Jevons paradox

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There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

Just before you go ripping out all your double glazing and deflating your tyres, note that I am not saying that efficiency gains cannot be useful in the future. But I am saying they are no good at all on their own. (It is only fair to write that the Jevons Paradox has been hotly debated over the years. More detail on this and why the deniers are wrong is in this endnote28.) By default efficiency improvements lead to greater environmental burden Efficiency Figure 3.8. The Jevons Paradox. 100% 84 3 ENERGY Given the catch, what can efficiency do for us? We badly need more efficiency, but we also need to learn not to squander it with increased consumption. We have to make efficiency work for us in a different way than we are used to.

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What is the catch with energy efficiency? It goes hand in hand with an even greater increase in demand for whatever the energy is used for. In 1865 William Stanley Jevons spotted that if the UK used coal more efficiently it would end up wanting more of it, not less27. This phenomenon has become known as the Jevons Paradox. Energy efficiency leads, by default, to an increase in total demand, rather than the decrease that is often assumed. It applies just as widely today as it did in 1865 and it has gamechanging implications for energy and climate policy. It may be counter intuitive at first but makes perfect sense on reflection.

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They might spend one of those nights fitting new insulation so that the coal becomes even more useful to them and the other night working by the fire to earn the extra money they need for their increased coal budget. However, the price of coal per tonne comes down a bit to help them because demand is going up so much and economies of scale are kicking in along with a stack of investment in new extraction technologies. And so it goes on. This is just a caricature of how the Jevons Paradox works, but I hope it demonstrates the principle. What is the catch with energy efficiency? 83 Resource Consumption Over the years we have become many times more efficient in our production of just about everything. LED lighting is hundreds of times more energy efficient than oil and gas lamps.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

A “coal panic” ensued, leading to the appointment of a blue-ribbon royal commission. Five years later, it published the first detailed estimate of Britain’s coal reserves but managed to sidestep Jevons’s conclusions altogether. The public went back to sleep. Britain’s coal did not run out, and the isles didn’t become fully reliant on oil until after World War I. The “Jevons Paradox” still troubles us: The more efficiently you use a resource, the more of it you will use. Put another way: The better the machine, the broader its adoption. And there has never been a better machine for transportation than the jet engine. A pair of General Electric GE90-115B turbofans mounted on a 777 are capable of generating 230,000 pounds of thrust between them—enough to propel four hundred passengers between New York and London in six and a half hours, with gas mileage equivalent to fifty-five miles per gallon per passenger.

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But the aggregate cost is still staggering: twenty-five thousand gallons of fuel ignited in the upper atmosphere. Fifty years of refinements have yielded engines cleaner by an order of magnitude, but any gains in efficiency have been far outpaced by exponential growth in the number of passengers—the inevitable result of falling costs and ticket prices. The Jevons Paradox illustrates why infinitely renewable, zero-carbon fuels are a necessity—because merely efficient solutions only postpone the day of reckoning. Peak whale teaches us how an entire way of life underpinned by a single source of energy can be transformed or vanish overnight thanks to timely substitution.

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Peak whale ended when whalers “ran out of customers before they ran out of whales,” quipped the environmentalist Amory Lovins, who was charting paths to a renewable future before Jimmy Carter wore cardigans in the White House. So how will peak oil end? The Reckoning: Peak Oil You couldn’t ask for a more ominous example of the Jevons Paradox circa 2020 than the prospect of a hundred million tourists and traders transiting the Gulf on the New Silk Road. Anyone paying close attention to oil prices and carbon footprints might reasonably conclude that a Middle East remade in Dubai’s image is a looming catastrophe. There is a growing consensus among activists, energy analysts, and fliers alike that aviation is unsustainable at its current pace, ethically and economically.

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Increasing efficiency merely paves the way for greater energy consumption, a situation known as the Jevons Paradox. Named for the world’s first energy economist, a Brit named William Stanley Jevons, the paradox has only gained credibility in recent years as increasing numbers of researchers have corroborated Jevons’s work, confirming what Jevons said in 1865: “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuels is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”27 Perhaps the most exhaustive analysis of energy-efficiency efforts and their effects on consumption was done in 2008 in a book called The Jevons Paradox and the Myth of Resource Efficiency Improvements.

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(table) Jakuba, Stan Jamaica Japan(fig.) and carbon dioxide emissions and electricity(fig.) and energy consumption(fig.) and energy intensity(fig.) and natural gas nuclear attacks on and nuclear power and nuclear waste ranking of, by GDP and electricity generation(table) Japan Steel Works Jevons Paradox Jevons Paradox and the Myth of Resource Efficiency Improvements, The (Polimeni) Jevons, William Stanley Jobs “green,” and the oil and gas industry John Birch Society Johnson Controls Johnson, Lyndon Joiner, Columbus Marion (“Dad”) Jones, Jerry Joule, James Prescott Joules (J), as a measure of energy Joy Mining Machinery Kansas Kazakhstan Kennedy, Robert F., Jr.

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Thus, you can consume more with the same budget constraint.”28 Put another way, any time you reduce the cost of consuming something (in this case, by increasing the efficiency of a machine, home, or vehicle), then people will respond by consuming more of it. Over time, the gains in efficiency get swamped by the increased consumption that follows each gain. Numerous other analysts have come to the same conclusion as Polimeni.29 We can also look at historical trends for evidence of the Jevons Paradox. James Watt’s improvements to the steam engine led to huge improvements in energy efficiency, with the immediate result being a sharp drop in coal consumption. Watt continued making improvements in the steam engine until he died in 1819, before he was fully able to appreciate the revolution he helped to ignite.30 And the dimensions of that change can be seen in the amount of energy that was consumed: Between 1830 and 1863, British coal use increased by about 1,000 percent.31 Given that energy efficiency results in increased energy use, it’s obvious that, although energy efficiency should be pursued, it cannot be expected to solve the dilemmas posed by the world’s ever-growing need for energy.

The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World by John Michael Greer

back-to-the-land, Black Swan, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, David Strachan, deindustrialization, Easter island, European colonialism, Extropian, failed state, feminist movement, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, hydrogen economy, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, McMansion, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Project for a New American Century, Ray Kurzweil, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

His argument is impeccable: as using the resource becomes more efficient, costs per unit go down, and so people can afford to use more of it; as efficiency goes up, it also becomes economically feasible to apply the energy resource to new uses, and so people have reason to use more of it. Jevons’ paradox has been used more than once to argue against conservation, on the grounds that using energy more efficiently will simply lower the cost of energy and encourage people to use more of it. This was quite true when the only thing constraining energy supply was price, but this is no longer the case; geological realities rather than market forces are placing hard limits on the upper end of petroleum production. Thus Jevons’ paradox becomes a counterweight to rising energy prices: as energy costs rise, conservation and energy efficiency measures become more profitable and the decrease in systems costs helps hold the price of energy in check. 171 172 T he E cotechnic F u t u re When energy supplies are limited, therefore, Jevons’ paradox is an argument for conservation, not against it.

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In a world facing significant declines in the availability of energy, it’s therefore crucial to pay attention to system costs as well as production costs, keeping net energy as high as possible, so that systems necessary to community survival can be kept going more efficiently. This approach relies on the logic of Jevons’ paradox, which was first propounded by British economist William Stanley Jevons in his 1866 book The Coal Question. Jevons pointed out that when improvements in technology make it possible to use an energy resource more efficiently, getting more output from less input, the use of the resource tends to go up, not down.

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Thus Jevons’ paradox becomes a counterweight to rising energy prices: as energy costs rise, conservation and energy efficiency measures become more profitable and the decrease in systems costs helps hold the price of energy in check. 171 172 T he E cotechnic F u t u re When energy supplies are limited, therefore, Jevons’ paradox is an argument for conservation, not against it. During the 1970s, people across the industrial world downshifted their lifestyles and used energy more efficiently with relatively simple cost-effective measures. As a direct result, energy use dropped sharply — ​between 1978 and 1985, for example, world petroleum consumption went down by 15 percent. The measures that caused that sharp decrease cost much less than it would have cost to produce 15 percent more petroleum and could readily have been pushed further if the industrial world had not chosen instead to cash in the resulting gains and spend them on one final energy binge.

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough by Peter Barnes

adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, banks create money, basic income, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Money creation, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stuart Kauffman, the map is not the territory, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy

Given Congress’s present inability to do anything sensible on taxes or climate change, it seems unwise to bet the planet on Congress’s being sensible on both issues multiple times. There’s one other problem with relying on price alone to reduce total carbon use. The oil-price shock of 1973 prodded America to improve energy efficiency but not to reduce energy consumption. This was a demonstration of the so-called Jevons Paradox, first noticed by British economist William Stanley Jevons in 1865. Jevons observed that improvements in the efficiency of coal use led to greater consumption of coal in a wide range of industries, an increase that more than offset the savings from efficiency. In the twenty-first century, it’s quite possible that more people using fossil fuels more efficiently for more purposes (such as the Internet) could still increase total use, or at least dampen the rate at which usage declines.

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See Taxation Incremental possible, 121 India and HFC-23, 105 Industrialization, 16 Inequality, spiral of, 32–33 Inflation and debt-free money distribution, 91 Innovation, 25–26 Insourcing, 26–27 Intel, 25–26 Intellectual property rights dividends from, 144 protection of, 94 Internalizing externalities, 63 Internet, 128–129, 145–146 Investment banks, 54–55 Iraq, 130 J Japan and money distribution, 92 Jevons, William Stanley, 116 Jevons Paradox, 116 Jobs, 22–24. See also Labor unions; Unemployment top ten growth in, 23 work hours, decreasing, 95 Job training, 21, 25 Just Give Money to the Poor, 131 K Kauffman, Stuart, 120 Kay, John, 53 Kelso, Louis, 81–82 Kerry, John, 110 Keynes, John Maynard, 56, 135–136 Keystone pipeline, 135 Kyoto Protocol, 99–100, 104–105 L Labor unions, 131 build-and-join movements and, 131–132 and cap-and-trade system, 131–132 deunionization, 18–19 Landrieu, Mary, 130 Lanier, Jaron, 128–129 Lemann, Nicholas, 134 Lieberman, Joe, 100 Liquidity premium, 48, 54 Long, Huey, 134 M Madison, James, 15 Market economies, 30–32 Markey, Edward, 97, 108 Marx, Karl, 51 McCain, John, 100 McGovern, George, 80 McKibben, Bill, 110, 134 Meadows, Donella, 29 Means testing, 41 Medicare, 19 drug prices and, 54 individual/employer contributions to, 84 privatization of, 21 voucher system and, 39 Mexico, 26, 131 Microsoft, 48–49 Middle class, 10–11, 16–17 descent of, 19–20 mass middle class, 15–16 nonlabor income and, 27–28 Minerals, rent from, 145 Money.

