Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumNo way out? The double-bind in seeking global prosperity alongside mitigated climate change
Here is a paper by written Tim Garrett. an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah. In it he treats the global economy as a thermodynamic system and examines the energy requirements and CO2 outputs in relation to it.
He claims to demonstrate several interesting things: that inflation-adjusted global GDP growth can be related to global energy consumption by a constant of about 10 milliwatts per dollar; that the Jevons Paradox (applied as a generalized indirect rebound effect) is real; that efficiency improvements won't help reduce CO2 emissions; and that CO2 emissions cannot be mitigated in the presence of a growing global economy.
Here are a few excepts of Garrett's paper (PDF). The emphasis is mine.
In a prior study I introduced a simple economic growth model designed to be consistent with general thermodynamic laws. Unlike traditional economic models, civilization is viewed only as a well-mixed global whole with no distinction made between individual nations, economic sectors, labor, or capital investments. At the model core is a hypothesis that the global economy’s current rate of primary energy consumption is tied through a constant to a very general representation of its historically accumulated wealth. Observations support this hypothesis, and indicate that the constant’s value is = 9.7 0.3 milliwatts per 1990 US dollar. It is this link that allows for treatment of seemingly complex economic systems as simple physical systems.
Here, this growth model is coupled to a linear formulation for the evolution of globally well-mixed atmospheric CO2 concentrations. While very simple, the coupled model provides faithful multi-decadal hindcasts of trajectories in gross world product (GWP) and CO2. Extending the model to the future, the model suggests that the well-known IPCC SRES scenarios substantially underestimate how much CO2 levels will rise for a given level of future economic prosperity. For one, global CO2 emission rates cannot be decoupled from wealth through efficiency gains. For another, like a long-term natural disaster, future greenhouse warming can be expected to act as an inflationary drag on the real growth of global wealth. For atmospheric CO2 concentrations to remain below a “dangerous” level of
450 ppmv (Hansen et al., 2007), model forecasts suggest that there will have to be some combination of an unrealistically rapid rate of energy decarbonization and nearly immediate reductions in global civilization wealth. Effectively, it appears that civilization may be in a double-bind. If civilization does not collapse quickly this century, then CO2 levels will likely end up exceeding 1000 ppmv; but, if CO2 levels rise by this much, then the risk is that civilization will gradually tend towards collapse.
Conclusions
Another implication is that the commonly used IPCC SRES scenarios make unphysical underestimates of how much energy will be needed to be consumed, and CO2 emitted, to sustain prosperity growth. At the globally relevant scales, energy efficiency gains accelerate rather than reduce en-ergy consumption gains. They do this by promoting civilization health and its economic capacity to
expand into the energy reserves that sustain it.
Reductions in CO2 emissions can be achieved by decarbonizing civilization’s sources of fuel. But this has an important caveat. Decarbonization does not slow CO2 accumulation by as much as might be anticipated because it also alleviates the potential rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. If decarbonization leads to fewer climate extremes, then economic wealth is supported, and because wealth is tied to energy consumption through a constant, consumptive growth partly offsets the anticipated CO2 emission reductions. Ultimately, civilization appears to be in a double-bind with no obvious way out. Only a combination of extremely rapid decarbonization and civilization collapse will enable CO2 concentrations to be stabilized below the 450 ppmv level that might be considered as “dangerous”.
This paper is one of the first rigorous confirmations I've seen of something that many of us have only intuited until now: that GlobCiv 1.0 is in a "coffin corner" caused by the intersection of climate change and the economy, and the only way out is though a breakdown of the economy.
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OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)The popular version of “Jevons Paradox” goes like this; a more efficient steam engine led to greater use of steam engines overall, which led to greater use of coal. Therefore improved efficiency leads to greater consumption, not less.
However, the truth of the matter is, Watt’s steam engine was nothing like a minor improvement on Newcomen’s steam engine (like the difference between a Ford Fusion "hybrid" automobile over a conventional Ford Fusion.) Watt’s engine was useful; Newcomen’s was not. The result was “the industrial revolution.”
