The Efficiency Paradox

We're told that increasing energy efficiency will make a big impact on decreasing our carbon emissions, but what if that isn't really the case?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here this is it could happen
here the show about how things are falling apart and
how maybe they could be made a bit better. Uh.
Right now, today we're doing an episode that is based
on a I don't know essay Garrison wrote and I
edited that we think you'll find interesting. So here it goes.

(00:24):
Green capitalism promises to deliver us all the same luxuries
and commodities that we enjoy today, but without doing net
harm to the biosphere. It's the message liberal elites try
to hold on when they make their case for being
better stewards of the environment than Republicans. This is not untrue,
but it's also not true enough to stop your house
from flooding or your town from being incinerated in a

(00:46):
hell storm. When it comes to the methods green capitalism
posits by which we might reverse course without changing the
direction of the ship. One term you'll hear often is
energy efficiency. I want to read a statement I found
on white House dot gov, a fact sheet on the
new US government commitment to reduce carbon emissions by fifty
to fifty I should note that's of the two thousand

(01:11):
five levels which were like high or something like that. Anyway,
here's the quote. The United States can create good paying
jobs and cut emissions and energy costs for families by
supporting efficiency upgrades and electrification and buildings. Through support for
job creating retrofit programs and sustainable affordable housing, wider use
of heat pumps and induction stoves, adoption of modern energy

(01:33):
codes for new buildings. The United States will also invest
in new technologies to reduce emissions associated with construction, including
for high performance electrified buildings. Now, energy efficiency is in
fact a fine goal, and trying to reduce emissions is
broadly good. But the sad and kind of weird fact
is that increasing efficiency can sometimes mean increasing pollution through

(01:55):
what's known as the efficiency paradox, which is, of course
the title of the episod out because what you want
you want us to think of a second title, of
a separate title from that. Come on. So, first off,
what does energy efficiency mean? In general terms? Energy efficiency
refers to the amount of output that can be produced
with a given input of energy. Output being stuff that

(02:17):
energy is used to do, like like your house, or
wash your clothing, or power your wall mounted twenty volt
vibrator that requires as much electricity as an arc welder
in order to use. Energy savings are the reduction of
energy use without the loss of output produced. Improved energy
efficiency is expected to bring a number of benefits. First
of all, reducing energy usage should result in lower energy bills. Ideally,

(02:41):
reduced energy demand also means that energy imports can be decreased.
The International Energy Agency has estimated that strict efficiency policies
could allow the world to achieve more than forty of
the greenhouse gas emissions cuts needed to reach its climate
goals even without new technology, So there is considerable goal
room within the existing structures of global society to reduce

(03:03):
emissions a lot without fancy space technology. But despite substantial
energy efficiency gains in the past few decades and decreases
an output from places like the United States, we as
a species are using more energy than we have pretty
much forever, and emissions wildly surpass are or the Earth's
ability to handle them. Quoting from the Global Carbon Project quote,

(03:25):
global energy growth is outpacing decarbonization, despite positive progress in
twenty countries whose economies have grown over the last decade
and their emissions have declined. Growth and energy used from
fossil fuel sources is still outpacing the rise of low
carbon sources and activities. A robust global economy in sufficient
emission reductions and developed countries, and a need for increased
energy use in developing countries where per capita emissions remain

(03:48):
far below those of wealthier nations, will continue to put
upward pressure on CEO two emissions. They use the term
developing um and developed. We don't prefer those. But obviously
population growth contributes to all that, the growth and the
use of energy and the emissions of carbon um you know,
more people, more cars in the road, whatever, But it's
not really the primary factor that's adding onto the increase

(04:11):
in energy use for the human race. We'll talk about
that later though. For now, it's important to note that
the full potential energy savings, like in these kind of
hypotheticals about how much could be saved by improving efficiency,
are usually estimated by assuming that demand for energy services
will remain unchanged after energy efficiency gains. So when they
say that we can get the greenhouse emissions, gases gas

(04:34):
reductions we need by increasing efficiency, they're doing that assuming
that nothing will change about our overall energy use when
we make things more efficient. But time and time again,
we see that once products are made more energy efficient,
people often end up consuming, producing, or even using more
of the thing, which makes the potential savings less meaningful

(04:54):
in a net result. Doesn't mean that it's not a
net good, but it's not as much as is often
calculated in these climate proposals. You can see this demonstrated
on the job. If you're in say food services, if
you happen to figure out how to do a task faster,
your boss probably isn't gonna let you use that extra
time to just chill out and do stuff on your phone. Um.
What is the phrase if you can lean, you can clean? Um?