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change by Dieter Helm

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, Extinction Rebellion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jevons paradox, lockdown, market design, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price mechanism, quantitative easing, remote working, reshoring, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, systems thinking, Thomas Malthus

The energy efficiency lobby likes to paint a picture of state-of-the-art housing, the sort that wealthy people can afford. It neglects to focus on the run-of-the-mill housing. It is indeed remarkable that even in the midst of a UK house-building boom, almost all of them are not remotely close to net zero. Finally, remember the Jevons Paradox discussed in chapter 6 (see endnote 8). Suppose the energy efficiency measures reduce your energy costs. You would have more money to spend on energy. That indeed is what has happened over the last century: as energy efficiency has improved, so the demand for energy has gone up rather than down.

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Back to text 6. Helm, D. ‘HS2: a conclusion in search of a rationale’, September 2019, www.dieterhelm.co.uk/regulation/transport/hs2-a-conclusion-in-search-of-a-rationale/. Back to text 7. See the Airports Commission, ‘Airports Commission: Final Report’, July 2015. Back to text 8. This is known as the Jevons Paradox after the nineteenth-century English economist William Stanley Jevons, referred to in chapter 1: more efficiency leads to higher, not lower, demand, as it has for the last 200 years since those early very inefficient steam engines were used to pump water from coal mines. Back to text 9. One proposal is Desertec, which failed, but nevertheless identified the ambitious opportunity which might be subsequently pursued.

