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@coffee2Di4 @jackofalltrades @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green Technology change is complex and multifactorial, but people like to boil stuff down to simple explanations, like the Jevons Paradox. Unfortunately, these simple explanations are usually wrong.

@coffee2Di4 @jackofalltrades @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green People building bigger houses or buying bigger cars isn’t solely caused by efficiency improvements, and efficiency is nowhere near the most important contributor to this effect.

@coffee2Di4 @jackofalltrades @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green In the same way, people look at aggregate statistics for energy use and say “look, efficiency causes energy use to go up” but there are many other factors pushing energy use upwards. Overall increase in wealth is the most powerful one.

@coffee2Di4 @jackofalltrades @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green Efficiency wasn’t the sole reason for its ascendence, and probably wasn’t the most important reason, but the lesson most people take from this “effect” is that efficiency causes increases in energy use. That conclusion is almost always false.

@coffee2Di4 @jackofalltrades @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green These reasons included higher power densities, the ability to store energy, the ability to locate motive power flexibly within factories, the ability to operate underground. Steam engines were what is known as a general purpose technology, which had wide and deep applications across society.

@coffee2Di4 @jackofalltrades @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green The Jevons paradox is widely misunderstood and almost always overestimated. Jevons himself made the mistake of attributing to efficiency improvements the rapid adoption of the steam engine, but there were many other reasons why steam engines were widely adopted.

@jackofalltrades @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green What we have to do is unprecedented, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. And your judgment about what is “plausible” isn’t evidence either. My point is that absolute decoupling is possible, we just need to do it. Most people use historical examples to argue that it can’t be done, which is invalid and wrong. Will it be hard? Absolutely. But it is possible.

@urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @jackofalltrades @ajsadauskas @green Remember also that absolute decoupling of energy from GDP is harder than absolute decoupling of emissions from GDP. There are many ways to supply energy services without increasing emissions.

@urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @jackofalltrades @ajsadauskas @green We need to pursue absolute decoupling of emissions from GDP, and we can, while also doing all the other things forced on us by more than 3 decades of dithering (like carbon removal). That’s the only way out of this mess.

@urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @jackofalltrades @ajsadauskas @green No, that is not the case. Efficiency doesn’t cause increases in energy use except on the margin for a limited number of cases. What drives emissions up is people getting wealthier in a mostly fossil energy system. When we transform the system to be much less fossil intensive then emissions can come down even if GDP goes up.

@jackofalltrades @urlyman @ajsadauskas @green Of course it’s important to track emissions and materials associated with imported goods manufactured elsewhere, but that doesn’t change the plain fact that there is vast potential for improving efficiency, and that potential keeps increasing all the time as technology improves.

@jackofalltrades @urlyman @ajsadauskas @green As I was careful to say in my posts above, evidence for relative decoupling is very strong. Absolute decoupling is something still being debated, but there’s no reason in principle why it can’t be done, and people who just point to historical data to argue it can’t be done have to address the literature on energy and material efficiency potentials, which are vast and largely untapped.