(05:16):
So if you do something faster now, you're just expected
to do it faster all the time and output more
total work for your boss. This is the paradox of efficiency,
and it applies to energy as well. On a societal level.
Increased energy efficiency is a double edged sword, having the
potential to help cut emissions by a significant factor um
and having the potential to increase our total energy used

(05:38):
depending on what is made more efficient and how people
react to it. The idea that energy efficiency improvements can
actually lead to more overall energy use goes all the
way back to the start of the Industrial Revolution. In
eighteen sixty five, economist William Stanley Jeevens published a book
called The Coal Question, in which he argued that innovation
and efficiency, particularly in the case of the coal powered

(06:00):
deam engine, would actually increase the overall consumption of coal,
rather than reducing it as it had been intended to do.
His prediction that efficiency improvements on steam engines would lead
to massive economic expansion accelerating coal consumption was very much correct.
This idea, then dubbed the Jeevens paradox, is still very
much worth considering when we discuss efficiency gains and policies

(06:22):
that are meant to reduce energy consumption and thereby fight
climate change. In modern terms, we describe the process by
which potential energy savings can be cut by greater use
of the energy efficient product as the rebound effect. There
are two different kinds of rebound effects observed, the most
obvious of which is dubbed the direct rebound effect. Direct

(06:43):
rebounds are observed when improvements and energy efficiency for a
particular energy service reduces the effective price of that service
and thus provides incentives to increase its demand. This leads
to the overall increased efficiency not equaling to a reduction
energy used as it as you might think. Direct rebounds
are observed when improvements and energy efficiency for a particular

(07:04):
energy service reduces the effective price of that enough that
it provides incentives to increase its demand. You may upgrade
to a more energy efficient appliance, but because of the
lower energy costs, you'll use the appliance more often and
thus use more total energy. Or in some cases, energy
efficiency gains are cut by the fact that more efficient
products allow people to use more of that product. For example,

(07:26):
someone may get a more efficient fridge that's also much larger,
and so even though it cools more efficiently, it's also
consuming overall more energy. Transportation has a lot of direct rebounds.
Despite massive fuel efficiency gains in recent years, transportation is
still responsible for twenty of global greenhouse gas emissions. Transportations

(07:46):
contribution to global warming is quickly increasing, with travel producing
greater and greater percentages of the planet's carbon footprint. Private
automobile tailpipes will drive this phenomenon for the foreseeable future,
as the number of active vehicles on the road is
projected to grow from seven million in the year two
thousand to two billion by so even though cars are
a lot more efficient, vastly more cars are being used.

(08:09):
And of course that's not entirely. It doesn't mean that, like,
more efficient cars cause people to buy more cars, but
it does make it more affordable for more people to
own cars and to drive them further, which drives up,
you know, fuel use, and drives up emissions. And you
see how the whole problem works, and it's not just cars.
When planes became more fuel efficient, ticket prices decrease and

(08:29):
more people started to travel by plane. As cost per
mile dropped, more miles were flown. The fact that airplanes
got more fuel efficient didn't reduce general pollution by the
air travel industry, quite to the contrary. In fact, the
decreased emissions led to an increase in air travel, which
shot a hell of a lot more poison out into
the sky and also gave us eat pray love. So

(08:49):
the other kinds of rebounds are indirect rebound effects. This
refers to when energy efficiency leads to monetary savings for
a producer or consumer who then can spend those extra
says things, on other carbon emitting goods and services that
otherwise they couldn't afford. For example, you buy a more
fuel efficient car, you save money on fuel, and you
wind up with extra funds in your bank account that
you can use on a vacation, and maybe you take

(09:11):
a flight on that vacation. So in the end, you
emit more c O two despite the fact that you're
emitting less c O two through your car. You've got
five bucks extra in the bank and you fly to
Mexico on it. Right, That's an indirect rebound effect. So
even if a product is replaced by a more efficient
one with similar respects, lower energy bills can mean that
more consumers will have more money to spend on goods

