improvements in refrigerator efficiency increase refrigerator use: clearly there are kinds of optimization to which the Jevons paradox applies. It stands to reason that optimizing the energy efficiency of almost any appliance will optimize use of that appliance.
On the other hand, there are other kinds of efficiency optimization where the Jevons paradox is not in effect.
Timing all the traffic signals in the country, for instance, would save from %10 to %20 of US gas consumption. Gas consumption is a complex phenomenon, but it seems hardly likely that it will increase a concomitant amount.
Insulating houses would probably cause people to keep their houses warmer. But how warm can they keep them? There is an upper limit, just as there is on refrigerator usage. A truly efficient house, with insulation, highly efficient heaters, and maybe some solar cells and a windmill on the roof, will keep the house just as hot as anyone would want it for next to nothing. Thus, the Jevons paradox is in effect--but ineffectual. It cannot compete with the sheer force of true efficiency. What effect would telecommuting have? An increase in telecommuting?
I certainly support energy efficiency improvements and the other measures to optimize energy use that you describe. And I would like to think that they will do the whole trick. But the Jevons paradox tells us that we have to look beyond the direct impacts of efficiency improvements. The more we improve efficiency, the cheaper energy gets, and the more money we can spend on other things such as new gadgets, air travel and the like. Let's use energy as efficiently as we can, but I don't see how we get around making it also more expensive.
California is in a unique position to offer state rebates, utility rebates and federal rebates that are the most lucrative in the country for energy efficiency. The utilities have discovered that it is more efficient reduce demand than it is to add supply as long as they can maintain their margins. In addition, adding small solar and wind to residential and business property alows both to get paid. In order for residential and business property owners to maximize their returns, they must reduce their consumption through energy efficiency and energy conservation.
What is missing in the equation is an efficient mechanism to defray the large upfront captial costs to retrofit residential, commercial, retail and industrial properties with LED lgihting, geothermal heating and cooling, super efficient aplliances and ultra efficient industrial electrical motors. The solution is a National low interest rate energy efficiency lending program to be repaid with the energy savings. Furthermore, the investment tax credit for alternative energy should be eliminated and replaced with a comparable energy efficiency investment tax credit.
To Be Continued
http://www.next10.org/pdf/report_eijc/75_01-2%20ClimateAction_Report%2004B_online.pdf