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acid rain 25, 194 Africa xiv, xv, 2, 25, 30, 38, 44, 45, 47, 48, 51, 137, 229 agriculture 2, 6, 12, 13, 14, 23, 35–6, 43, 44–5, 70, 76, 86, 87–8, 95, 100, 102, 109, 116, 146–7, 149, 159, 163–80, 181, 183, 192, 197, 198, 206, 220 baseline, the 164–8 biodiversity loss and 2, 5, 100, 164, 165, 168, 169, 171, 172, 174, 180 biofuels and 197–8 carbon emissions and 2, 12, 13, 35–6, 76–7, 146–7, 163–80 carbon price and 167–70, 171, 172, 173, 180 China and 28–9, 35, 45, 180 economics of 76, 165, 166–7, 171, 174 electricity and 13, 166, 168, 174, 178, 180 fertiliser use see fertiliser lobby 14, 110, 164, 165, 169, 170, 197 methane emissions 23, 84, 177, 178, 179 net gain and 172–4 net value of UK 76, 166 new technologies/indoor farming 87–8, 174–9, 180, 213 peat bogs and 2, 179 pesticide use see pesticides petrochemicals and 166 polluter-pays principle and 76, 168–70, 172, 173 pollution 36, 86, 163, 165–6, 168–70, 172, 173, 177–8, 230 public goods, agricultural 170–4, 180 sequestering carbon and 12, 95, 163, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173–4, 177, 179, 180 soils and 2, 146, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171, 172, 175, 179 subsidies 14, 76, 102, 109, 116, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 172, 180, 228 25 Year Plan and 179–80 Agriculture Bill (2018), UK 170 air conditioning 135–6, 224, 233 air quality xiii, 13, 25, 46, 52, 61, 70, 135, 153, 177, 180, 201, 216, 230, 232 air transport 3–4, 6, 11, 13, 22, 50, 53, 73, 87, 88, 92, 107, 125, 128, 129, 132, 133, 134, 149, 156–7, 186, 195, 201, 203–5 aluminium 7, 117 Amazon rainforest 2, 34, 35, 95, 145, 149–50, 151, 155, 229, 230 ammonia 35, 137, 191 anaerobic digesters 35, 165, 230 animal welfare 167, 177 antibiotics 93, 165, 174 Arctic 26, 46, 114, 178 artificial intelligence (AI) 32, 175, 220, 231 autonomous vehicles 13, 129, 132, 175, 189–90, 231 Balkans 137–8 Bank of England 121 batteries 6, 31, 131, 135, 141, 183, 184, 185–90, 191, 199, 204, 213, 214, 219, 220, 221, 225, 231 beef 5, 95, 116, 117, 167, 230 Berlin, Isaiah 104 big 5 polluter products 117–18, 120 bin Salman, Mohammad 27 biocrops 36 biodiversity xiv, 2, 5, 12, 13, 28, 35, 51, 76, 94, 100, 148, 149, 152, 153, 158, 159, 164, 165, 168, 169–70, 171, 172, 174, 180, 227, 233 bioenergy 31, 34–5, 36 biofuels 21, 35, 49, 50, 67, 70, 95, 135, 183, 184, 197–8, 210, 230 biomass 32, 34, 49, 50, 67, 69, 109, 146, 147, 151, 210, 217 bonds, government 220 BP 27, 149, 187, 199 Deepwater Horizon disaster, Gulf of Mexico (2010) 147 Brazil 2, 35, 38, 44–5, 47, 95, 145, 149–50, 155, 198 Brexit 42, 47, 56, 117, 165 British Gas 102, 139 British Steel x, 194 broadband networks 6, 11, 90, 92, 125, 126, 127–8, 130–1, 132–3, 135, 140–1, 199, 201, 202, 205, 211, 214, 231, 232 Brundtland Commission 45 BT 127–8, 141 Openreach 214 Burn Out (Helm) ix, xiv Bush, George W. 36, 48, 53, 103 business rates 76, 165 Canada 52, 191, 193 capitalist model 26, 42, 99, 227 carbon border tax/carbon border adjustment xii, 11, 13, 60, 80, 115–20, 194–6, 204 carbon capture and storage (CCS) xiv, 12, 75–6, 95, 109, 146, 147–8, 149, 154, 159, 203–4, 207, 209, 222, 223 Carbon Crunch, The (Helm) ix, xiv, 221 carbon diary 4–5, 8, 10, 11, 64–6, 83, 86, 116, 143, 144, 155, 156, 167, 180, 181, 185, 203, 205 carbon emissions: agriculture and see agriculture by country (2015) 30 during ice ages and warm periods for the past 800,000 years 21 economy and 81–159 electricity and see electricity global annual mean concentration of CO2 (ppm) 19 global average long-term concentration of CO2 (ppm) 20 measuring 43–6 since 1990 1–14, 17–37 transport and see individual method of transport 2020, position in 36–7 UN treaties and 38–57 unilateralism and 58–80 see also unilateralism carbon offsetting xiii–xiv, 4, 5, 12, 34, 45, 72, 74, 79, 94–6, 97, 105, 143–59, 192, 201, 203, 207, 214, 222, 223, 234 for companies 148–50 for countries 151–5 for individuals 155–7 markets 71–2, 110–13, 117, 144, 157–9, 208 travel and 156, 201–3 see also sequestration carbon permits 71–2, 79, 110–13, 117, 144, 208 carbon price/tax xii, xiii, xv, 8, 11, 12, 13, 26, 60, 61, 71, 72, 77, 79, 80, 84, 85–6, 102–3, 105, 106–24, 134, 143, 146, 147, 150, 151–4, 157, 159, 192, 197, 198, 199, 203, 227–30, 232, 234 agriculture and 167, 168, 169–70, 171, 173, 180 domain of the tax/carbon border adjustment xii, 11, 13, 60, 80, 115–20, 121, 124, 192, 194–6, 197, 204, 227 electric pollution and 216–18 ethics of 107–10 floor price 115, 117, 208 for imports 11, 13 prices or quantities/EU ETS versus carbon taxes 110–13 setting 113–15 transport and 192–9 what to do with the money 121–4 where to levy the tax 119–20 who fixes the price 120–1 carbon sinks 2, 5, 166, 169, 203 carboniferous age 34 cars 1, 3, 4, 7, 20, 22, 36, 44, 70, 73, 114, 129, 181, 182, 183, 184–5, 190, 191, 193, 196, 197, 198, 199 see also electric vehicles cartels 39, 40, 43, 45, 46, 47, 56 cattle farming 35, 36, 95, 150, 166, 167, 173, 177, 198 Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) 102, 139, 218 cement 6, 7, 26, 29, 34, 87, 117, 171 charging networks, electric vehicle 91, 129–30, 141–2, 184, 185–90, 199, 200, 202, 219 Chernobyl 78 China xi, xv, 1–2, 5, 8, 18, 42, 46, 47, 48, 64, 66, 74, 101, 180, 229 Belt and Road Initiative 28, 45 coal use 1–2, 8, 23–4, 24, 28, 31, 38, 117, 154, 206, 208 Communist Party 2, 27, 42, 46 demand for fossil fuels/carbon emissions 1–2, 8, 18, 20, 22, 23–4, 24, 25, 27–31, 36, 38, 51, 73, 117, 154, 206, 208 export market x–xi, 5, 9, 64, 66, 117, 155, 194 fertiliser use 35 GDP xv, 27, 29 nationalism and 42 petrochemical demand 22 renewables companies 9, 32, 73, 74, 77, 79 Tiananmen Square 42 unilateralism and 58, 59 UN treaties and 46, 47, 48, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59 US trade war 56, 118 Churchill, Winston 183 citizen assemblies 99–101 climate change: carbon emissions and see carbon emissions 1.5° target 38, 57 2° target 1, 10, 22–3, 28, 30, 38, 39, 45, 47, 54, 55, 57, 108, 122, 155, 206 see also individual area of climate change Climate Change Act (2008) 66, 74–7 Clinton, Bill 40, 48 Club of Rome 98 coal 1–2, 5, 8, 13, 20, 23–5, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 38, 50, 52, 53, 60–1, 67, 72, 77, 78–9, 101, 109, 112, 116, 117, 119, 134, 136, 145, 147, 148, 151, 154, 155, 182, 183, 194, 196, 206–9, 210, 212, 214, 216, 217, 218, 229, 230 coastal marshes 146, 159 colonialism 45 Committee on Climate Change (CCC), UK x–xi, 7, 74–5, 120, 164, 166, 169, 217, 235 ‘Net Zero: The UK’s Contribution to Stopping Global Warming’ report x–xi conference/video calls 6, 129, 156, 202, 205 Conference of the Parties (COP) xii, 10, 48, 50, 53–4, 55, 59, 205 congestion charges 198 Copenhagen Accord 48, 53–4, 59 Coronavirus see Covid-19 cost-benefit analysis (CBA) 71, 108, 110, 114, 138 cost of living 116 Covid-19 x, xi–xii, 1, 3, 6, 9, 18, 19, 22, 25, 27, 30, 37, 44, 46, 50, 57, 65, 69, 80, 89, 93, 129, 135, 148, 171, 201, 202, 204, 232 CRISPR 176 crop yields 172, 177 dams 2, 36, 52–3, 179 DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) 100 deforestation 2, 5, 34, 35, 36, 38, 43, 44, 47, 55, 87, 95, 145, 146, 149–50, 155, 172–3, 179, 197–8, 229 Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) 170 deindustrialisation x, 29, 46, 52, 54, 59, 72–4, 218 Deng Xiaoping 27 Denmark 69–70, 136–7 desalination 135–6, 179 diesel 4, 20–1, 70, 76, 86, 109, 119, 121, 129, 132, 164, 165, 166, 174, 175, 178, 179, 181, 182, 185, 186, 191, 192, 196–7, 208, 217, 230 ‘dieselgate’ scandal 196–7 digitalisation 1, 8, 11, 13, 33, 92, 117, 136, 174, 175, 180, 206, 211, 215, 221, 228–9, 231 DONG 69 Drax 147, 151, 154, 218 economy, net zero 10–12, 81–159 delivering a 96–103 intergenerational equity and 96–7 markets and 103–5 net environmental gain see net environmental gain political ideologies and 98–101 polluter-pays principle see polluter-pays principle public goods, provision of see public goods, provision of technological change and 98 EDF 139, 218 Ehrlich, Paul 98 electricity 1–2, 4, 6, 11, 12, 13, 23, 31, 32, 49, 53, 61, 65, 66, 68, 70, 73, 77, 78, 79, 91, 92, 101, 102, 109, 117, 125, 127, 128, 129–30, 131–2, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 149, 158, 166, 168, 174, 178, 180, 182, 183, 228, 229, 231, 232, 234, 235 coal, getting out of 206–7 electric pollution and the carbon price 216–18 electric vehicles 4, 6, 13, 20, 23, 49, 61, 91, 92, 94, 121, 125, 128, 129–30, 131–2, 134, 141, 183–92, 193, 194, 197, 200, 201, 202, 206, 219, 228 equivalent firm power auctions and system operators 210–16 future of 206–25 gas, how to get out of 207–9 infrastructure, electric 185–90, 218–20 low-carbon options post-coal and gas 209–10 net gain and our consumption 222–5 R&D and next-generation renewables 220–2 renewable see renewables Energy Market Reform (EMR) 219 equivalent firm power (EFP) 212–16, 217, 220 ethanol 35, 71, 95, 197 eucalyptus trees xiv, 152 European Commission 60, 71, 72, 112 European Union (EU) xiv, 2, 7, 8, 9, 37, 42, 44, 46, 47, 117, 137, 165, 166, 197; baseline of 1990 and 51–2 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 76, 165 competition regime and customs union 56 deindustrialisation and 46, 52, 54, 59, 72–4 directives for 2030 66 Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) 71–2, 73, 79, 110–13, 117, 144, 208 importing carbon emissions 59 Internal Energy Market (IEM) 68, 71 Kyoto and 9, 51, 59, 66–7 Mercosur Agreement 44, 95 net zero target for 2050 66, 115, 143, 155, 167, 180 Paris and 54 Renewable Energy Directive 68–71, 73, 109 2020 targets signed into law 66 2020–20–20 targets 67, 69, 74 unilateralism and 59, 66–71, 80 Eurostar 133 externalities 104, 170, 180, 196 Extinction Rebellion 6 farmers 14, 26, 35, 36, 43, 71, 76, 86, 95, 102, 109, 110, 146–7, 164, 165, 166, 169, 170, 174, 175, 196, 197, 198 fertiliser 4, 6, 7, 26, 29, 35, 61, 73, 86, 87, 116, 117, 119, 163, 165, 169, 174, 175, 178, 179, 191, 194, 197 fibre/broadband networks 6, 11, 90, 92, 125, 126, 127–8, 130–1, 132–3, 135, 140–1, 201, 202, 205, 211, 214, 231, 232 financial crisis (2007/8) 1, 19, 69 first-mover advantage 75 First Utility 199 flooding 13, 77, 149, 152, 153, 159, 170, 233 food miles 167 food security 170–1 food waste 178, 180, 231 Forestry Commission xiv Formula One 186, 196 fossil fuels, golden age of 20–5 see also individual fossil fuel France 46, 47, 52, 56, 73, 78, 101, 113, 130, 136, 138 free-rider problem 39–40, 43, 62–4, 106, 119 fuel duty 121, 195–6 fuel efficiency 197 fuel prices 26, 112–13, 209 fuel use declaration 195 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (2011) 52, 78 Fukuyama, Francis: The End of History and the Last Man 40–1 gardens 6, 43, 143, 156 gas, natural ix, 2, 5, 8, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 31, 32, 36, 50, 52, 68, 69, 79, 102, 109, 117, 119, 129, 136, 137, 146, 147–8, 149, 183, 190, 193, 194, 207–9, 210, 211, 214, 216–17 G8 47 gene editing 172, 176, 231 general election (2019) 121 genetics 98, 172, 174–6, 231 geoengineering 177 geothermal power 137, 178 Germany 9, 30, 47, 52, 59, 60, 62, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 77–80, 83, 91, 101, 112, 136, 137, 138, 144, 206, 208, 209 Energiewende (planned transition to a low-carbon, nuclear-free economy) 59, 69, 77–80, 112, 144, 208 Gilets Jaunes 101, 113 GMOs (genetically modified organisms) 176, 177 Great Northern Forest, Britain 151 Green and Prosperous Land (Helm) xiii, xiv, 165, 169, 234 greenbelt 173 greenhouse effect 17 green new deal 90, 102, 234 green parties/green votes 69, 77, 78 green QE (quantitative easing) 102–3 green walls 153, 231 greenwash 156 gross domestic product (GDP) xii, xv, 1, 25, 27, 29, 41, 57, 59, 73, 76, 83, 93, 98, 103, 133, 165, 207, 227, 229, 233 growth nodes 133 G7 47 G20 47 Haber-Bosch process 35, 163 Hamilton, Lewis 186 ‘hands-free’ fields 175 Harry, Prince 6 Heathrow 133, 134 hedgerow 76, 166, 167, 172 Helm Review (‘The Cost of Energy Review’) (2017) ix, 120, 141, 200, 210, 212, 215, 217, 220, 238 herbicide 163 home insulation 102 House of Lords 170 housing 101, 223–4 HS2 92, 125, 132–4, 138, 202 Hume, David 49 hydrogen 13, 49, 92, 125, 128, 135, 137, 183, 184, 190–2, 199, 200, 204, 206, 213, 228 hydro power 31, 35, 36, 50, 52–3, 70, 136, 137, 191 Iceland 137, 178 imports x–xi, xiii, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 62, 68, 70, 117–18, 155, 167, 178, 173, 180, 196, 227 income effect 72, 111 income tax 121, 122, 232 India xiv, xv, 25, 30, 31, 38, 43, 44, 47, 48, 51, 54, 55, 57, 154, 229 individuals, net zero for 155–7 Indonesia 2, 35 indoor farming 87–8, 177–8, 180, 213 indoor pollutants 223, 232 Industrial Revolution 1, 18, 19, 25, 47, 116, 145 INEOS Grangemouth petrochemical plant xi information and communications technology (ICT) 117, 202, 231 infrastructures, low-carbon xiii, xiv, 11–12, 14, 28, 60, 62, 65, 66, 90, 91–4, 96, 105, 109, 123, 125–42, 143, 147, 151, 154, 159, 171, 184, 186, 187, 190, 199–200, 214, 218–20, 228, 230, 231–2, 234–5 centrality of infrastructure networks 128–30 electric 125–41, 218–20 