Watch this video to see why:
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Especially in its indirect version? If so, you haven't read the paper yet.
FWIW, "Connections" was one of my all-time favourite TV shows. It taught me to look at the bigger picture.
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)I understand that environmentalists are in general allergic to Jevons.
These conclusions have direct bearing on global scale emissions of CO2. Just as civilization can be treated as being well-mixed over timescales relevant to economic growth, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are also well-mixed over timescales relevant to global warming forecasts. Thus, for the purpose of relating the economy to atmospheric CO2 concentrations, what matters is only how fast civilization as a whole is emitting CO2.
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)…is similar to telling me that an astronomical paper proves (among other things) that the Moon is made of green cheese.
My reaction is that since the author is promulgating one massive fundamental error (or misrepresentation) I’m not really interested in what other things the paper may have to say.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/02/16/207532/debunking-jevons-paradox-jim-barrett/
By Climate Guest Blogger on Feb 16, 2011 at 11:53 am
[font size=3]The “Jevons paradox,” asserts that increasing “the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.” It is mostly if not entirely bunk, as the scientific literature and leading experts have demonstrated many times (see “Efficiency lives -- the rebound effect, not so much“).
But it lingers on in part because it is one of those quirky, ill-defined contrarian notions that the media can’t get enough of and in part because those who oppose clean energy, often for bizarre ideological reasons, keep pushing it.
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GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)...motivated reasoning... 
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)[font size=3]Eric Wesoff of GTM Research has a guest blog post on GE’s Ecomagination site titled “Will efficiency lead to more power consumption?” It touches on the idea, first proposed by economist William Stanley Jevons in 1885, that technologies designed to make our use of energy more efficient work to increase, not decrease, overall power consumption. This Jevons paradox, or energy rebound effect, is often used by folks who want to undermine policy efforts aimed at promoting energy efficiency. Wesoff, it should be pointed out, is simply posing the question to encourage discussion.
Does the introduction of new energy-efficient technologies make us use more of something we might not otherwise use, thereby negating efficiency gains? There certainly is evidence that, for example, people drive more when they’re in more fuel-efficient vehicles. But beyond The Breakthrough Institute, it’s generally believed the rebound effect is in the area of 10 per cent and that there is still a healthy net benefit to introducing more efficiency into vehicles. Certainly, there are specific examples we can find that show the rebound effect is higher, but there are far more examples — in my view — where it’s likely to be far lower. I don’t buy, for example, that introducing more efficient lighting technologies will lead us to leave the lights on more. Yes, communities and cities will grow and that will increase electricity demand for lighting, but on a per-capita basis will we use more? Maybe, for some, if the price of power stays the same or falls, but that’s not the case. The fact is, the widespread introduction of LED lighting will lead to a dramatic overall reduction in energy use on a per capita basis, and we can’t blame energy efficiency on growth that is likely to happen anyway.
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GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Who does that leave?
BTW, he didn't say that energy efficiency isn't a good thing, just that it won't save civilization. Same goes for me.
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)But Jevons Paradox is a load of crap.
http://www.greatenergychallengeblog.com/2010/12/20/rebounds-gone-wild/
Posted by James Barrett of Clean Economy Development Center on December 20, 2010
[font size=3]Energy efficiency has become very popular in recent years. So much so that it’s becoming cool for the truly hip to hold it in disdain.
…
To be clear, the rebound effect is real. The theory behind it is sound: Lower the cost of anything and people will use more of it, including the cost of running energy consuming equipment. But as with many economic ideas that are sound theory (like the idea that you can raise government revenues by cutting tax rates), the trick is in knowing how far to take them in reality. (Cutting tax rates from 100% to 50% would certainly raise revenues. Cutting them from 50% to 0% would just as surely lower them.)
The problem with knowing how far to take things like this is that unlike real scientists who can run experiments in a controlled laboratory environment, economists usually have to rely on what we can observe in the real world. Unfortunately, the real world is complicated and trying to disentangle everything that’s going on is very difficult.
