The Archdruid Nails It: Energy Conservation, Not Efficiency, Is Key
by Mark Ontkush, Boston, Massachusetts, USA on 08.28.08
A good read for the eco-serious is The Archdruid Report, a collection of perspective on industrial society which is written by John Michael Greer. The posts are characteristically druid-like - long, thoughtful, laden with wisdom - and although sometimes grim, are superb. The one on "Net Energy and Jevons' Paradox" targets the problem of peak energy and is a charmer.
Greer begins with a whammy; to build the infrastructure to produce a new energy source in meaningful quantities ("the production cost"), a great deal of energy will be needed. Additionally, if the new source can’t be delivered via an existing distribution network ("the system cost"), we'll need to invest even more energy to build this out as well. Immediately, one can see why some alternative energy options are being tried; for example, ethanol and windpower have some production costs but negligible additional distribution costs. In contrast, hydrogen requires both new production and distribution networks, so is proving to be a bust.
How will we come up with the surplus energy to make the transition? The Druid looks at two oft-thought methodologies, conservation and efficiency, lauding the first and laughing the second. Greer acknowledges that both approaches boost the net energy of the system but, unlike conservation, as efficiency goes up it also becomes economically feasible to apply the energy resource to new uses, and so people have reason to use more of it. This is known as the Jevon's Paradox, and just take a lookie 'round to see it in action - multiple TVs per household, the McMansions, more miles driven due to increases in automobile fuel efficiency, meat consumption. In every case advancements in efficiency not only encouraged more use, but also depleted the surplus in energy we require to make the transition to a new energy economy.
At one point, Herr Druid is a little bitter about these missed opportunities over the last 25 years and it's tough not to sympathize, particularly when many leading environmentalists are promulgating efficiency as 'better than nothing', and leaving the necessary choice of conservation to rhetorical op-ed pieces with a 'pare your lifestyle' down kind of tone. Greer is not without company in this regard; in a recent column, Jimmy Kunstler agreed with him that environmentalists need to do more in this regard. Our Robed One puts on the cream with cherry by observing that as the steady decline in net energy available to industrial society dwindles, from the historical 200-to-1 surplus of light sweet crude to the current single digits available today, we are continuing to make ironic self-defeating choices that drain the energy pool. Let's make no (more) mistake, we are running out of energy because of a focus on efficiency instead of conservation. :: Archdruid Report
Conservation and Efficiency
Efficiency works forever(?)
Conservation is the Best Energy Source
Alliance to Save Energy
Thanks for the link to Archdruid Report. DB
Re: Jevon's Paradox. Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute says that if you carefully run the numbers, in most practical situations, Jevon's Paradox doesn't apply. For example, people don't drive more just because they have a hybrid car that gets a lot more mileage - we have real lives that require a certain amount of driving, so if we have a hybrid, we actually end up using less gas.
[you, the individual, may end up using less gas; we, the society, end up using more gas, because everyone buys a hybrid. Lovins is committed to maintaining a certain level of 'Happy Motoring' to maintain 'real lives'; this is fine, it just doesn't do anything for curtailing gas consumption mjo]
MJO,
Do you really think that there are a lot of poor people with no cars at all? Maybe there are, I don't have the numbers, but I often see poor people driving crappy polluting inefficient old cars.
[how about new drivers in China and India? Do they count? mjo]
Americans collectively using more gas as vehicle efficiency increases does not worry me.
[the world is the problem mjo]
I would have to say I disagree. The simple fact is, you cannot solve a complex problem with a black and white solution. Our problems need to be addressed in a comprehensive, holistic fashion. Which really means conservation, efficiency, and many other variables must be taken into account to "really" make a difference. Being dogmatic about any "one" angle will not solve the problem.
In addition, efficiency is a good end-user angle. It is about modifying behavior and showing that you can save energy and money by being more aware.
