Geoengineering would turn blue skies whiter

[OKIsItJustMe]

9. I am tired of “Jevons’ Paradox”

It is invoked as some sort of magical dictum, to suggest that any attempt to improve our lot will eventually produce an overwhelmingly negative result.

This, I feel, is defeatist, and more simply, wrong.

http://realclimateeconomics.org/wp/archives/647

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Rebounds Gone Wild[/font]
by James Barrett • January 10, 2011 @ 11:30 am
This post by Real Climate Economics blogger James Barrett originally appeared on the Great Energy Challenge blog, in partnership with National Geographic and Planet Forward.

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The focus of the article is something called the Jevons paradox (named after economist William Jevons), or the more common and more broadly defined “rebound effect.” In essence the rebound effect is the fact that as energy efficiency goes up, using energy consuming products becomes less expensive, which in turn leads us to consume more energy.

Jevons’ claim was that this rebound effect would be so large that increasing energy efficiency would not decrease energy use. The rebound effect would eat up all (or more than all) of the energy savings.

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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http://realclimateeconomics.org/wp/archives/654

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Rebounds and Jevons: Nobody Goes There Anymore. It’s Too Crowded[/font]

by James Barrett • January 18, 2011 @ 8:27 am
This is the second post in a series on the rebound effect and energy efficiency by Real Climate Economics blogger James Barrett. It originally appeared in the Great Energy Challenge blog, in partnership with National Geographic and Planet Forward

[font size=3]My last post on David Owen’s piece in the New Yorker and on the Jevons effect stirred up some interesting questions and discussion that I want to follow up on here. My last one purposely avoided some of the more technical parts of the issue to keep it readable and under my word limit. I think I’m about to undo that.

But first we should pay thanks to the great 20th Century philosopher, Yogi Berra, from whom I shamelessly stole the title of this post. Though he discovered it nearly 100 years after Stanley Jevons, I believe his exploration of the Jevons effect is more complete and accurate than Jevons’ own, as well as being vastly shorter. The notion that we could get so efficient at using energy that we’d end up using more is about as valid as the idea that a restaurant could get so crowded that it was empty.

[font size=4]Dictating Terms[/font]

Though I hate having arguments about how we should argue, there are a few things we need to get straight:

First, as originally observed and defined by Jevons, the Jevons effect is a decidedly micro issue. He observed that increased energy efficiency in coal fired steam engines resulted in increased use of coal to fire steam engines as they were used in more applications and more intensively in existing ones.

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