making it happen 141–2 net zero national infrastructure plan 130–6 private markets and 125–8, 141–2 regional and global infrastructure plan 136–7 state intervention and 126, 127–8, 141–2 system operators and implementing the plans 138–41 inheritance tax 76, 165 insects 164, 177, 231 insulation 102, 224 Integrated Assessment Models 114 intellectual property (IP) 75 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 17–18, 47, 55, 57, 108, 172 internal combustion engine 13, 22, 181–2, 183, 184, 200, 221, 228 Internal Energy Market (IEM) 68, 71, 138 International Energy Agency (IEA) 25, 207 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 51 internet banking 131, 213 internet-of-things 128, 175 Iran 27, 42, 113, 137 Iraq 56, 192 Ireland 43, 157 Italy 137, 182 Japan 27, 28, 30, 52, 73, 78, 101, 185 Jevons Paradox 224 Johnson, Boris 89–90 Kant, Immanuel 104 Keynes, John Maynard 89, 102, 103, 105 Kyoto Protocol (1997) xii, 2, 7, 9, 13, 17–18, 37, 38, 39, 40–1, 47–8, 49, 51, 52–3, 59, 66–7, 119 laissez-faire 104, 138, 188 land use 35, 61, 95, 172, 237 LED (light-emitting diode) lighting 87, 178, 179, 180, 213 liquefied natural gas (LNG) 136, 183 lithium-ion battery 185 lobbying 10, 14, 33, 69, 71, 109, 110, 111–12, 115, 121, 157, 169, 170, 187, 197, 209, 223, 227, 228 location-specific taxes 194 maize 35, 165, 197 Malaysia 2, 229 Malthus, Thomas 98 Mao, Chairman 27, 42 meat xi, 65, 164, 177, 180, 232 Mekong River 2, 28, 179, 229 Mercosur Agreement 44, 95 Merkel, Angela 78 methane 4, 23, 84, 177, 178, 179, 216 microplastics 22 miracle solution 49–50, 55, 209 mobile phone 5, 125, 185 National Farmers’ Union (NFU) 110, 164, 165, 169, 170, 171 National Grid 139, 141, 189, 200, 211, 214, 219 nationalisations 101–2, 126–7 nationalism 41, 43, 55, 56, 138 nationally determined contributions (NDCs) 54–5 natural capital xiii, 14, 33–6, 51, 85, 86, 88, 90, 94, 97, 154, 158, 168, 171, 173–4, 236 Nature Fund 123, 169, 234 net environmental gain principle xiii, xiv, 10, 12, 62, 84, 94–6, 105, 143–59, 169, 172–4, 192, 201–3, 222–5 agriculture and 169, 172–4 carbon offsetting and see carbon offsetting electricity and 222–5 principle of 94–6, 143–4 sequestration and see sequestration transport and 192, 201–3 Netherlands 138 Network Rail 214 net zero agriculture and see agriculture defined x–xv, 3–14 economy 10–12, 81–159 see also economy, net zero electricity and see electricity transport and see individual method of transport 2025 or 2030 target 89 2050 target x, xi, 5, 59, 66, 74, 75, 115, 120, 135, 143, 155, 167, 169, 180, 184, 216, 217, 222, 226, 230, 231, 232 unilateralism and see unilateralism NHS 65 non-excludable 91, 93, 126, 170 non-rivalry 91, 93, 126, 170 North Korea 42 North Sea oil/gas 9, 40, 75, 97, 102, 137, 139, 147, 148, 193 Norway 130, 137, 191 nuclear power 5, 9, 12, 18, 23, 52, 60, 73, 77–9, 109, 125, 128, 129, 136, 140, 178, 194, 199, 206, 207, 208, 209–10, 212, 214, 216, 218, 219, 222, 228 Obama, Barack 48, 53, 54, 59 oceans 2, 14, 22, 33, 85, 86, 88, 148, 163, 231 offsetting see carbon offsetting offshore wind power 31, 69, 75–6, 208, 212, 219, 221 Ofgem 220 oil ix, 2, 20, 22–3, 25, 26, 27, 31, 32, 33, 36, 39, 40, 50, 67, 69, 86, 97, 117, 119, 129, 136, 137, 146, 147, 148–9, 150–1, 152, 181–3, 184, 185, 187, 189, 190, 192–4, 196, 197, 199, 206, 209, 210, 216–17, 229 OPEC 39, 40, 193 Orbán, Viktor 41, 42 organic food 61, 87, 178 Ørsted 70 palm oil 2, 5, 6, 35, 36, 66, 71, 167, 173, 197–8, 230 pandemic see Covid-19 Paris Climate Change Agreement (2015) xii, 2, 10, 13, 18, 30, 37, 38, 39, 48, 49, 54–5, 56, 57, 58, 66, 80, 105, 106, 118, 119, 227 peat bogs xiv, 2, 13, 14, 33, 35, 36, 43, 109, 146, 169, 179 pesticides 4, 26, 61, 163, 165, 169, 174, 178, 231 petrochemicals xi, 7, 8, 20, 22–3, 29, 73, 80, 86, 117, 166, 182 petrol 4, 86, 119, 121, 129, 185, 186, 187, 191, 192, 199 photosynthesis 34, 197 plastics 1, 22, 28, 35, 43, 66, 86, 87, 119, 143, 166, 184, 231 polluter-pays principle xiii, xv, 84–90 agriculture and 76, 168–70, 172, 173 carbon price and see carbon price/tax generalised across all sources of pollution 86 identifying polluters that should pay 86 importance of 10–11, 13, 61, 62, 65 intergenerational balance and 96–7 net environmental gain and 94 sequestration and see sequestration, carbon sustainable economy and 96–7, 105, 106 transport and 192–5, 198–9 see also individual type of pollution population growth 93, 97, 177, 178, 179, 232 privatisation 127, 140, 218–19, 220 property developers 94 public goods, provision of xiii, 10, 11–12, 62, 75, 84, 90–4, 96, 104, 105, 109, 122, 123, 126, 128, 141, 147, 151, 153, 159, 164, 168, 173–4, 180, 192, 199–200, 202, 218, 229, 230 agricultural 170–4, 180 low-carbon infrastructures see infrastructures, low-carbon research and development (R&D) see research and development (R&D) Putin, Vladimir 27, 41, 42, 89 railways 11, 13, 13, 87, 91, 92, 94, 125, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132–3, 138, 139, 156, 182, 183, 187, 202, 212, 214, 232 rainforest 2, 5, 34, 35, 36, 38, 44, 47, 55, 87, 95, 145, 149, 155, 173, 179–80, 197, 229 rationalism 40–1 Reagan, Ronald 103 red diesel 76, 109, 164, 165, 196 regulated asset base (RAB) 127, 141, 215, 220 remote working 128, 156, 201–2, 205 renewables ix, 6, 8, 9–10, 18, 19, 21, 26, 31–5, 36, 49, 50, 55, 61, 67, 72, 77, 79, 85, 86, 109, 110, 112, 123, 125, 128, 131, 135, 138, 140, 144, 149, 178, 188, 191, 194, 197, 199, 207, 209–10, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219, 220–2, 224, 228 Chinese domination of market 9, 32, 73, 74, 77, 79 cost-competitiveness of 9–10, 49, 51, 61, 68 failure of, 1990-now 19, 31–3, 36 modern global renewable energy consumption measured in TWh per year 32 miracle solution and 49–51 Renewable Energy Directive 68–71, 73, 109 subsidies ix, 9, 10, 50, 68–9, 71, 79, 80 see also individual renewable energy source Renewables UK 110 research and development (R&D) xiv, 12, 13, 14, 62, 65, 66, 90, 93–4, 104, 109, 123, 165, 172, 192, 200, 218, 220–2, 223, 228, 234 reshoring businesses 8, 204 rivers 2, 22, 28, 86, 128, 152, 165, 169, 179, 214, 230 roads 11, 28, 45, 91, 92, 125, 129, 131–2, 140, 165, 182, 189, 194, 198, 202, 232 robotics 32, 175, 204, 206, 231 Rosneft 26 Royal Navy 183 Russia 26, 27, 30, 40, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 52, 55, 56, 192, 193 RWE 139, 218 Ryanair 156–7 rye grass 35 salmon 169, 177 Saudi Arabia 26, 33, 40, 42, 50, 137, 192, 193 Saudi Aramco 26, 50 seashells 34 sequestration, carbon xi, xiv, 12, 61, 66, 85, 90, 95, 143–59, 228, 229, 231, 232 agriculture and 12, 163, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 176–7, 179, 180 baseline definition and 146–7 biofuels and 35, 146, 217 carbon capture and storage (CCS) xiv, 12, 75–6, 95, 109, 146, 147–8, 149, 154, 159, 203–4, 207, 209, 222, 223 companies, net zero for 148–51 countries, offsetting for 151–5 electricity and 222, 223 gas and 207 individuals, net zero for xi, xiv, 155–7 markets, offsetting 157–9 natural capital destruction and 2, 19, 33–6, 44, 45, 51 natural sequestration xi, xiii, 2, 7, 12, 14, 33–6, 37, 45, 52, 66, 85, 90, 94–6, 105, 143–59, 163, 168, 171, 173, 176–7, 179, 180, 203, 206, 207, 222, 223 net gain principle and 143–4, 146, 149–50 offsetting principle and 143–5 peat bogs and see peat bogs principle of xi, xiii, 2, 7, 12–13 soils and see soils transport and 185, 190, 203 tree planting and see trees, planting/sequestration and types of 145–8 wetlands/coastal marshes and 146, 159, 233 shale gas 8, 208 Shell 27, 149, 199 shipping 8, 13, 22, 28, 36, 49, 114, 125, 137, 181, 182–3, 191, 194–5, 203–5, 217 Siberia 2, 46 smart appliances 128, 129, 132 smart charging 11, 13, 128, 129, 130, 139, 214, 219 soils xiii, 2, 5, 7, 12, 14, 33, 35, 36, 43, 55, 76, 109, 146, 149, 152, 156, 159, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171, 172, 175, 179, 203, 228 solar panels/solar photovoltaics (PV) 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, 21, 31, 32, 33, 49, 53, 68, 69, 71, 74, 79, 87, 91, 135, 136, 137, 178, 179, 188, 204, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213, 214, 216, 217, 221, 222, 223, 224–5 Sony 185 Soviet Union 18, 40, 52, 67–8, 89 soya 95 Spain 69, 130, 137 sport utility vehicles (SUVs) 106, 121, 192 spruce xiv, 152, 170 standard of living xv, 1, 5, 8, 10, 11, 14, 229, 233 staycations 201 steel x–xi, 6, 7, 8, 26, 28, 29, 53, 66, 73, 80, 87, 116, 117, 118, 119, 171, 184, 194–5 Stern, Nicholas: The Economics of Climate Change 41, 63 subsidies ix, 9, 10, 14, 32, 50, 51, 52, 53, 69, 71, 76, 79, 80, 89, 102, 109, 110, 113, 116, 123, 140, 154, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 172, 180, 193, 196, 198, 209, 215, 221, 222, 228, 230 sugar cane 35, 71, 95, 197, 198 sulphur pollution 22, 25, 28, 78, 191, 194, 197, 230 sustainable economic growth xv, 10, 12, 14, 61, 83, 92, 94, 97, 98, 105, 227, 233 Taiwan 42 taxation xii, 11, 62, 71, 72, 76, 80, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 97, 101, 102, 103, 106–24, 126, 127, 130, 133, 147, 150, 151–2, 153–4, 157, 159, 165, 169, 170, 192–6, 197, 198, 199, 203, 232, 234 technological change 98, 127, 141, 174–5, 221 Thatcher, Margaret 17 Thompson, Emma 6 3D printing 175, 204 Thunberg, Greta 6, 205 tidal shocks 159 top-down treaty frameworks 13, 38–57, 80, 110, 119 tourism/holidays 6, 22, 36, 88, 94, 107, 114, 128, 156, 201, 204–5 transport, reinventing 181–205 aviation 195, 201, 203–5 see also air transport batteries and charging networks 185–90 biofuels 196–8 electric alternative 183–5 hydrogen and fuel cells 190–2 innovation, R&D and new infrastructures 199–200 internal combustion engine 181–2 net gain and offsets (reducing travel versus buying out your pollution) 201–3 oil 183–4 polluter pays/carbon tax 192–6 shipping 203–5 urban regulation and planning 198–9 vehicle standards 196–8 see also individual type of transport Treasury, UK 120–2 trees, planting/sequestration and xi, xiii, xiv, 2, 7, 13, 14, 33, 34, 45, 76, 85, 94–6, 146, 148, 149–51, 152–3, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 168, 169, 172, 179, 203, 231 trophy project syndrome 133 Trump, Donald 2, 8, 41, 42, 48, 89, 99, 103, 121 25 Year Environment Plan xiii, 153, 170, 179–80 UK 47, 69 agriculture and 164, 166, 167, 173 carbon emissions (2015) 30 carbon price and 115, 120 Climate Change Act (2008) 66, 74–7 coal, phasing out of 24–5, 60–1, 77, 208 Committee on Climate Change (CCC) x–xi, 7, 74–6, 120, 164, 166, 169, 217, 235 deindustrialisation and 72–4 80 per cent carbon reduction target by 2050 74 electricity and 206, 208, 218, 219, 224 Helm Review (‘The Cost of Energy Review’) (2017) ix, 120, 141, 200, 210, 212, 215, 217, 220, 238 infrastructure 125, 132–3, 134, 137, 139–40 net zero passed into law (2019) 66 sequestration and 145, 150, 153, 154, 155, 156 transport and 195–6, 197, 198 unilateralism and 58–9, 60–1, 65, 66, 69, 72–7, 80 unilateralism xi, 8, 10, 11, 25, 58–80, 83, 105, 106, 119, 125, 143, 144, 155, 164, 167, 197, 203, 227 in Europe 66–80 incentive problem and 58–60 morality and 62–6 no regrets exemplars and/showcase examples of how decarbonisation can be achieved 60–2 place for 80 way forward and 80, 83 United Nations xi, xii, 6, 10, 17, 37, 38, 118 carbon cartel, ambition to create a 39–40, 43, 45, 46–7, 56 climate treaty processes xi, 6, 10, 13, 17–18, 36, 37, 38–57, 59, 80, 110, 118, 119, 204–5 see also individual treaty name Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 17–18, 36, 38, 59 miracle solution and 50–1 origins and philosophy of 41 Security Council 46, 47, 57 United States 8, 74, 139, 206 agriculture in 175, 176, 197 carbon emissions 8, 29, 30 China and 27–8, 42, 118 coal and 2, 24, 28, 29, 208 economic imperialism 45 energy independence 50 gas and 8, 20, 23, 24, 29, 50, 208 oil production 40, 50, 193 pollution since 1990 29 unilateralism and 58, 59, 74 UN climate treaty process and 38, 40–1, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 53, 54, 56 universal service obligations (USOs) 92, 126, 131, 202 utilitarianism 41, 63–4, 108, 110 VAT 117, 119–20, 121, 122, 232 Vesta 69 Volkswagen 196–7 water companies 76, 214, 230 water pollution/quality xiv, 12, 22, 61, 76, 152, 153, 165, 169, 170, 171, 172, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180, 232 Wen Jiabao 53, 59 wetlands 159, 233 wildflower meadow 164, 184 wind power 5, 9, 12, 21, 31, 32, 33, 49, 53, 68, 69–70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 91, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 178, 188, 191, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214–15, 216, 217, 219, 221, 222 wood pellets 67, 217, 230 Woodland Trust 156, 158 World Bank 51 World Trade Organization (WTO) 52, 56, 118 World War I 183 World War II (1939–45) 78, 90, 92, 101, 106, 171 Xi Jinping 27, 41, 42 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS So much is now discussed, written and published about climate change that it is impossible to keep track of all the ideas and conversations that have influenced my understanding of the subject.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

