Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [83]
REBOUND RELATIONSHIPS AND THE GLOBE
For all his successes in the United States, Rosenfeld’s methods may not be the answer for the entire globe. He has long been concerned with making things cheaper for consumers. He’s fundamentally interested in the American problem of energy waste and inefficiency. Unlike younger greens, whose interest was formed during the more recent runup in oil prices and climate change concern and was tempered with blistering energy usage growth in the developing world, Rosenfeld is more interested in saving dollars than pushing any kind of low-carbon energy supply technology—whether nuclear, renewable, or otherwise.
In his autobiography he notes that the rise of climate change concern changed his priorities from “1. Money, 2. Resources, 3. Pollution to 1. Money, 2. Pollution, 3. Resources.” In other words, climate change has not made Rosenfeld fundamentally rethink his position on energy efficiency: It’s a good idea, and it will happen to cut carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.30
It shouldn’t take anything away from Rosenfeld’s legacy as the “godfather of efficiency,”31 but there are persistent and pesky questions about whether or not efficiency will actually reduce energy consumption and thus carbon dioxide emissions in the long run. A gaggle of analysts have questioned whether a “rebound” effect eats up most or all of the energy initially saved.
In the simplest case, there can be a direct rebound effect: If your car gets thirty miles to the gallon rather than fifteen, you might drive more. The direct impact of such changes is the easiest to measure and probably to manage, too. An intensive 2009 review of the empirical evidence found that this direct rebound effect occurs for probably less than 30 percent for household services in developed countries.32 From this number, Rosenfeld’s main criterion seems to be satisfied. Consumers will obviously save money and get more energy services. Yet even this moderate rebound effect is not fully factored into the calculations by esteemed bodies like the International Energy Agency when they consider efficiency as an emissions reduction strategy.
But there is a deeper and more global problem with energy efficiency as a carbon reduction strategy. If efficiency measures in the developed countries (perhaps accompanied by a carbon tax) reduce fossil-fuel usage in those countries, economists would say that the price of those fuels could drop. Petroleum, natural gas, and coal all trade at pretty close to the same price globally, so some demand destruction in the United States may make using fossil fuels more attractive to a growing country like Indonesia or China. Some critics have suggested, following the early thought of the nineteenth-century British economist William Jevons, that by lowering prices, efficiency may well cause increased, not decreased, consumption. Economists call this backfire.33
The most obvious and suggestive evidence for the Jevons Paradox is that although the amount of energy per dollar of GDP keeps dropping, the absolute amount of consumption keeps rising. This is true the world over—and it’s not simply a function of greater numbers of humans. Per capita energy consumption, the vast majority of it derived from burning carbon-based fuels, continues to grow. One study looked at how this happens in California. They found that American home sizes just kept growing and growing. The efficiency gains of better HVAC systems have been completely overwhelmed by the growing volume of air that has to be heated and cooled. In 1950 the average person lived in 286 square feet of space. That’s a little less than a couple of parking spaces. In 2000, however, the average floor area per capita had risen to 847 square feet. That’s only a little less than the total square footage of an average 1950 home.34
As such, the role of energy efficiency has become linked with some of the most contentious debates in energy economics. Whether energy or energy services drive economic growth or whether economic growth