Slovenski NEPN, ki se zgleduje po nemškem energetskem modelu, temelji na predpostavki, da bomo v prihodnje povečali učinkovitost rabe energije (URE),zaradi česar se bo poraba energije lahko zmanjšala. No, realno življenje je drugačno. Dejansko imamo opravka s paradoksom, da se s povečanjem učinkovitosti rabe energije njena poraba še dodatno (praktično linearno) povečuje. Ta paradoks je odkril britanski ekonomist Williams Jevons leta 1865, ko je napisal knjigo o tem, da bo V. Britaniji zmanjkalo premoga, in to prav zaradi povečane učinkovitosti strojev. Paradoks je v tem, da bolj kot so naprave, ki jih uporabljamo, energetsko učinkovite, bolj povečujemo njihovo uporabo in jih širimo v vedno širše polje uporabe. Denimo, če so računalniki postali milijardokrat bolj učinkoviti, se ni za toliko zmanjšala njihova poraba energije, pač pa smo za milijardokrat povečali uporabo računalnikov, ki so danes vsepovsod, od podatkovnih centrov do avtomobilov in pametnih telefonov.

(In mimogrede, podoben paradoks se dogaja pri lastnikih samooskrbnih sončnih elektrarn: namesto da bi prišlo do zmanjšanja njihove porabe elektrike iz omrežja, se ta po namestitvi sončnih elektrarn še povečuje. Za polnjenje e-avtov, za toplotne črpalke in nasploh bolj razkošne porabe elektrike, ki je “zastonj”)

Spodaj je nekaj odlomkov iz odličnega zapisa Blaira Fixa, ki dokazuje, da Jevonsov paradoks glede učinkovitosti / rabe energije ne velja samo za človeško aktivnost pri uporabi tehnologije, da za to ni kriv samo kapitalizem, ampak da gre za lastnost vseh živih bitij. Z eno izjemo – bakterije, ki so omejene s svojo velikostjo. Iz tega Fix, ki verjame, da so fosilni viri omejeni, izpelje trditev, da je namesto spodbujanja povečevanja učinkovitosti naprav za izkoriščanje toplotne energije fosilnih goriv, potrebno povsem zmanjšati podpore v ta namen in jih nameniti za spodbujanje izkoriščanja, ja, uganili ste, obnovljivih virov energije. Ja, Fix navija za “odrast”. Padel je sicer v isto past kot ostali “odrastniki”, ki ciljajo na zmanjšanje potrošnje ob hkratnem naslanjanju na vire energije z ekstremno nizko gostoto energije, ki so hkrati nestanovitni ter odvisni od vremena (solarne in vetrne elektrarne), namesto denimo na jedrsko energijo, ki ima gromozansko energetsko gostoto.

Ampak pustimo zdaj to. Fixov zapis je zelo zanimiv zaradi odpiranja enega izmed ključnih vprašanj sedanjosti in bodočega razvoja – koliko energije bomo potrebovali in kako jo bomo najbolj učinkovito in planetu prijazno pridobili.

When it comes to our sustainability problems, striving for greater resource efficiency seems like an obvious solution. For example, if you buy a new car that’s twice as efficient as your old one, it should cut your gasoline use in half. And if your new computer is four times more efficient than your last one, it should cut your computer’s electric bill fourfold.

In short, boosting efficiency seems like a straightforward way to reduce your use of natural resources. And for you personally, efficiency gains may do exactly that. But collectively, efficiency seems to have the opposite effect As technology gets more efficient, we tend to consume more resources. This backfire effect is known as the ‘Jevons paradox’, and it occurs for a simple reason. At a social level, efficiency is not a tool for conservation; it’s a catalyst for technological sprawl.¹

Here’s how it works. As technology gets more efficient, it cheapens the service that it provides. And when services get cheaper, we tend to use more of them. Hence, efficiency ends up catalyzing greater consumption.

Take the evolution of computers as an example. The first computers were room-sized machines that gulped power while doing snail-paced calculations. In contrast, modern computers deliver about a trillion times more computation for the same energy input. Now, in principle, we could have taken this trillion-fold efficiency improvement and reduced our computational energy budget by the same amount. But we didn’t.

Instead, we took these efficiency gains and invested them in technological sprawl. We took more efficient computer chips and put them in everything — phones, TVs, cars, fridges, light bulbs, toasters … not to mention data centers. So rather than spur conservation, more efficient computers catalyzed the consumption of more energy.

In this regard, computers are not alone. As you’ll see, efficiency backfire seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Far from delivering a cure for our sustainability woes, efficiency gains appear to be a root driver of the over-consumption disease.

The search for a sustainability cure

Humans, being fad-prone animals, excel at taking old ideas and redressing them in language that’s shiny and new. Hence we get the modern obsession with ‘resource efficiency’.

Of course, the word ‘efficiency’ is not new. However, humanity’s sustainability predicament has given the pursuit of efficiency new meaning. In the before times, ‘efficiency’ was understood as a way to cut costs and bolster profits. But in recent decades, ‘efficiency’ has been rebranded as a tool for sustainability. As the UN Environment Programme puts it, the pursuit of resource efficiency can (supposedly) “decouple economic development from environmental degradation”.

So where did this reinterpretation of ‘efficiency’ come from? Well, it was a collective effort that gained traction in the 1990s, the decade when our sustainability problems became widely discussed. Perhaps more than any other work, the book Factor Four (written by Ernst von Weizsäcker, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins) popularized the idea that efficiency could be a cure-all for our sustainability woes. Published in 1997, the book came out just as the phrase ‘resource efficiency’ exploded in popularity.

Factor Four’s thesis was simple: if our technology were to grow four times more efficient, we could live twice as well, while cutting our resource budget in half.