Jevons concluded, in italics, “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”36 What was true for each individual steam engine was not true for the whole of England. This insight is known as Jevon's Paradox: make something more efficient, and people will use more, not less of it. Jevons Paradox is the reason why expanding freeways in Los Angeles, Houston, and other concrete jungles only leads to more cars, less carpooling, and worse traffic. When people can drive more easily, they can live further away. Suddenly, much larger, more affordable homes are in commuting distance from cities.

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Heinz Company, 3G/Buffett purchase, 3–4 Hoffer, ERic, 230 Horizontal shareholding, 209 disallowance, 246–247 problems, 200 Hospitals, mergers (impact), 43, 129 Housing costs, increase, 114 Hull, Cordell, 150 Hurricane Maria, impact, 60 Huxley, Aldous, 113 I IG Farben dissolution, 148 economic power, 147 “marriage,” 149 Immelt, Jeffrey, 211 Income distribution, union membership (contrast), 79f inequality (United States), 214f, 215–217 Income inequality, 36 increase, 37–40 Industry consolidation, timeline, 162f Inequality causes, 217 concentrated industries, impact, 225–226 income inequality, 37–40, 214f, 225f increase (Gini coefficients), 220f Information superhighway, Google dominance, 108 Initial public offerings (IPOs), 107 collapse, 11f Innovation, monopoly power deterrence, 54 Innovator's Dilemma, The, (Christensen), 55 Instagram, Facebook acquisition, 91 Instant Articles (Facebook), 102 Intaler, market dominance, 130 Intellectual property exploitation, 173 protection, 69–70 Intel, market domination, 121 Interest rates, increase, 64 Internal equity, 206 International Monetary Fund (IMF), developed country analysis, 216 Internet giants, avoidance, 247–248 platforms, common carriage rules (creation), 245 Intuit, market dominance, 125–126 Investment gap, 57–58 profitability, contrast, 57f reduction, 56–57 Invisible hand (Smith), 38 iPhone, Silicon Valley metaphor, 114 Ireland-Smith, Renee, 61 Irish Potato Famine, 59 IRS Restructuring and Reform Act, 126 J Jackson, Thomas Penfield, 94 Jefferson, Thomas, 50 Jeffreys, Diarmuid, 147 Jelinek, Craig, 77 Jevons' Paradox, 18 Jevons, William Stanley, 18 Job Creation and Destruction (Haltiwanger), 50 Jobs creation, 50, 74–75 reduction, 45–47 Jobs, Steve, 67–68 John D. Rockefeller (Nevins), 156 Josephson, Matthew, 139 JPMorgan Chase, 182 market dominance, 127 Juvenal, 87 K Kalecki, Michał, 6 Katz, Lawrence, 74 Keillor, Garrison, 17, 206 Keynes, John Maynard, 16–17, 154 Khan, Lina, 39, 103–104, 225 Kidney dialysis, duopolies, 124 Kill zone, 109 King Kong, monopolies (comparison), 35 King, Mervyn, 18 Knepper, Lisa, 83 Knoer, Scott, 170 Kodak, digital photography, 55 Kosnett, Michael, 169 Koss Corp., Chapter 11 reorganization, 170 Kraft Foods, H.J.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

The issue remains controversial, especially in view of the poor correlation between price and abundance, but recent evidence of increasing metal prices and price volatilities, decreasing ore quality, and a tripling of the resources and materials required to generate a given quantity of some ores compared to a century ago suggests that Ehrlich’s view might be sound.60 Besides, the problem modern civilisation faces isn’t just finding substitutes for a few resource inputs but for many, at a time when demand is growing and pollution sinks are shrinking. And consider rebound effects or the Jevons paradox: increased efficiency in resource use, which potentially delays its exhaustion, is counterbalanced by greater usage due to lowered price. (Evidence in this area is complex, but often suggests strong rebounds.61) So, to put it mildly, Simon’s case against resource scarcity seems unproven. Others put the matter less mildly, including chemical engineer Harald Sverdrup and his colleagues: Several metals, elements and energy resources are about to run into scarcity within the next decades, and most elements within some centuries.… [T]his scarcity will lead to ‘peak wealth,’ ‘peak population,’ ‘peak costs,’ ‘peak junk,’ ‘peak problems’ and possibly ‘peak civilization,’ unless some urgent measures are systematically taken throughout the world.… The future resource supply is thus unsustainable as long as resource use continues as today.… [G]overnments must take this issue seriously and immediately start preparing for legislations that can close material cycles, optimize energy use and minimize all types of irreversible material losses as soon as possible.62 Yet governments are stuck with a single model of development that makes it hard for them to do so.

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In other words, higher-yielding land-sparing strategies might actually point to small-scale agriculture. Second, the land-sparing framework typically assumes that total production is fixed, so if per acre yields increase then land-take is bound to fall. This is rarely what happens in practice. There can be a Jevons paradox in land use, as with any kind of consumption. For example, improved yields in staple crops for which demand is relatively fixed can make land available for cash crops like biofuels, coffee, and meat for which demand is elastic, prompting increased land-take. Generally, greater market linkage can increase land-take, even when per acre yields are higher.

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Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13809. Ploeg, Jan Douwe van der. 2008. The New Peasantries: Struggles for Autonomy and Sustainability in an Era of Empire and Globalization. London: Earthscan. _______. 2013. Peasants and the Art of Farming: A Chayanovian Manifesto. Halifax: Fernwood. Polimeni, John, et al. 2008. The Jevons Paradox and the Myth of Resource Efficiency Improvements. London: Routledge. Ponisio, Lauren, et al. 2014. ‘Diversification Practices Reduce Organic to Conventional Yield Gap,’ Proceedings of the Royal Society B 282:20141396. Poore, J., and T. Nemecek. 2018. ‘Reducing Food’s Environmental Impacts Through Producers and Consumers,’ Science 360(6392): 987–92.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Unfortunately, the complete mismatch of where global capitalism’s trillions of investable wealth ends up (unproductive but lucrative housing markets, risky third-world corporate debt, safe first-world public debt, or simply stashed away in tropical island tax havens) and where it should (clean energy, green infrastructure, social investments) is possibly the most serious indication of how modern capitalism is unfit for the challenge of climate change, or any challenge that requires prioritizing environmental and social needs rather than treating them as consequential to interest rates being in equilibrium with the profit motive of each individual firm. But even in the event that the invisible hand guided private capital towards climate mitigating investment, this comes up against yet another well-known quandary in environmental economics: the Jevons Paradox. Named after a mid-nineteenth-century English economist, William Stanley Jevons, the paradox is one that appears to be endemic to resource markets; the tendency for efficiency gains in any industry to result in increased demand. This eventually leads to greater rates of consumption which offset the initial efficiency gain.

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Jevons noticed this in the coal industry, which at the time was undergoing considerable technological change, but it has also been observed in most energy and transportation markets, among others.7 No better current example exists than the stratospheric rise in demand for air travel in recent decades that has completely swamped efficiency gains in aircraft (a fact that our environment-conscious but travel-obsessed society should take note of).8 The implications of the Jevons Paradox are significant, and go a long way towards explaining why technology alone is not the solution to the climate crisis. Demand matters. The spread of these technologies into developing countries also ends up with them becoming more energy intense than Western countries were at similar levels of development.

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., “The Global Saving Glut and the U.S. Current Account Deficit”, The Federal Reserve Board, 10 Mar. 2005, https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2005/200503102/default.htm 6 Most of Lawrence Summer’s writing on the topic can be accessed at: http://larrysummers.com/category/secular-stagnation/ 7 Alcott, B., “Jevons’ paradox”, Ecological Economics, 50(1), Jul. 2005, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2005.03.020 8 Peeters, P. et al., “Are technology myths stalling aviation climate policy?” Transportation Research Part D, 44, May 2016, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2016.02.004 9 “Millennium Development Goals Indicators”, United Nations, http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/SeriesDetail.aspx?

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence by Robert Bryce

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, congestion pricing, decarbonisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, financial independence, flex fuel, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Jevons paradox, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, low interest rates, Michael Shellenberger, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, price stability, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stewart Brand, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

After studying coal consumption patterns in Britain and assuming (wrongly) that his country’s coal deposits would soon be exhausted, Jevons concluded, “It is wholly a The Impossibility of Independence 143 confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuels is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”17 This observation has since come to be known as the Jevons paradox.18 In 2003, Vaclav Smil published a magnificent book, Energy at the Crossroads, that provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of the history of energy consumption, the problems in forecasting energy use, and the challenges facing any transition away from fossil fuels. When it comes to energy efficiency, Smil—like Huber, Mills, and Jevons—concluded that history is “replete with examples demonstrating that substantial gains in conversion (or material use) efficiencies stimulated increases of fuel and electricity (or additional material) use that were far higher than the savings brought by these innovations.”19 None of this is offered to imply that efficiency is bad.

