Jevons Paradox

One can observe that, on a global level, CO2 emissions have never been higher.

In other words, not only have we not made progress, we have gone backwards. I believe Jevon's paradox is a major cause, along with a lack of understanding of it.

A clearer way of presentint Jevon's paradox is: price decline, usage increases. Which is such a standard economic statement that it hardly needs saying. The unintuitive part of the paradox is that we measure the price of a unit of energy, not what we can do with it.

I think the best way to combat this is to negotiate for countries to implement a tax on carbon.

Negotiating for emissions reductions directly causes problems: you are asking countries to slow their growth. So, they will look for solutions. Increasing efficieny is the natural way, to get more use out of the CO2 you're allowed to use. But then....every unit of CO2 is suddenly more tempting.

Hence, our emissions have gone up, not down. There's just so much you can do with it now!

If countries agreed to tax carbon, that tax would deal with the externality caused by carbon emissions, and give an incentive to develop non-carbon electricity.

This is so obviously the market based solution that I am baffled more people don't advocate for it. It doesn't even have to raise overall taxes. You just cut the income tax or corporate tax to compensate.

Most streetlamps had been HID lamps for a long time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_discharge_lamp

Efficiency was one reason for this, but the bigger reason was just that (for the duty cycle of a streetlamp) they require fewer installations and last way longer than incandescent bulbs. This means that the maintenance costs are much lower.

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

You need to define what you mean by "being a zero-sum game". For example, in terms of entropy (which is a possible metric in the context of "dissipation") it isn't a zero-sum game -- certain processes increase entropy more, some less. In terms of total instantaneous thermal absorption, which defines the temperature of the Earth, it also isn't a zero-sum game -- If there was a white surface and it is made black, then the temperature of the Earth will rise; the same goes for emitting CO2 which in effect increases the global absorptivity (energy that wouldn't be absorbed if the Earth didn't contain as much GHG). Putting solar cells in barren deserts isn't going to disrupt local lifeforms simply because there aren't any. So it seems in almost every definition of zero-sum it indeed isn't a zero-sum game -- which is good!

Note that I didn't claim renewable energy has no environmental cost. It most definitely has. Every activity will have certain impacts, greater or lower, on resource availability, thermal balance, and on other lifeform habitats. The key is pricing adequately those impacts so any damage could be repaired or compensated. The effect of pricing is usually just impact minimization, since the cost of repair or compensation is usually much greater than prevention.

So it is a matter of seeking technologies that give the greatest return (power output in this case) for total cost (environmental and economic) -- and better alternatives than current ones are constantly being discovered, thankfully.

To the best of my knowledge, coal consumption reduced eventually, and exactly technology apparently did play some role.

The impact of removing this energy from circulation is absolutely tiny compared to the impact of CO2. There is a local environmental impact to all structures, yes, but it's absolutely not zero-sum.