Sounds compelling, right?

Sadly, there were some nagging problems. True, Factor Four made a well-reasoned case that many of our technologies could grow four times more efficient. But when it came to translating this efficiency into resource conservation, details were scarce.

Worryingly, the book mostly ignored the historical record. And that turns out to be a fatal flaw. You see, efficiency improvements are not a new invention; they’ve been happening continuously for at least three centuries. And over that time, resource use didn’t shrink. It ballooned.

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Neglecting technological sprawl

It’s the neglect of technological sprawl that ultimately undermines techno-optimist books like Factor Four. Although the authors were right to argue that technology can get more efficient, they were wrong about what we would actually do with this newfound efficiency.

Let’s use computers to illustrate the problem.

To the 21st-century eye, Factor Four contains a delightfully retro discussion about how laptop computers could be tools for conservation. “A modern laptop,” the authors observed, “can ideally reduce electricity demand by 99 per cent when compared with an old-fashioned desktop computer.”

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My point is that when Factor Four was written in 1997, the authors could have looked at the history of computational efficiency and seen what it had wrought. The answer — then and now — was not resource conservation. It was the continuous expansion of technological sprawl.

On the consumer end, new devices proliferated. And on the industrial end, the demand for cloud computing spawned an ever-expanding network of data centers. Today, the computational sprawl has reached comical levels. Using the most modern, ultra-efficient computers, data centers guzzle power so that half-baked chatbots can respond to your queries with answers that are plausible but wrong.

Some people call this ‘progress’. But another word for it would be the continuous backfire of computational efficiency.

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Backfire on the blockchain

Despite the ubiquity of computers, it’s surprisingly difficult to pin down their collective power budget. Hence, it’s difficult to measure the scale of efficiency backfire. But in specific applications, we do have hard numbers .. and they are jaw dropping.

One such application is the ‘blockchain’ — the technology that powers cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Now, you’ve probably heard that the Bitcoin network uses loads of energy. And it does. But before we look at this gluttony, let’s study a (seemingly) more positive trend. Over the last decade, Bitcoin mining has grown vastly more efficient.

Figure 5 tells the story. Since 2010, the hashing efficiency of Bitcoin tech grew by a factor of a million.

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Given the million-fold improvement in hashing efficiency, we can ask what it wrought. Did it cause Bitcoin miners to save spectacular amounts of electricity? Or did it induce new forms of technological sprawl?

Points to readers who guessed the latter. With more efficient technology in hand, Bitcoin miners responded by expanding their operations. The result, as Figure 6 shows, was that the million-fold efficiency improvements were met with a million-fold increase in Bitcoin’s energy budget. As I said, jaw-dropping backfire.

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The Jevons paradox comes to America

Among the spectrum of modern technology, computers are probably unique for the staggering scale of their efficiency improvements. Elsewhere, the gains have been more modest. Still, it’s worth remembering that efficiency gains were not an invention of the sustainability-aware 1990s. Long before anyone cared about conserving resources, industrial tech was getting steadily more efficient.

Think of the difference between the cars of the 1910s and the cars of today. Think of what electricity generation plants looked like in 1900 and what they looked like now. Think of how powered flight went from not existing to landing on the moon in 66 years. In hindsight, the scope of this technological change is breathtaking. And the thread of efficiency runs continuously through it.

Interestingly, few scientists have attempted to look at the big picture of this efficiency thread. In other words, we know a lot about the efficiency improvements of specific machinery. But we know surprisingly little about how these improvements add up across the whole of society.

That changed in 2009 with a book called The Economic Growth Engine.² Written by economists Robert Ayres and Benjamin Warr, the book attempts to add up efficiency gains across the full range of technology. In other words, Ayres and Warr look at how much primary energy gets pumped into society. Then they estimate how much ‘useful work’ gets done. Take the ratio of these two quantities and you get a measure of aggregate efficiency.

Figure 7 shows Ayres and Warr’s estimates of aggregate efficiency in the United States. Starting in 1900, energy-conversion technology was on average, about 4% efficient. By 2000, that value had increased to nearly 12% — a roughly threefold improvement.

So again, we can ask what these efficiency gains wrought. Did they work to conserve energy? Or did they catalyze new forms of technological sprawl?

The evidence speaks for itself. As Figure 8 shows, the threefold improvement in US aggregate efficiency was met with a threefold increase in energy use per person. Instead of investing in energy conservation, Americans took their efficiency gains and used them to catalyze new forms of technological sprawl — interstate highways, massive suburbs, theme parks, and gadgetry of every kind.

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Is efficiency a ‘curse’?

To summarize, the backfire of energy efficiency appears ubiquitous. It’s a consistent pattern throughout industrial history. And it’s a recurring theme across life itself. Given this universality, does it make sense to call efficiency a ‘curse’? (This is the language used by Foster and colleagues.)

I think the answer is no.

In essence, efficiency is simply a means to an end — a way to catalyze technological or biological sprawl. Whether this sprawl is a blessing or a curse depends on the setting.

In the case of life, biological sprawl is just the spread of life into many niches of size. We typically call this sprawl ‘biodiversity’, and we consider it a good thing. But in the case of industrial society, fossil fuels have allowed use to build more technological sprawl than the Earth can sustain. So it’s less that efficiency is a ‘curse’, and more that anything done with fossil fuels was always destined to be unsustainable. Greater efficiency simply hastened the inevitable.

To summarize, humans play the same game as life — we use efficiency to catalyze sprawl. And for most of human history, we played the game within tight constraints, using only the energy made available by the sun. But our exploitation of fossil fuels obviously changed everything, supercharging our activity beyond what the solar budget could maintain. It’s this lack of constraint that converts the Jevons paradox from a blessing into a curse.

Vir: Blair Fix