Electric Cars And The Jevons Paradox
Y’all know how much I hate cars. Even electric cars.
The thing is, I don’t just hate them because they intimidate, harass, injure and kill pedestrians and cyclists, but also because they’re bad for the environment. The Jevons Paradox (wiki) suggests that electric cars might actually be worse for the world than regular cars.
America could, in theory, see a drop in unhealthy smog and things of that nature, but overall energy consumption could jump, and more importantly, it could jump drastically around the world if we continue to work to make driving a viable option.
Here’s some introductory reading:
And this is a good, brief video on the Jevons Paradox:
Electric cars == bad.
So, Jevons Paradox says that on the micro level, energy efficiency is a good thing. On the macro level, disaster.
…What’s the fix, then? Every time you create an resource/energy efficiency fix, you have to also add a tax against that resource so that consumption of that resource does not go up. In this way, you actually get the desired effect of less energy use. Else, all you’ve done is effectively made energy less expensive, so supply and demand will kick in and could cause consumption to actually rise on a per capita basis — this is the Jevons Paradox in action.
Leave comment (2)[p.s. The Forums are open for participation.]
June 9th, 2009 at 8:16 am
This is an important video - I’m going to put a link to it on my blog.
For a long time, I’ve wondered what the effect of making cars that use less gasoline (oil) would have overall. It seemed, to my feeble brain, that if we could use it more efficiently - that is, if we could make it cost less - we’d simply use more of the stuff.
We’d use more of it so we could travel farther on personal vacations, to visit Aunt Minnie more often, to drive to work instead of taking the bus. So owning, say, a Prius, while providing a huge increase in the number of miles we can drive relative to the cost, simply means driving more until we bump up against the same cost again.
Except now, over time, we have even less gasoline to burn. Which is why I’ve long thought that making and selling more Prius’ won’t help.
To me, it seemed to be a wash - buy a Prius, but spend as much as before on gasoline. But now I see it’s worse than a wash, that cars as efficient as a Prius will, in the long run, make us use more gasoline than if we owned something like the Ford Ranger I use.
I think the topic is clouded with other issues that are innately human: personal freedom, human ingenuity, etc. I think, too, there is a self-correcting mechanism, which we see at work right now, as the price of gas, which last year soared and then sank, is rising again.
We should be asking ourselves if we can manage our resources so that what is inevitable - a period of self- correction - is rather less, than more, painful.
June 18th, 2009 at 7:42 am
Really good, thoughtful video. It is all true of course. But here is the deal. This is what is usually missing in these types of discourses. That is the growing human population problem. It’s simple- more humans=more growth = more pollution and all the other problems caused by humans (de-forestation, water pollution, species extinction etc). Not that hard to understand. The overpopulation by humans is an issue that is skipped over in these discussions. Without doing something about it things will get a hell of a lot more messed up. The only thing the green movement can do from here is soften the fall. There doesn’t seem to be a constituency or any national dialogue about limiting population with the
historical exception of Chairman Mao’s work. (He was a psyco and mass murderer aside from the family size limit program.)
All of the positive actions in the video are good ones however any positive gains will be overcome by more population growth.