(09:32):
and services. This is generally seen as desirable from a
social and economic standpoint, and probably from an individual standpoint.
Having more money is always useful UM, but it involves
additional energy consumption means that you're consuming more, you're emitting
more UM, and so the savings and whatnot haven't actually
led to a savings in terms of, you know, from
an environmental perspective. An analysis of EU data shows that

(09:55):
out of twenty nine EU countries, eleven experienced rebound effects
of over fifty which means more than half of the
gains in energy efficiency were consumed by increases in energy use.
Six of those countries, including Denmark and Finland, reached over
rebound effects. This is called a backfire, and it means
that in those six countries, extra energy spending overtook all

(10:17):
of the efficiency gains achieved. Air Conditioning and heating are
large contributors to both direct and indirect rebounds. A rebound
effect as large as sixty percent has been shown in
increased improvements and efficiency in the residential heating sector, which
is something that the White House specifically quote about in
their paper. In China, long term rebound effects ranging from
forty six percent to fifty six percent for residential electricity

(10:40):
consumption in Beijing have been estimated. All of this data
casts doubt on the wisdom of relying on energy efficiency
policies to reduce energy demand. I'm gonna quote here from
a report by the Copenhagen School of Energy Infrastructure. In
recent decades, large increases in demand for energy services have
globally driven energy consumption. As a counterbalance, energy efficiency has

(11:00):
become a key energy policy mechanism to tackle higher energy
consumption and emissions, and countries and regions have adopted different
targets and policies to achieve energy and environmental objectives. The
main goals of these policies are to minimize the dependence
on fossil fuels and mitigate local air pollution and g
h G emissions. This has been particularly relevant for the
energy intensive sectors. The development and deployment of more efficient

(11:22):
technologies are, along with more technology management, the main channel
to achieve these environmental and energy objectives. However, energy efficiency
improvements can lead to changes in the demand for energy services,
changes that offset some of the expected energy savings. Consequently,
forecasts of energy consumption reductions may be overstated. As evidenced
by the empirical literature, rebound effects can be a non

(11:44):
negligible issue. Therefore, ignoring them can imply an overestimation of
the benefits coming from energy efficiency improvements. This can in
turn lead to decisions such as the overallocation of public
funds to ineffective environmental and energy policies. Policy Makers need
to take rebound effects in to account for air quality,
energy security, and climate change policy reasons. A rebound effect

(12:05):
different from zero implies that the expected proportional reductions and
emissions from fuel efficiency improvements might not be achieved. Therefore,
the policy goals to reach specific levels of emissions through
fuel efficiency enhancements may need to be adjusted accordingly. And again,

(12:29):
we have nothing against the idea of making more efficient devices.
The point is that energy efficiency can't be pursued in
a vacuum. It has to coincide with changes to a
less extract of cancerous mindset regarding the Earth's resources and
carrying capacity. Just telling someone you can drive more for
less money now, or you can afford to keep your
TV on all the time doesn't really help anything. My

(12:50):
fear is that governments and corporations, the neoliberal leviathan as
we've come to call it on this show, will focus
almost overwhelmingly on energy efficiency to maintain economic growth and
obscure the overall lack of action on stopping carbon emissions.
Think Joe Biden doing donuts in an electric jeep through
such a lens as the Biden administration. Energy efficiency is

(13:11):
a foil to climate change is a charade being used
to keep relentless economic growth. Feud is a net good.
It plays into the myth that will be able to mitigate,
adapt and survive the effects of climate change with little
to no change to our current lifestyles. What we need
to do is decouple human well being from energy consumption
and consumption in general to effectively combat climate change. This

(13:32):
needs to happen at such a scale that advocating for
individual changes in lifestyle will never be enough, but that
is still a significant part of the puzzle. The trick
comes in getting people to accept the fact that their
life will need to change without them telling them and
buying this product instead of that product. Is how you
do it. That said, populations of people can and do
change their behaviors in pretty profound ways. In nineteen fifty,

(13:54):
abortion was not at all an issue for the religious right.
Resistance to abortion might make some products and distrust you,
because that was seen as a Catholic concern. Now abortion
is the defining political issue of the ascendant right there
promised to destroy. It is the rock upon which their
titanic power is based. In a less calamitous sense, since
two thousand seven, we've gone from a time in which

(14:15):
smartphones were expensive trash for rich people to buy to today,
when they're expensive trash that every human being who can
afford to has to carry at all times because they're
so utterly integrated to our daily life. So yes, people
can change. A bigger challenge, though, will be to change
the mindset of industry, which is not entirely or even
often driven by consumer demand. As we've seen with the