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OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)by Michael Levi
December 14, 2010
[font size=3]Switch to a more efficient car, and you’ll drive a bit more, since extra gasoline now costs you less. This well-known phenomenon is known as the “rebound effect”. In the case of cars, it eats up about ten percent of the fuel savings from greater fuel efficiency. But at the level of economies, many believe, it’s much worse. All the money saved through more efficient automobiles and better refrigerators doesn’t just mean more summer road trips and Sub-Zeros – it means more money pumped into the whole economy, and hence greater emissions overall.
That’s a minority view, for good reason: it’s wrong. But in a long essay in the new issue of the New Yorker, David Owen buys it hook, line, and sinker. He’s enamored of the work of 19th century British economist Stanley Jevons, and while Stanford’s Lee Schipper clearly spent oodles of time trying to explain to him why what Jevons wrote doesn’t apply to today’s economy, Owen isn’t believing him for a second.
I was planning to go through the article and pick apart every instance of silly logic, but those piled up so high that that goal became unrealistic. Instead, let me focus on two passages that capture the essence of Owen’s mistakes. …[/font][/font]
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)Posted December 17, 2010 in Curbing Pollution
[font size=3]In The Efficiency Dilemma, The New Yorker (December 20, 2010), David Owen revives a discredited 19th century article on economics to posit that the increasing efficiency of household products such as refrigerators and air conditioners is responsible for a range of problems, including everything from food waste to America’s culture of excess. Owen argues (apparently seriously) that by allowing consumers to save money that would otherwise go to high and wasted energy bills, efficient appliances have caused Americans to abandon the simple life.
Owen – whose expertise lies in the unrelated field of golfing (I'm not making this up), has unfortunately cobbled together this thesis without the benefit of facts or data. In the real world, efficient appliances (and the laws and policies that make them increasingly efficient) play a major role in reducing household energy usage, slashing energy bills for those consumers who can least afford them, and avoiding the need to build new costly power plants. Sad to say, this article – however well-intentioned, is a great example of misguided pseudo-analysis that is based on rank speculation made worse by gross errors of fact.
The reality is that the increase in efficiency of appliances is a huge success story for all consumers who benefit from the savings these products provide. Refrigerator energy use was growing with a trend that would have resulted in electricity demand of about 175 GW by today; but with efficiency policies that level of power demand was cut to less than 15 GW. The difference, about 160 GW, compares to about 125 GW provided by the entire nuclear power fleet in the United States, or to 400 large coal plants that were expected to be needed but now are not.
Owen, however, blames a host of evils on efficiency, but fails to back up his accusations with facts. Owen starts by conceding that serious energy analysis of rebound effects shows them to be “comparatively trivial.” People who insulate their houses don’t absorb all the savings by sweltering through the winter, and buyers of efficient refrigerators don’t start leaving the door open gratuitously. But after admitting that the serious studies show rebound effects to be small and getting smaller over time, he does nothing to address the finding of the studies but instead starts writing a fairy-tale story of how efficient refrigerators don’t really save energy because somehow efficiency is responsible for the growing size of refrigerators, the increasing extent of refrigeration, and even the growing girth of Americans. The author notes how the size and feature offerings of refrigerators increased rapidly from 1954 until recently, and then, with out-of-the blue imagination, tries to link this to efficiency increases.
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NoOneMan
(4,795 posts)So, coal/gas is burned to manufacture & distribute them, then you have to pay for them (meaning you had to go to your earth-raping job to get the capital), then that capital gets disbursed and either reinvested into the business (to make more machines) or given to employees who produced/sold the item, who themselves spend it on the own energy-efficient machines (thus reverberating more production across the economy).
If something is new (and you already have an old one), creating it, distributing it, buying it causes production and creates wealth (the ability to command energy) which is inevitably commanded for more production. Its an endless cycle that perpetually increases (as we observe) the velocity of capital/energy in the economic machine.