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Available: http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/26/autos/hybrid_sales. 14. Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills, The Bottomless Well, 109. 15. Ibid., 111–112. 16. Vaclav Smil, Energy at the Crossroads, 167. 17. Ibid., 332. 18. For more on this topic, see Wikipedia. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Jevons_paradox. 344 Notes to Chapter 12 19. Smil, op. cit., 335. 20. Labonte and Makinen, op. cit. CHAPTER 12 1. Schmidt interview with the author, March 9, 2007, via telephone. 2. California Progress Report, “President Clinton: Why I Support Proposition 87 and Why the Oil Companies Are Wrong—The Complete Speech Delivered at UCLA,” October 14, 2006.

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See also Oil companies International Research Center for Energy and Economic Development, 23–24 Internet, and electricity consumption, 133–136 Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, 38 Iowa imperative, 156–158 Iran, 76 economic freedom in, 75 energy deals with, 247, 248–251 and energy imports, 8 influence of, 11 natural gas reserves in, 248 and 1953 coup, 97 nuclear development program in, 247, 251 oil exports in, 250 and oil price, 72–73 oil reserves in, 23 as terrorism sponsor, 60 U.S. attempts to isolate, 247–251 and U.S. oil imports, 55 See also OPEC Iran, shah of, 96–97, 105 Iran-Contra scandal, 120 Iranian revolution, 105 Iran-Iraq war, 23, 98–99 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, 251 Iraq, 21–22, 23–28, 51, 72 and al-Qaeda, 31, 57 black market in, 25, 26 civil war in, 26–27 and oil control, 26 oil exports in, 23, 98 oil infrastructure in, 24, 26 and oil price collapse, 77 and U.S. oil imports, 55 as U.S. colonial possession, 77 See also First Iraq War; Iran-Iraq war; Second Iraq War Ireland, 57, 225–226 Islam, and terrorism, 58 Islamic fundamentalism, and Saudi Arabia, 56 Islamic parties, 74 Islamic world engagement with, 266, 288 Index 385 oil price collapse in, and reform of, 71–76 Isolationism, 9, 288, 289 Israel, 57 and bin Laden, 29 and Hezbollah, 55–56 U.S. military aid to, 96 Israeli-Palestinian issue, and oil infrastructure attacks, 32 Italy, and Iran, 250 Kunstler, James Howard, 35–36 Kuwait, 23, 51, 99–100, 102–103 economic freedom in, 74–75 oil exports in, 73 and oil price collapse, 79 reform in, 73 as U.S. ally, 54 See also OPEC Kyoto Protocol, 126, 270–272. See also Carbon dioxide emissions Jack No. 2, 39–40, 282 Jacobson, Mark Z., 186–187 Japan, 19, 21, 290 and carbon dioxide emissions, 271–272 and Iran, 250 oil reserves in, 68 Jebel Ali port, 54 Jefferson, Thomas, 1 Jevons, William Stanley, 142–143 Jevons paradox, 143 Johnson, Stephen L., 184 Jubail, Saudi Arabia, 237–240 Labonte, Marc, 143 Lanchester, John, 42 LaSorda, Tom, 193 Latin America, 167–168 Lay, Ken, 162 Leahy, Patrick, 245 Lebanon, 56 Lesar, David, 245 Libby, I. Lewis “Scooter,” 117 Libya, 251 Lieber, James B., 151–152 The Limits of Growth (Club of Rome), 37 Lind, William S., 56–57 Lindbergh, Charles, 278 Liquified natural gas (LNG), 200–201 Little Big Inch pipeline, 90 Live Earth: The Concerts for a Climate in Crisis, 42 London bus bombings, 57–58 The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Kunstler), 35–36 López Obrador, Andrés Manuel, 78 Losman, Donald, 95 Love, John A., 95 Lovelock, James, 274 Lovins, Amory, 4, 138, 175 Luft, Gal, 28, 115, 119–120, 233 Kenedy Ranch, 228 Kennedy, Robert F., Jr., 227–228 Kennedy family, 227 Kermac 16, 39 Kerry, John, 176, 195 Khor al-Amaya, 30 Khosla, Vinod, 147, 168, 174 King, Gary, 244–245 King David Hotel bombing, 58–59 King Ranch, 228 Kissinger, Henry, 96 Klare, Michael, 34 Klein, Joel, 151 Koplow, Doug, 149 Kramer, Felix, 121 Kreider, Jan F., 166, 189–190 386 Index Lugar, Richard, 158, 159, 175 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inacio, 249–250 Maginot Line, 232 Makinen, Gail, 143 Maktoum, Mohammed bin Rashid al-, 73 Malaysia, 248 Mandela, Nelson, 59 Markey, Ed, 69, 70 Mauro, Garry, 103–104 Maxwell, Charley, 40–41 McCain, John, 5 and ethanol, 155–156 McFarlane, Robert C., 120 Media, and terrorism, 264 Mexico, 9, 53, 75 economic freedom in, 75 oil exports in, 78 and oil price collapse, 77–78 Microprocessors, 134, 135 fig. 6 Microsoft, 134 Middle East natural gas reserves in, 113 and oil price collapse, 79 refining capacity in, 81 refugee crisis in, 26–27 Mileage-based insurance policies, 276 Militarization of oil infrastructure, 33 of Persian Gulf, 96–100, 290 Mills, Mark, 133, 142 Mina al-Bakr, 30 Mineral imports, 16, 18, 293–297 Mineral rights, 75–76 Mining, 18 Montana, 65 Moore, Gordon, 44–45 Moore, Patrick, 274 Mortenson, Greg, 266 Mossadegh, Mohammad, 97 Motiva Enterprises, 61–62 MTBE (methyl tertiary-butyl ether), 181–182, 186 Mubarak, Hosni, 74 Mueller, John, 263–264 Muhanna, Ibrahim al-, 241–242 Mulally, Alan, 193 Muslim Brotherhood, 73, 74 Naimi, Ali al-, 50, 241 NASCAR Nation, 21 National Archives of Iraq, 24 National Commission on Energy Policy, 140 National debt, U.S., 289–290 National Iranian Gas Company, 247 National Iranian Oil Company, 247, 248 National Library of Iraq, 24 National Museum of Antiquities of Iraq, 24 National oil companies, 86–87, 105, 110, 113, 245.

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cakes and ale, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cryptocurrency, dark matter, decarbonisation, degrowth, distributed ledger, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, fiat currency, Food sovereignty, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, High speed trading, high-speed rail, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, land reform, liberation theology, liquidity trap, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, megastructure, Modern Monetary Theory, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rewilding, RFID, Robert Solow, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, synthetic biology, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, wage slave, Washington Consensus

Also, crucially, even though they were creating more energy than ever before, they were burning far less CO2 into the atmosphere, less per year than in any year since 1887. So Jevons Paradox appeared to be foxed at last; not in its central point, which stated that as more energy was created, more got used; but now that it was being generated cleanly, and for fewer people as the population began to drop, it didn’t matter how much of it was being used. Since there was a surplus at most points of supply, most of the time, and created cleanly, they had simply outrun Jevons Paradox. And where excess energy was being lost by lack of completely effective storage methods, people were finding more ways to use it while they had it: for desalination, or more direct air carbon capture, or seawater pumped overland into certain dry basins, and so on.

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Back home we found ourselves minor celebrities, and opportunities to tell our story would last forever. Some of us took that opportunity, others slipped back into comfortable anonymity. I myself decided to decompress in Tahiti. So, effect of this event on the real world: zero! So fuck you! 40 Jevons Paradox proposes that increases in efficiency in the use of a resource lead to an overall increase in the use of that resource, not a decrease. William Stanley Jevons, writing in 1865, was referring to the history of the use of coal; once the Watt engine was introduced, which greatly increased the efficiency of coal burning as energy creation, the use of coal grew far beyond the initial reduction in the amount needed for the activity that existed before the time of the improvement.

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Of course efficiency as a measure has been constructed to describe outcomes considered in advance to be good, so it’s almost a tautology, but the two can still be destranded, as they are not quite the same. Examination of the historical record, and simple exercises in reductio ad absurdum like Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” should make it obvious that efficiency can become a bad thing for humans. Jevons Paradox applies here too, but economics has normally not been flexible enough to take on this obvious truth, and it is very common to see writing in economics refer to efficiency as good by definition, and inefficient as simply a synonym for bad or poorly done. But the evidence shows that there is good efficiency and bad efficiency, good inefficiency and bad inefficiency.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

‘The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.’ Malthus was far from unique in such reasoning. William Jevons, an English economist writing in the 1860s, noted how more efficient steam engines counter-intuitively meant more coal was consumed rather than less – an observation since referred to as the ‘Jevons Paradox’. Between Malthus and Jevons the verdict appeared to be the same: humanity’s ingenuity, as vast as it is, can never hope to keep pace with its voracious appetites. Yet the story of agriculture over the second half of the twentieth century tells us otherwise. While feeding a world of 9 billion might seem impossible, especially so within the broader context of the five crises, the most important achievement of the last sixty years suggests it can be done.

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., 198 internal energy insulation, 113 International Astronautical Congress, 119 International Bank for Energy Prosperity, 222 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), 221 International Development Association (IDA), 221 International Energy Agency (IEA), 100–1, 103, 105 International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), 103–4 International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), 166 internationalism, 197–200 internet bandwidth, 45–6 Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), 119, 120 IPCC, 101 IRENA (International Renewable Energy Agency), 103–4 IRRI (International Rice Research Institute), 166 Ishee, David, 9, 153–4 ITS (Interplanetary Transport System), 119, 120 Jain, Naveen, 127–8 Jameson, Fredric, 17n Japanese Space Agency, 131 JD.com, 89 Jennings, Ken, 80, 81 Jevons, William, 164, 167 Jevons Paradox, 164 Just Foods, 174, 178 Kalanick, Travis, 84 Kalecki, Michał, 230, 231 Kasparov, Garry, 80 Kennedy, Robert, 233 Keynes, John Maynard, 51, 56–9, 243 ‘KIVA’ robot, 89 Kodak, 40–2 Kranzberg, Melvin ‘Six Laws of Technology’, 237 Kuiper belt, 130 Kurdi, Alan, 156–7 Kuznets, Simon, 233 labour, when capital becomes, 69–71 Labour Party, 229 Łaski, Kazimierz From Marx to the Market, 230–1 LEDs, 242 Lehman Brothers, 21 Leia, 4–5 Lendlease, 205 Leninism, 196 Leontief, Wassily, 75–6 Letter on the Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren, 56–7 Lewicki, Chris, 132 Lewis, Clive, 207 life expectancy, 139–40, 142, 166 lithium, 117, 118 livestock farming, 169–70 ‘lost decade’, 26 Luther, Martin, 240–1 luxury populism electoralism and society, 194–6 against elite technocracy, 185–8 FALC and, 192–4 against globalism, 197–200 green politics and red politics, 188–92 towards internationalism, 197–200 Machiavelli, Niccolò Discorsi, 95 Madrid Protocol, 136 Malthus, Thomas, 167 An Essay on the Principle of Population, 163–4 market capitalism about, 197–8 emergence of, 39–40 market socialism, autonomy of publicly owned firms under, 231 Mars, 120 Martinelli, Luke, 226 Marx, Karl on capitalism, 16, 34–6, 35, 51, 54–5, 128, 199 The Communist Manifesto, 51–2 compared to Wycliffe, 241 Grundrisse, 51–2, 56–7, 61–3 on information, 49 on mode of production, 195 on production, 60 on technology, 237 May, Theresa, 29, 141, 206 McAfee, Andrew, 93 McCauley, Raymond, 146 McDonnell, John, 207 meat cultured, 170–5 synthetic, 168–70 from vegetables, 175–7 medicine, automation in, 91 meganucleases, 150 Memphis Meats, 172, 173 Mendel, Gregor, 149 migration, globalism and, 197 milk, cellular agriculture and, 177–9 Millennium Project, 87–8 minerals, 117–18, 134–7.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

