Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jevons Paradox

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 46 posts

Re: Jevons Paradox

#11

Post by rm445 »

topbarcolor wrote: post #5
roenxi wrote: post #4

Applying this paradox in reverse (which is paraphrasing the wiki article) - if introducing energy efficiency measures causes energy use to go down then someone needs to ask probing questions about what is going on. Increased efficiency should be linked, all else equal, to increased use of a resource.

It's not hard to find examples where this "rule" doesn't seem to hold. If you give me water heated for free, I may shower twice on some days, but I will not take infinite hot showers. If you gave me shoes that cause less ablation of the pavement I walk on, I wouldn't find other ways to remove the same amount of material, I would simply use up less resources wherever I go, being none the wiser.

Do you think such a private individual's behaviour holds for all society?

First example: if lots of people had that free hot water, there would pretty soon be companies offering them money for the use of it. A bitcoin miner hooked up to a stirling engine under the hot tap, perhaps?

Second example: shoe materials are probably fungible for other petrochemical products. Reduced-wear elastomers might result in fewer pairs of shoes wearing out but higher demand in other markets.

Re: Jevons Paradox

#12

Post by spodek »

People view technology as a deus ex machina that will enable them to keep doing what they're doing but magically it won't pollute any more.

For example, many think that solar powered planes will enable flying without pollution, which somehow justifies their current flying. The "logic" doesn't work, but they just want a story to help them sleep at night while they read that the arctic is 45 degrees above normal, knowing somewhere in the backs of their minds that the jet fuel they paid to burn to move their share of a plane around the world and back contributed more to that climate change than nearly anyone in hundreds of thousands of years of human existence.

Technology has helped humanity out of many problems, as have markets and economic growth. Now we're facing problems that technology, markets, and growth are causing (extinctions, resource depletion, pollution, litter, climate change, etc), Jevon's paradox contributing significantly (the tragedy of the commons and principle agent problem being others) and people haven't realized that applying more of what solved other problems isn't helping but exacerbating current problems.

Technology can buy us time, but systems change generally requires changing the goals and beliefs driving the system, which are social and emotional issues, not technological.

Re: Jevons Paradox

#13

Post by roenxi »

topbarcolor wrote: post #5
roenxi wrote: post #4

Applying this paradox in reverse (which is paraphrasing the wiki article) - if introducing energy efficiency measures causes energy use to go down then someone needs to ask probing questions about what is going on. Increased efficiency should be linked, all else equal, to increased use of a resource.

It's not hard to find examples where this "rule" doesn't seem to hold. If you give me water heated for free, I may shower twice on some days, but I will not take infinite hot showers. If you gave me shoes that cause less ablation of the pavement I walk on, I wouldn't find other ways to remove the same amount of material, I would simply use up less resources wherever I go, being none the wiser.

Actually, Jeveron's paradox would hold in the case you mentioned. Someone who gave you heated water would give it to you with an implicit quota otherwise a rational actor use an infinite amount of it.

If I actually had free no-holds-barred heated water, I'd run a pipe down to the local laundry and sell it at a profit. That is the rational response - the reason you don't see people doing that is because nobody offers free heated water at scale.

Your mistake here is thinking that resources have an implicit purpose (hot water => warm showers). If that were true, Jeveron's paradox would not hold. The paradox holds because once something becomes more abundant, it can be used for totally new activities.

Re: Jevons Paradox

#14

Post by whack »

roenxi wrote: post #4

Applying this paradox in reverse (which is paraphrasing the wiki article) - if introducing energy efficiency measures causes energy use to go down then someone needs to ask probing questions about what is going on. Increased efficiency should be linked, all else equal, to increased use of a resource.

If you look at the inelastic demand graph, in the "cause" section of the wiki, it answers your question. Even if there's increased use of a resource, total energy consumption often still goes down, because each resource now consumes less energy.

Re: Jevons Paradox

#15

Post by darkmighty »

empath75 wrote: post #9

Which is why you need an energy tax to actually reduce consumption.

But why would we need to reduce consumption? We need emissions tax -- a tax proportional to the environmental cost. If power consumption carried little or no environmental cost, we'd want to use a huge amount, and that wouldn't be an issue.

Re: Jevons Paradox

#16

Post by gameswithgo »

grondilu wrote: post #10

I suppose a nice example would be city lights. There was an article lately about how electrical consumption for city lights increased despite the switch to LEDs. Can't quite find the article though, but here is one about light pollution increasing (which does not necessarily correlate with electrical consumption, but still): https://www.cbsnews.com/news/light-pollution-increasing-arou...

> There was an article lately about how electrical consumption for city lights increased despite the switch to LEDs.

Its something like a 6x reduction in electric usage vs incandescent, how would people manage to use 6x more light?

OR was this a switch from CFL to LED that led to more usage?

Re: Jevons Paradox

#18

Post by grondilu »

gameswithgo wrote: post #16
grondilu wrote: post #10

I suppose a nice example would be city lights. There was an article lately about how electrical consumption for city lights increased despite the switch to LEDs. Can't quite find the article though, but here is one about light pollution increasing (which does not necessarily correlate with electrical consumption, but still): https://www.cbsnews.com/news/light-pollution-increasing-arou...

> There was an article lately about how electrical consumption for city lights increased despite the switch to LEDs. Its something like a 6x reduction in electric usage vs incandescent, how would people manage to use 6x more light? OR was this a switch from CFL to LED that led to more usage?

They'd just have to use at least six times more lights. Or leave them on more often. That does not seem impossible to me.

That being said, I may just be misremembering it. Maybe it was just about light pollution, but I do think it was about electric consumption. I'm just not sure.

Re: Jevons Paradox

#19

Post by pygy_ »

darkmighty wrote: post #15
empath75 wrote: post #9

Which is why you need an energy tax to actually reduce consumption.

But why would we need to reduce consumption? We need emissions tax -- a tax proportional to the environmental cost. If power consumption carried little or no environmental cost, we'd want to use a huge amount, and that wouldn't be an issue.

Renewable energy has an environmental cost as well.

The solar and wind energy that isn't currently used by humans is dissipated by atmospheric, marine, geological and biological processes.

It is a zero-sum game, and increasing our consumption will disrupt other processes.

Re: Jevons Paradox

#20

Post by oftenwrong »

grondilu wrote: post #10

I suppose a nice example would be city lights. There was an article lately about how electrical consumption for city lights increased despite the switch to LEDs. Can't quite find the article though, but here is one about light pollution increasing (which does not necessarily correlate with electrical consumption, but still): https://www.cbsnews.com/news/light-pollution-increasing-arou...

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/10/led-light-cfl-b.html

this?

Post reply on HN