Is all the consumption that it is to save you in the future worth all the immediate production that is necessary in its purchase, and the production that purchase caused via the multiplier effect (resulting in GDP growth)? If immediate GDP is always growing (which translates to real carbon emissions), despite efficiency savings we might get in the future, is there any real way out of this? Is there some magic point in time when suddenly our consumption levels will stop because everyone has their efficient stuff and we are done making and buying them? Then what happens to the economy? What will be the state of the environment at that point?
But no, I don't think old, inefficient stuff rules. Rather, I think we have a complex system that tends to continually result in more and more energy being consumed. Can we buck the trend? Thats the million dollar question (just don't spend that million on an energy intensive item).
AldoLeopold
(617 posts)by eliminating 6.2 billion humans
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)Written by: Shakeb Afsah and Kendyl Salcito and Chris Wielga* • Jan 11, 2012
[font size=4]Summary[/font]
[font size=3]Energy efficiency is an over-rated policy tool when it comes to cutting energy use and CO2 emissions—that’s the basic message promoted by the US think tank the Breakthrough Institute (BTI), and amplified in major news outlets like the New Yorker and the New York Times. Their logic is that every action to conserve energy through efficient use leads to an opposite reaction to consume more energy—a “rebound” mechanism, which, according to the BTI, can negate as much as 60-100% of saved energy, and in some cases can backfire to increase net energy consumption.
In this research note we refute this policy message and show that the BTI, as well as its champions in the media, have overplayed their hand, supporting their case with anecdotes and analysis that don’t measure up against theory and data. Our fact-checking revealed that empirical estimates of energy rebound cited by the BTI are over-estimated or wrong, and they contradict the technological reality of energy efficiency gains observed in many industrial sectors.
We provide new statistical evidence to show that energy efficiency policies and programs can reliably cut energy use—a finding that is consistent with the policy stance of leading experts and organizations like the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) and the World Bank. Additionally, we take our policy message one step further—by using new insights from the emerging multi-disciplinary literature on “energy efficiency gap”, we recommend that the world needs more energy efficiency policies and programs to cut greenhouse gases—not less as implied by the BTI and its cohorts in the media.
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Speck Tater
(10,618 posts)
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Last edited Tue Jan 8, 2013, 05:20 PM - Edit history (1)
That's life.
Edited to add: And not just the general public, either. 
Speck Tater
(10,618 posts)People, including myself to be perfectly honest, are not simply going to voluntarily give up everything they would have to give up right now in order to save the planet. On the one hand, I already live a life of voluntary simplicity, but I'm still far richer and more privileged than most of the rest of the human race. So suppose I really did further reduce my footprint to where the average footprint needs to be to save the planet? What then? Would enough other people follow suit to make a difference? Or would I just be that one crazy hunter-gatherer guy who lives in the cave outside of town?
Frankly, nothing I can do will make a noticeable difference, and there's no way I can convince enough people to follow my example so that it would make a difference. The human race is on a collision course with reality and only reality is in a position to make things change. The laws of physics do not negotiate with humans, nor do they care what we wish were true.
If there were something I could do that would actually make a difference on a global scale, I'd do it. But I can't really think of anything, and most of the rest of the species doesn't really give it any thought. So it looks like the die has been cast and our destiny already written.
limpyhobbler
(8,244 posts)lot of big words and specialized jargon in there.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)There are lots of smart people here who will get the point.
As Speck Tater pointed out above, even if John and Jane Doe were to read it and get it, what could they do?
This message is aimed more at the motivated reasoning of the environmentalist community.
hunter
(40,691 posts)... an effective public health care system, universal literacy, with liberty and justice for all.
Everything else is bling.
We can still achieve a prosperous society, but it won't be anything like our present stratified consumer society.
The USA is a wealthy nation, but it's never been a prosperous nation.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Well said.
NoOneMan
(4,795 posts)So far, we've always discounted outsourced misery and exploitation when measuring prosperity.
I really wonder if a complex organized society can achieve those goals without in some way exploiting some form of labor (inside or outside their boundaries). In any case, we've yet to see it.
eppur_se_muova
(41,948 posts)