The initial effect of any widely adopted new technology that is more efficient at using a resource—say electricity—is to reduce the cost of that resource as demand falls. But by reducing the cost of a resource, we are spurred to consume more of it, often in other new applications for which it was previously too costly to use as an input. Urban planners have long been familiar with their own version of the rebound effect (or Jevons paradox as it is also known) in transportation planning. Building more roads never reduces traffic for long, but rather unleashes latent demand that was there all along. When congestion is reduced due to the new capacity, the opportunity cost of driving falls, spurring drivers who would never have ventured onto the previously clogged road to sally forth.

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Cities Can Prepare for Atomic War,” Life, December 18, 1950, 85. 73Light, From Warfare to Welfare, 164. 74Galison, “War Against the Center,” 14–26. 75World Energy Outlook 2011 (Paris: International Energy Agency, 2011). 76Realizing the Potential of Energy Efficiency: Targets, Policies, and Measures for G8 Countries (Washington, DC: United Nations Foundation, 2007), http://www.globalproblems-globalsolutions-files.org/unf_website/PDF/realizing_potential_energy_efficiency.pdf. 77Buno Berthon, “Smart Cities: Can They Work?,” The Guardian Sustainable Business Energy Efficiency Hub, blog, June 1, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/amsterdam-smart-cities-work. 78Blake Alcott, “Jevons’ Paradox,” Ecological Economics 45, no. 1 (2005): 9-21. 79Robert Cervero, The Transit Metropolis (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998), 169. 80Michele Dix, “The Central London Congestion Charging Scheme—From Conception to Implementation,” 2002, http://www.imprint-eu.org/public/Papers/imprint_Dix.pdf, 2. 81Robert J.

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., 205–6 indoor positioning systems, 272 Industrial Dynamics (Forrester), 77 industrialization, of cities in nineteenth century, 5 information technology, 192–93, 241, 280 history of urban relationship to, 4–14 as undermining need for cities, 6 In-Stat, 39 “instrumentation,” sensor grids in, 32 Intel, 131–32, 153 alliance with Microsoft of, 290 Intellec-8, 153 International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, on aging infrastructure, 38 International Energy Agency, 278 Internet: broadband vs. cable for, 2–3 “bufferbloat” problem in, 266 cafes for, 26 Cisco as leading supplier for, 44 cloud infrastructure for, 289, 294 dot-com bubble of, 121 DSL for, 2, 195 fiber-optic lines for, 2, 46, 171, 262, 287–89 hubs for, 260–61 human right as access to, 288 invention of, 107–11 “kill switch” of, 300 local area networks (LANs) for, 45 net neutrality for, 288 rapid expansion of, 6 social media for, 304 untethering from wire of, 49–56 of Victorian age, 44 voice calls in protocol of, 37 Internet of Things (big data), 3–4, 134–36, 139–41 Invisible Cities (Calvino), 305 iPhone, 6, 271 apps for, 200–201, 292 rapid spread of, 148 Iran, 266–67 Istanbul, 308 Italy, 61 Ito, Joi, 109 iTrans, 232 iTunes App Store, 148–49, 234 Ivrea, 137 Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) at, 137 Jabber, 293 Jacob, Nigel, 213–17, 224, 239, 242 Jacobs, Jane, 16, 97–98, 102–6, 234–35 Jacquard loom, 59 Jaguar, E-Type, 21 Jana, 183 Japan, 26, 262–63 Jevons paradox, 317 Jordan, Vincent, 197–98 Joroff, Michael, 25, 219–20, 305–6, 308 Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 78, 81 Jungle, The (Sinclair), 318 Jupiter Communications, 121 Kaczynski, Ted, 70 Kahn, Herman, 277 Kansas City, Mo., 36 Kaplan, Daniel, 225 Kargon, Robert, 96 Karnataka, India, corruption in, 12–13 Kasarda, John, 24 Katz, James, 56 Kaufman, Sarah, 159 Kenya, 179–80, 184–89 M-Pesa smart banking in, 179 Safaricom wireless carrier in, 179 Khanna, Parag, 224 Kirkpatrick, Robert, 181–84 Koolhaas, Rem, 112 Koonin, Steve, 314 Krugman, Paul, 74 Kundra, Vivek, 200, 204 Landau, Royston, 22 Langner, Ralph, 267 Lara, Marcos, 131 Lee, Douglass, 81–82, 88, 296–98 Lehrer, Jonah, 312 Leibowitz, Jon, 197, 287 Lerner, Sandy, 44 Levitas, Jake, 230 Levittown, N.Y., 231 LG, 23, 49 Light, Jennifer, 78–79 Lindsay, Greg, 24, 25, 28 Lindsay, John, 80, 207, 212 Linux, 241 Lippmann, Walter, on 1939 World’s Fair, 18 Living Cities, 206 Living Labs Global, 10, 244–45 Awards from, 245–46 Living PlanIT, 249, 289–90 load shedding, 39–41 load shifting, 39–41 Locke, Gary, 4 London, 94–95 congestion-pricing system in, 279–80 Crystal Palace in, 19–21, 23 first public electric streetlamps in, 35 growth of, 6 industrialization of, 5 Oyster card in, 316 Longmont, Colo., 197–98 Look Before We Leap, 197–98 “look smart,” 68 Löscher, Peter, 8, 38 Lynch, Kevin, 160 Macfarlane, W.

Oil Panic and the Global Crisis: Predictions and Myths by Steven M. Gorelick

California gold rush, carbon footprint, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jevons paradox, meta-analysis, North Sea oil, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, statistical model, stock buybacks, Thomas Malthus

“Comparison of Passenger Vehicle Fuel Economy and Greenhouse Gas Emission Standards Around the World”, Pew Center on Global Climate Change. Data courtesy of Jim Nader, Director, North American Business Development, CSM Worldwide, August, 2007. Foster, J. B. (2000). “Capitalism’s Environmental Crisis – Is Technology the Answer?” Monthly Review, 52(7). Sorrell, S. (2009). “Jevons’ Paradox revisited: The evidence for backfire from improved energy efficiency,” Energy Policy, 37(4), April 2009: 1456–69. The 27.5 mpg standard went into effect in 1985 but was reduced from 1986 to 1989 and reinstituted in 1990. Bezdek, R. H. and R. M. Wendling (2005). “Fuel Efficiency and the Economy,” American Scientist, 93(2): 132.

