Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [84]
The most sophisticated analyses are now trying to determine which energy efficiency improvements are most likely to have large rebound effects. Steve Sorrell of the Sussex Energy Group has split up the big efficiency targets into two large groups. On the one hand, efficiency gains in developing countries, with general purpose technologies like internal combustion engines, and in energy-intensive sectors appear likely to be susceptible to major rebound effects. On the other hand, efficiency improvements in developed countries, specifically in households, may lead to actual energy consumption drops.36
Perhaps the best framing for energy efficiency’s role in the greentech future comes from Dan Adler, president of the California Clean Energy Fund. “Efficiency is how we’re going to pay for all of this other stuff,” he reflected.37 Any energy supply—some form of renewable or nuclear—that is brought onto the U.S. grid so that the country can shut off its coal plants will probably cost a little bit more than coal. Consequently, following the California model of using invisible efficiency improvements to offset the price increases of new energy types could be a political necessity.
All of these studies necessarily rely on data from the past, when energy supplies were not constrained. It remains to be seen how the peak of global oil production will play out, but Taoyuan Wei of Oslo’s Center for International Climate and Environmental Research pointed out in a 2009 paper that nearly all the rebound studies pretend that there is an infinite amount of energy supply.38 That is to say, the new studies on the rebound effect focus just on the demand side of the global equation. In a kind of sad engineering poetry, the new research almost perfectly inverts the supply-obsession error that Rosenfeld’s generation helped to correct.
This means that if the security of the energy supply enters a period of remarkable deterioration, past rebound effects may not be a good guide to future rebound effects. Although it may have made sense at some point in the United States to continue moving farther and farther outside urban cores and using increased fuel efficiency savings to drive more miles, those days may be coming to an end. Even coal reserves, which had been thought likely to last for well over the next one hundred years, are getting a fresh look and revised downward by some analysts. 39 And efficiency savings that may have been converted into greater consumption in the past may not have the same effect in a future of rising energy prices.
Conversely, if new carbon-based energy supplies are easily tapped and the world does not put an across-the-board limit on their extraction, then it seems likely that no amount of low-carbon energy or efficiency, no matter how cheap it is, will keep that carbon in the ground. If the global North switches to renewables or nuclear en masse, doing so could very well drop the price of fossil fuels, thus leading to an increase in global consumption by poor countries. This may be a global social good: Vaclav Smil has calculated that real and quantifiable good stuff happens as a country reaches closer to an energy supply of about 110 gigajoules per person.40 Billions of people are nowhere close, while Americans and Europeans far exceed the threshold. Purely from a climate perspective, however, it doesn’t matter who burns the fuel.
Without global coordination and a historically unprecedented deployment of low-carbon power sources, the least savory effects of deranging the atmosphere will be felt. The only options we will be left with are the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the air and its subsequent burial in the ground as advocated by Columbia University’s Klaus Lackner or massive