[Efficiency is an excellent user angle - if you are efficient, you personally will save resources. Greer is just pointing out that when you look at a truly global problem, such as climate change or oil weaning, efficiency doesn't do zip mjo]
Greer's articles have been a regular uplift for me over the last few years, and I applaud this latest item gutting the seductive trap of seeking "energy efficiency".
For those unfamiliar with Jevons Paradox, it is perhaps worth noting that Jevons was focussed on the growth of steam engines' production in his day, as their use of coal became more efficient, and thus more affordable.
His theorum has not been disproved in the subsequent two centuries.
Jevon's Paradox, being the growth possible due to the profitability of efficiency gains, exposes the lie at the core of the lethal delusion of eternal economic growth on a finite planet.
Yet it has to be said, (I hope by Greer at some point) that energy Conservation is by itself no panacea for our problems. Indeed, for wealthy nations with relatively carbon-efficient machinery to leave fuels on the global market for less carbon-efficient users to purchase, would be plainly utterly counter-productive.
Not useless, but actually counter-productive; it would increase the net pollution output.
However, that situation will last only until the day a UN "Treaty of the Atmospheric Commons" come into force.
By agreeing the CONTRACTION of global GHG output to respect the Earth's capacity,
in return for the CONVERGENCE of all nations' emission rights to per capita parity,
energy conservation, alongside sustainable energy supply, then becomes a vital policy for cutting fossil fuel demand in an orderly fashion,
(rather than leaving the brutal market to simply price each nation's poor into unruly mass-destitution).
In those circumstances Conservation reduces energy demand, while the Treaty precludes that amount of fuel just being sold to the next country.
Thus the priority is now plainly to negotiate the global treaty based, necessarily, on Contraction & Convergence.
Greer's new book, The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age is excellent.
From the back cover:
Conservation is NOT the answer, it will of course help but the ONLY solution to our energy problems is to reduce the human population to what is now sustainable and 6,7 billion humans is NOT sustainable.
As long as we continue to treat the symptoms and ignore the real problem, our environmental troubles will continue to worsen.
Conservation yes, but tie that with population reduction or we are doomed!
Sheila – you claim that
“the ONLY solution to our energy problems is to reduce the human population to what is now sustainable and 6,7 billion humans is NOT sustainable.”
It appears that you confuse mere numbers of people with the impacts arising from a US-led ideology of maximized consumption, so I’d ask you by just how many ppmv of CO2 did the native peoples of the Himalayas raise the atmospheric concentration ?
It is ideology that determines impact, as is very obvious if you’d simply observe that the Earth cannot possibly afford the current impact just of 300 million Americans, but it probably can afford that of perhaps 2,000 million traditional farmers, particularly if US corporations are prevented from further impoverishing them.
The one thing that is undoubtedly doomed is what Bush senior said “is not up for negotiation”, namely the thoughtless “American way of life.”
The tragedy is that, having propagandised its materialist ideology worldwide, and having thus generated the mass impoverishment that drives populations to boom, the climatic outcome of America’s callous folly will, very probably, bring a loss of food-production on a scale to cause an utterly unprecedented worldwide genocide-by-famines.
(Note that IPCC AR4 was presented with the news that some African countries will lose half their food production to drought by 2020. That’s just 12 years hence. And climate destabilization is a rising curve at least for several decades).
So doesn’t it worry you that the population reduction “Solution” that you propose, and which American hegemony has now set in train, is in practice just another vastly larger version of the “Final Solution” enacted by an earlier fascism ?
Unless Americans get over their nationalist programming really fast and start to respect other nations’ wellbeing, America seems likely to be remembered as an accursed culture that crushed a global society, and itself, through its callous greedy incompetence.
Finally, it appears that you are, perhaps unconsciously, trying to deflect blame for climate impacts from wealthy nations onto the burgeoning peoples of the global South, who are already suffering from those impacts.
If so, I wish you’d grow out of it.
Conservation is OK, efficiency is OK, frugality is what is needed in both cases. --Noah