{"id":21483,"date":"2013-08-03T10:48:57","date_gmt":"2013-08-03T15:48:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=21483"},"modified":"2013-08-03T10:48:57","modified_gmt":"2013-08-03T15:48:57","slug":"energy-efficiency-does-not-equate-to-lower-energy-usage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/08\/03\/energy-efficiency-does-not-equate-to-lower-energy-usage\/","title":{"rendered":"Energy efficiency does not equate to lower energy usage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tim Harford<\/a> talks about an obscure 19th century prognosticator and the implications of one of his predictions:<\/p>\n

Despite Keynes\u2019s admiration, Jevons might now be forgotten, save for one famous prediction and one intriguing argument. The famous prediction — that the UK\u2019s economic prosperity was at risk because the country would run out of viable reserves of coal — was contained in The Coal Question<\/em> (1865), a book that made Jevons a celebrated pundit at the age of 29. The coal industry did fall into decline. Production peaked exactly a century ago, when there were 1.1 million coal miners — four times as many as when Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979. Whether this had much to do with the fall of the Empire is a fascinating question.<\/p>\n

Jevons remains notable in some circles for an argument he made in The Coal Question<\/em>, rebutting critics who claimed that a coal shortage was no problem because steam engines would become dramatically more efficient. Jevons replied: \u201cIt is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.\u201d This idea became known as the Jevons paradox: that energy efficiency does not reduce energy consumption. When light was hugely expensive, a person might read by the fickle flame of a single candle; now it\u2019s so cheap we flood our cities with it. Double glazing could mean lower heating bills but in practice it means warmer houses.<\/p>\n

So was Jevons right? That\u2019s a hotly contested topic. On a microeconomic level, he was not: a 50 per cent increase in the energy efficiency of a device will lead to increased use, but rarely to the doubling in usage that would be necessary for Jevons to be correct. Aha, reply Jevons\u2019s defenders: even if a fuel-sipping car does not induce me to drive much further, I may still spend my cash savings on some other energy-guzzling device. True. But energy is a small enough part of the economy — about 6 to 10 per cent — that the actual cash savings available to spend elsewhere will usually be modest.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tim Harford talks about an obscure 19th century prognosticator and the implications of one of his predictions: Despite Keynes\u2019s admiration, Jevons might now be forgotten, save for one famous prediction and one intriguing argument. The famous prediction — that the UK\u2019s economic prosperity was at risk because the country would run out of viable reserves […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,25,7],"tags":[640,809],"class_list":["post-21483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-economics","category-history","tag-alternativeenergy","tag-mining"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5Av","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21483"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21484,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21483\/revisions\/21484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}