Amazingly, such efforts will actually make our situation worse. This probably makes absolutely no sense unless you understand how the modern day banking and monetary system works. To illustrate, let's revisit Jevon's Paradox, explained above, with an example:bberends schreef:Als ik het goed begrijp is minderen van energieconsumptie de enige echte verbetering die we kunnen aanbrengen.
Pretend you own a computer store and that your monthly energy bill, as of December 2004, is $1,000. You then learn about the coming energy famine and decide to do your part by conserving as much as possible. You install energy efficient lighting, high quality insulation, and ask your employees to wear sweaters so as to minimize the use of your store's heating system.
After implementing these conservation measures, you manage to lower your energy bill by 50% - down to $500 per month.
While you certainly deserve a pat-on-the-back and while your business will certainly become more profitable as a result of your conservation efforts, you have in no way helped reduce our overall energy appetite. In fact, you have actually increased it.
At this point, you may be asking yourself, "How could I have possibly increased our total energy consumption when I just cut my own consumption by $500/month? That doesn't seem to make common sense . . ."
Well think about what you're going to do with that extra $500 per month you saved. If you're like most people, you're going to do one of two things:
1. You will reinvest the $500 in your business. For instance, you might
spend the $500 on more advertising. This will bring in more
customers, which will result in more computers being sold. Since, as
mentioned previously, the average desktop computer consumes 10X
it's weight in fossil-fuels just during its construction, your individual
effort at conserving energy has resulted in the consumption of more
energy.
2. You will simply deposit the $500 in your bank account where it will
accumulate interest. Since you're not using the money to buy or sell
anything, it can't possibly be used to facilitate an increase in energy
consumption, right?
Wrong. For every dollar a bank holds in deposits, it will loan out
between six and twelve dollars. These loans are then used by the
bank's customers to do everything from starting businesses to
making down payments on vehicles to purchasing computers.
Thus, your $500 deposit will allow the bank to make between
$3,000 and $6,000 in loans - most of which will be used to buy, build,
or transport things using fossil fuel energy.
Typically, Jevon's Paradox is one of the aspects of our situation that people find difficult to get their minds around. Perhaps one additional example will help clarify it:
Think of our economy as a giant petroleum powered machine that turns raw materials into consumer goods which are later turned into garbage.
If you remove the machine's internal inefficiencies, the extra energy is simply reinvested into the petroleum supply side of the machine. By removing the machine's internal inefficiencies, you have enabled it to consume petroleum and produce garbage at an even faster rate.
The only way to get the machine to consume less petroleum is for whoever owns/operates the machine to press the button that says "slow-down." However, since we are all dependent on the machine for jobs, food, affordable health care, subsidies for alternative forms of energy, etc., nobody is going to lobby the owners/operators of the machine to press the "slow-down" button until it's too late.
Eventually (sooner than later) the petroleum plug will get pulled and the machine's production will sputter before grinding to a halt. At that point, those of us dependent on the machine (which means all of us) will have to fight for whatever scraps it manages to spit out.
To be clear: conservation will benefit you as an individual. If, for instance, you save $100/month on your energy bills, you can roll that money into acquiring skills or resources that will benefit you as we slide down the petroleum-production downslope. But since your $100 savings will result in a net increase in the energy consumed by society as a whole, it will actually cause us to slide down the downslope faster.
