There’s a lot of confusion in green thinking about
how energy use really works - both from greens who don’t adequately grasp the
relationship between efficiency and energy saving, and, to be fair, from those
at the opposite end who assume that making things more efficient automatically
means we’ll use less energy. Thank God there are Blogs like mine to set things
straight. 😃
You can think of capitalism's progression-explosion a bit like this, through the lens of the Jevons paradox. We build a steam-powered factory which costs £10 per item made. At £10 an item, we can sell 100 a day, because few customers can afford it. Then we build an electricity plant, and that only costs £1 per item made. At £1 per item, we can now sell 10,000 items per day, because most people can afford it. That's ten times more spend on a hundred times more energy, and a hundred times more consumers of that energy.
But in reality, it’s not as simple as “a hundred times more energy,” because the new technology also makes each item cheaper precisely by using less energy per unit. If production rises a hundredfold while each item uses a tenth as much energy, total energy use still rises about tenfold. In other words, efficiency lowers the energy per item, but growth in production and consumption more than makes up for it.
But in fact, it’s even more efficient than that, because we said we have ten times more total spending, and roughly ten times more total energy use - because even though each item uses less energy, we’re making vastly more of them - but the “a hundred times more energy” is an understatement, because but in my example, each item became cheaper precisely because it uses less energy per item. In other words, depending on how the technology and demand interact, total energy use might increase tenfold, a hundredfold, or somewhere in between - but it almost never falls. Efficiency doesn’t necessarily reduce total energy use; but it can enable the economy to expand and consume even more, and both consumers and producers are richer, and more is being produced for less effort. When goods and services become cheaper, we generally buy more of them. When production gets more efficient, we produce more. And the energy use increase from the economy getting bigger typically outpaces the energy use reduction from things becoming more efficient.
But there's even more to the story, because per unit of production, energy becomes more efficient (less energy per item). This is why we need to separate efficiency from total energy use. Per person, or per unit of economic output, modern, advanced economies are usually far more efficient than their predecessors (see the Environmental Kuznets Curve, which also factors in positive trade-offs regarding pollution vs. income benefits, and shows how, at higher income levels, pollution declines, as societies can afford cleaner technologies, smarter regulation and more efficient service-based economies.) - we get more GDP per unit of energy than older economies did, especially with the additional structural shifts (to services, outsourcing manufacturing) alongside those efficiency gains.
Energy intensity has been falling for decades in advanced economies, which shows that growth is almost always greener or more energy efficient. Yet at the same time, total global energy use keeps rising, because efficiency makes goods cheaper and accessible to more people, expanding both production and consumption.
This is one of the many matters the environmentalists don't address - though in most cases they don't currently even think in ways that show them this needs addressing. In other words, it's not just that they don't get this; they don't usually know there is anything here that needs getting (ditto the other green blind spots I have blogged about in the past). It's the complex trade-off between the efficiencies above, of the Environmental Kuznets Curve, and the fact that efficiency doesn’t shrink our total energy appetite - it just allows us to fuel a larger, more energy-intensive economy, where growth is not just about using less energy per item; it’s about the huge advancements of more activity overall, where the trade-off is more absolute energy use, but in most cases for the betterment and improved material living standards of the human species.