(14:36):
release of papers proving Chevron and other oil and gas
companies knew about and deliberately hid research on climate change
for decades, Big capital will put its thumb on the
scale every step of the way. In other words, if
you come at the behemoth that is the integrated industrial economy,
you'd best come correct. How do we do that? Well,
if anybody really knew, they would have, you know, done

(14:58):
it by now. The human infast structure of extractive capitalism
is deep and vast and tightly woven into the structure
of every government with any real power. So with the
full understanding and admission that we aren't claiming to have
solutions to that problem, let's talk about something that will
at least be part of any real solution to the problem.
D growth. This is a term will explain in more

(15:19):
detail later, but we mean it's simply as a holistic
approach to encouraging reduction and energy consumption and global environmental justice.
A paper on the Jeevens paradox and the link between innovation,
efficiency and sustainability for the Frontiers and Energy Research concluded
quote the Jevens paradox and tales that sustainability problems cannot
be solved by technological innovations alone. They must be solved

(15:42):
through institutional and behavioral changes. While there are still differences
of opinion about the scale every bound effects and ongoing
arguments about the macro and micro and longer and shorter
term consequences of efficiency, our interest in this topic today
is driven by the goal of improving how we use
energy rather than totally were hauling or abandoning efficiency. One

(16:02):
example would be the current fight in Europe over smartphone chargers.
Most of the rest of the smartphone industry worldwide has
jumped onto USBC. Is the right kind of port for charging,
et cetera with your device. Before this point, those of
you have been using smartphones for a decade or we'll remember,
there were tons of different charges and thus a tons
of different waste. Every phone had to come with a
new charger. A lot of them wound up in the

(16:23):
trash that has been reduced by everyone jumping onto USBC.
But Apple continues to use their own special charger. And
now the EU was promising to make a law to
mandate USBC for charging new phones in an attempt to
reduce waste. This isn't again a bad thing, but if
someone's really concerned with waste among the smartphone industry, planned

(16:44):
obsolescence is the thing to go after. Now, Targeting planned obsolescence,
stopping it includes a number of things. And for one thing,
you have to fight for the right to repair devices,
which is something that a number of corporations, not just
in the smartphone industry, have lobbied to in some cases
make illegal. More than that, it's stopping somehow these companies
from making the conscious decision to brick old technology to

(17:06):
increase profits, and that aspect of it is the bigger
enemy than even the right to repair. As electronic device
has become common and more sectors of daily life via
the Internet of Things, the overall share of global energy
use that goes to making new versions of old products
that could still be working but are designed to break
is is really quite depressing. For one example of how

(17:26):
large it must be, I haven't found any solid information
on the total size of this industry. Things that you
have to repeatedly re buy because they're meant to break.
But the mobile phone industry and two thousand nineteen alone
was four point six percent of global GDP, So that's
close to five percent of global GDP just from making
phones that are designed to break so you have to

(17:47):
buy a new phone. This is an example of an
area in which people's perspectives have to be changed, and
I think actually that digital fatigue, the fact that we're
also fucking exhausted with these devices these days, may provide
somewhat of an inroad for convincing people that they need
to buy new gadgets less often. But because these gadgets
are so crucial to daily life, the industry actually also

(18:07):
has to be forced to change. And again, rite repair
is one part of this, but that doesn't stop Apple
from just deciding to throttle their old devices whenever they
need to add a new layer to the money pile.
Our overall point with all this is that solutions to
climate change have to be cultural and not just based
in some version of will invent a better version and
that will solve the problem. Hybrid gas burning cars and

(18:28):
standardized charging chords are nibbling around the edges of the problem.
Relying on technological advances pacifies us in the present, and
it reinforces the need for certain types of human material codependence.
And that kind of codependence leads to increased dependency and
more extraction. By no means am I trying to say
that innovation is bad. I love gadgets as much as
the next person. Innovation also has the capacity to heavily

(18:50):
decreased resource extraction. It just has to be tailored with
something more than just will make this device more efficient
so we can use it more or sell more of them.
The capitalist mode of mass resource extraction and grind for
efficiency are intertwined, and if we are to limit the
most catastrophic effects of climate change, we as a culture
need to rethink how we view efficiency and energy use.

(19:13):
For the past few hundred years, economic growth has been
the road that has led to our current ecological dilemma.
The fantasy of switching over to nuclear and renewable energy
with a perfectly efficient electric grid to just sidestep climate
collapse is it's a fantasy. We missed our chance to
do that. Even if we stop all carbon emissions right now,
all of them, the carbon already in the atmosphere would

(19:35):
push US past two degrees celsius of warming in about
fifty years. So what besides carbon capture can we do
about this? We as in both you, the regular listener,
and the goals with power and real influence. Well. The
two thousand eighteen International Panel and Climate Change Special WORKPORT
indicated that in the absence of speculative negative emissions technologies,

(19:55):
the only feasible way to remain within safe carbon budgets
was for high income nations to actively slow down the
pace of material production and consumption. D growth is the
planned reduction of energy use, corporate profits over production, and
excess consumption designed to bring the economy back into balance
with the living world in a way that reduces inequality

(20:15):
while focusing on human and ecological well being. This isn't
just some sort of utopian Marxist thinking, and in fact,
a lot of Marxists have critiques of D growth, and
D growth could be applied to a number of different
economic and governmental systems. There are even some weirdo capitalist
advocates of D growth. Discussion about solving climate change can
get into uncomfortable eugenics e territory if you aren't careful,

(20:37):
So I should emphasize here that d growth is primarily
about already wealthy countries limiting their economic growth. When aggregated
in terms of income, the richest half of the world,
high and upper middle income countries amid eighty six percent
of global CO two emissions. The bottom half, lower and
middle income countries amid only fourteen percent. With very few exceptions.

(20:59):
The richer the nation is, the more it emits. It's
all part of the resource extraction infinite growth lie we
tell ourselves to keep going. Wealth is so much more
of a factor in emissions than population. North America is
home to only five percent of the world population, but
amids nearly eighteen percent of c O two. Asia is
home to sixty percent of the world's population, but amidst

(21:20):
just forty nine percent of c O two. Africa has
sixteen percent of the population but emits just four percent
of its c O two. This is reflected in per
capita emissions. The average North American emits seventeen times more
than the average African. This inequality in global emissions lies
at the heart of why international agreement on climate change
has and continues to be so contentious. The richest countries

(21:43):
in the world are home to half the world population
and amid eighty six percent of c O two. We
want global incomes and living standards, especially for those of
the poorest half of the world, to rise. The only
way to do that while limiting climate change is to
shrink the emissions of high income countries. Even several billion
additional people in low incombinations would leave global emissions almost unchanged.

(22:05):
Three or four billion poor individuals would only account for
a few percent of global c O two. At the
other end of the distribution, however, adding only one billion
high income individuals to the wealthiest parts of the world
would increase global emissions by almost a third. A programmer
in the United States has a higher c O two
footprint than fifty farmers in Uganda. A decent chunk of
this is just due to meet consumption. Meet consumption per

(22:28):
capita in the richest fifteen countries is seven hundred fifty
percent higher than in the poorest twenty four countries. Lowering
the population of say Uruguay won't do much for emissions.
This is not the case when you talk about wealthy nations.
In fact, if you live and say the United States,
possibly the biggest thing you as an individual could do
to reduce emissions is to have fewer or no children.

(22:50):
It's estimated that dedicated recycling curves about point three metric
tons of CO two emissions per year, while having one
fewer child is equivalent to preventing over fifty eight tons
of two emissions a year. Better sex, said, and free
access to contraceptives could also go a shockingly long way
to curbing individual emission in wealthy countries, these numbers are
averaged across the whole nation, and just like the case

(23:12):
in less wealthy countries, the impact on emissions by having
one fewer kid will be far lesser if your middle
class or poor than it would be if your upper
middle class are rich. But of course, none of that
is going to be enough if industrial production keeps chugging
along and advising people not to have children, one of
the singular driving motivations for human beings across history isn't
exactly a vote getter of a proposition. D growth is critical,

(23:34):
but the question of how to get there is thorny
as hell. There are a few easy answers. Abolishing planned
obsolescence could be pretty easily pitched to the average person.
Cutting down on the number of people who have to
commute could have a significant impact on toxic car culture,
and again you can sell that to people. The obvious
solutions are good places to start, but they should be
seen as opening incisions, meant to clear the way to

(23:55):
make deeper, more expansive cuts and eventually hu away at
the camp swer we planted in the heart of our civilization.
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(24:18):
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