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King approach, 4–9, 61, 68–9 backdating system, 136 extensions to, 80–1 career, 4 global oil endowment estimates, 124 natural gas endowment estimate, 180 predictions global oil production, 8–9, 95–8 natural gas production, 95 US oil production, 6–8, 88–91 on soothsaying, 98 revised endowment estimates, 124 success, 11–12 Hubbert’s curve, 5–6, 73, 80, 90–2, 110–12 appeal, 10–11 contradiction to application, 120 Hughes, Howard, Senior, 223 Hurricane Katrina, 49, 218 hybrid electric vehicles, 215 hydraulic mining, 157 hydrocarbons, 17 IEA, 72, 163–4 impurities, 40 in-situ recovery, 170 India carbon dioxide emissions, 217 coal, 180–1, 217 industrial development, 74–5 oil consumption, 74–6, 147, 150–2 oil production, 75–6 oil-use intensity, 150–1 vehicle ownership, 204–6 Indonesia oil production, 66 OPEC membership, 23 palm oil, 212–13 political stability, 217 industrial development, oil consumption and, 74–6 Index inflation, 77–8 innovation, rate of, 222–3 International Energy Agency (IEA), 72, 163–4 International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook, 154 Iran discoveries, 138 oil exports, 64 OPEC membership, 23 political stability, 217 revolution, 115 Iran, Shah of, 64 Iran–Iraq war, 115 Iraq OPEC membership, 23 political stability, 217 wells, 96 iron, 101–2 Israel, 63, 113 oil shale, 172 Japan oil imports, 36 vehicle ownership, 205 jet fuel, 176 need for, 109–10 Jevons, William Stanley, 199 Jevons’ Paradox, 199 Jubilee field, 139 Jupiter field, 189 Kara Sea, 145 Kashagan field, 138 Kazakhstan, 126, 138 Kern River oil field, 166 kerogen, 170 kerosene, 19 Khusaniyan oil field, 25 Kirkuk oil field, 71 Kuwait, 23, 67 lag effect, 48 lead, 101–2, 106 235 leapfrogging, 108–9, 213–15 lease condensate, 27, 39 Leiby, Paul, 208 Libya OPEC membership, 23 political stability, 217 lifting (production) costs, 23, 42–3, 133–4, 142 light trucks, 200 “Limits to Growth” model, 59–61 liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), 27 lode deposits, 156 logistic curve, 5–6, 14–15, 90–1, 93–4 LPG, 27 lubricants, 17, 38, 40, 173, 174 lubrication oils, 19 Malthus, Thomas, 58–9, 82 Malthusian doctrine, 58–9 Manning, Van H., 62 mass balance, 10, 124, 221–2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 59, 215 McCabe, Peter, 118–21 mercury, 108–9 metals price trends, 103–7 production, 100–2 methane, 18 Mexico, oil reserves, 65, 144 Michigan Basin gas field, 140 Middle East conflicts, 63, 112–13, 115 Minerals Management Service, 26, 28 Montana, 176 myths, 87–181 National Energy Program, 64 national oil bank, 218–19 natural gas conversion to liquid fuels, 173–4 description, 18 discarded, 177 discoveries, 70–1, 128–9, 138, 140, 145–6 236 Index natural gas (cont’d ) initial in-place, 164–5 liquids see NGLs peak estimation, 96 powering motor vehicles by, 210 synthetic fuel from, 175–7 USGS Assessment, 177–9 natural gas condensate, 138, 165, 189 natural gas consumption, 177, 196 natural gas endowment, 177–9 natural gas field growth, 135 natural gas liquids see NGLs natural gas plant liquids, 39 natural gas production, US, 95 natural gas reserves, 177 growth, 135–6 replacement, 138 natural gas resources, 177–80 natural gas, US offshore, 128–9 Nature, 215 neo-Malthusian, 59–62, 66, 98, 103 New York City, horses, 206 NGLs, 27, 28 Nigeria bonus payments, 125 corruption index, 217 OPEC membership, 23 political stability, 217 non-renewable resource model, 195–6 non-renewable resources, 100–3 normal distribution, 93–4 North Sea, oil reserves, 65 Norway, oil production, 66 OAPEC, 23 embargo in 1970s, 63, 115 members, 23 production, 24 offshore oil, 139 oil conventional, 27 definition, 17 era, 1, 3 initial in-place, 164–5 Oil and Gas Journal, 29, 31, 136 oil availability, 220 oil business, 20–3 return on investment (ROI), 21 oil consumption by country, 33–4, 148 per capita, 33, 35, 74–5, 147–9 industrial development and, 74–6 production vs., 38–40 see also oil-use intensity oil crises 1916, 62–3 1918, 63 1970s, 63–5 oil demand, 220 oil dependence, 26, 35–6, 61, 195, 199, 208–9, 213, 215 oil dependence, cost, 12–13 oil depletion models, 8–9 predictions, 61–2 see also oil crises oil discoveries deficit, 66–7 global, 138–44 number peak, 73 peak production and, 73–4 production and, 66 volume peak, 73–4 oil endowment definition, 17 global estimates, 8–9, 119–21, 124 as inflated, 68–9 USGS, 9, 28–9, 68–9, 119–20 historical assessments, 119–20 Hubbert curve and, 7–9 peak oil timing and, 68–9 regional breakdown, 32 status in 2009, 29–31 total, 28 see also US, oil endowment oil expenditures, 79, 153–6 oil extraction price ranges for profitable, 163–4 stages, 162 oil fields, 97 Index oil finding costs, 42–3, 53, 56, 133–4 oil imports, 35–7 from OPEC, 36–7, 208 oil lifting costs, 43, 54, 56 oil panics see oil crises oil price, 24–5 annual average, 77–8, 116 inflation-adjusted, 78–9, 114–15, 116 relative to wages, 114–15 by quality, 40–1 demand and supply relation, 24 gasoline price and, 44–5, 206, 217 reserves and, 132 spikes in, 78–9, 114–15, 219 stability, 26, 217–19, 224 oil production by country, 32–3 by region, 94 consumption vs., 38–40 costs, 23, 42–3, 133–4, 142 curve fitting, 6–9 declining, 65–6, 71–2, 80–1 global Hubbert predictions, 8–9, 95–8 population vs., 111 replacement by reserve additions, 136–8 trend, 110–11, 203–4 OPEC, 33 peak see peak oil see also US, oil production oil quality, 40 pricing by, 40–1 oil recovery technology, 121, 222–3 oil reserves booking, 125–6 by country, 32, 34 global, 123, 132–8 estimates as inflated, 67–8, 124–5 prices and, 132 industry exaggeration, 69, 125 possible and probable, 72 proven, 72 resources vs., 126 237 SEC rules, 69, 125–6 status in 2008, 31–2 oil resource pyramids, 160–5 global, 163–5 US, 161–2 oil sands Canada, 27, 29, 122, 132, 136, 168–70 US, 162, 168 oil shale global, 172–3 US, 162, 170–2 oil shocks, 155–6 oil, unconventional, 27, 165–75 oil-use efficiency see efficiency oil-use intensity, 148–52 oil wells, 96–7 oil window, 170 Oklahoma, 62 OPEC, 21, 23–6 dependence on, 36–7, 208 members, 23 price control, 24–6, 218 price rises in 1970s, 63–4 production, 24–5, 118, 218 quotas, 24, 67 reserves, 23 estimates, 67–8, 124–5 OPEC Basket, 24, 41, 56 Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, see OAPEC Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, see OPEC Orimulsion, 167 Orinoco heavy-oil belt, 167 overshoot and collapse, 60 palm oil, 212–13 panic, see oil crises patent activity, 222 PDVSA, 168 peak oil, 3–4 effects, 62 Hubbert predictions, 7–9, 11–12 238 Index peak oil (cont’d ) modern proponents, 124 oil company views, 16 oil discovery volume and, 73–4 oil endowment and, 68–9 US Department of Energy predictions, 81 peanut oil, 212 Pennsylvania, 1, 20, 160, 176 Peru, oil reserves, 144 petroleum composition, 18–19 definition, 17 refinement, 18–19 unconventional, 27 see also gasoline and oil petroleum endowment, 178–9 Petroleum Producers Association, 20 petroleum products, from barrel of oil, 37–8 Petroleum Week, 88 placer deposits, 156 plankton, 17 platinum, 106 political stability, 217, 221 population growth, 5, 58–61, 111 Porter, Edward, 114 predictions, 2, 4–13, 60–3, 87–93, 95–99, 123–4, 128, 130, 134–5, 223 price elasticity of demand, 45, 56 price gouging, 48–9 PricewaterhouseCoopers, 217 primary recovery, 162 private investment, 144 processing gain, 38, 39 producer rebound, 200 production costs, 23, 42–3, 133–4, 142 production decline, scarcity and, 98–103 profitable oil extraction prices, 113–4 Prudhoe Bay oil field, 128 Qatar, 23, 74, 176 Rand Corporation, 172 reasonable certainty, 125–6 rebound, 199–200 recession, 25, 154–5 recovery factor, definition, 18 remaining reserves, 28 renewable energy resources, 216 renewable resources, 98–100, 102 Requa, Mark L., 63 research and development spending, 222 reserve additions, 127, 130, 136–7 reserve base, 184 reserve growth, 28, 127, 134–6 reserves booking, 125–6 definition, 17, 122 private investment and, 144 revisions based on backdating, 136 see also gold reserves; natural gas reserves; oil reserves resource endowment, 6 resource pyramid, 156–73 resource substitution, 107–8, 207 resources definition, 17, 122 non-renewable, 100–3 renewable, 98–100, 102 reserves vs., 126 rock bit, 223 Royal Dutch Shell in-situ recovery method, 170 oil discoveries, 144 oil reserves, 23, 69, 125–6 Russia heavy oil, 166–7 natural gas, 145 oil production, 32, 144–5 oil reserves, 144 Sasol, 176 Saudi Arabia oil consumption, 74 oil production, 32, 71–2 Index incremental cost, 114 spare capacity, 118 oil reserves, 72 OPEC membership, 23 scarcity, 61, 77–9, 98–116, 186, 196, 219, 222 scarcity rent, 116–18 Science, 2, 5, 65, 90 Scientific American, 106 SEC, 69, 125, 126 SEC Rule (4–10), 125 secondary recovery, 162 security, 12–3, 64, 195, 217–9, 221 Shell see Royal Dutch Shell Shell Canada, 169 Shenhua China Coal Liquefaction Corporation, 177 silver, 106, 108 Simmons, Mathew, 104 Simon-Ehrlich bet, 103–5 Simon, Julian, 103–4 Six Day War (1967), 112–13, 115 Smithsonian Institute, 63 social disintegration, 217 solar power generation, 214 “sour” oil, 40 South Africa, transportation fuels from coal, 176 South America, heavy oil, 167 South Korea, vehicle ownership, 205 South Pars field, 138 soybean oil, 212–13 Spindletop, 160 spot price, 48 St.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

The lower prices and improved quality of their outputs did not lead to enough increased demand to offset improvements in productivity. On the other hand, when demand is very elastic, greater productivity leads to enough of an increase in demand that more labor ends up employed. The possibility of this happening for some types of energy has been called the Jevons paradox: more energy efficiency can sometimes lead to greater total energy consumption. But to economists there is no paradox, just an inevitable implication of elastic demand. This is especially common in new industries like information technology.21 If elasticity is exactly equal to one (i.e., a 1 percent decline in price leads to exactly a 1 percent increase in quantity), then total revenues (price times quantity) will be unchanged.

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.: GPS satellites maintained by see also economic growth, government role in GPS Graetz, Michael graphics, digital graphs, logarithmic Great Depression Great Recession Great Stagnation, The (Cowen) Greenspan, Alan Greenstein, Shane Greenwood, Jeremy Gregersen, Hal Grimbergen gross domestic product (GDP): alternative metrics to effect of Great Recession on increases in omissions from U.S. growth in see also economic growth; productivity Guo, Terry Hall, David Haltiwanger, John Hanson, Gordon Hanushek, Eric Hayek, Friedrich health, human: improvements in measurements of Health Affairs health care coverage hearing, computer-aided Heim, Bradley Hemingway, Ernest Hendren, Nathaniel Hendy, Barry Hewlett Foundation HireArt Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams) Hitt, Lorin Holmstrom, Bengt Homo sapiens Honda Hoover, Herbert housing, online data on How College Affects Students (Pascarella and Terenzini) HTML Hu, Jeffrey Hubbard, Elbert Huberman, Bernardo Hulu human development index humanity, social development of Hyatt, Henry IBM iChat IDC ideation, see creativity immigration income: average basic negative taxes on normal distributions in see also wages Industrial Revolution negative consequences of see also Second Industrial Revolution inequality: consequences of education and political see also spread inflation indexes information, control of information and communication technology (ICT) see also global digital network Information Rules (Shapiro and Varian) information technology (IT): demand elasticity in intangible assets associated with productivity correlated with infrastructure technological Innocentive innovation benefits of complementary economic measurement of effect of digitization on entrepreneurship’s role in government support of impact of spread on open; see also crowdsourcing organizational population growth and prizes for productivity linked to recombinant slowing down of unstable competitive effects of see also creativity Instagram Intel intellectual property International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering Internet collective projects on comparison sites on consumer surplus created by creation of education on housing data on retailing on sharing economy on time accounting for traffic on user costs of user-generated content on; see also social media see also global digital network; World Wide Web Intuit iOS iPad iPhone iRobot Israel iTunes Jaimovich, Nir Japan, productivity improvement in Jaspers, Karl Jelinek, Frederick Jennings, Ken Jensen, Robert Jeopardy! Jeppesen, Lars Bo Jevons paradox Jobs, Steve Johnson, Lyndon Jorgenson, Dale Joy, Bill Kaggle Kalil, Tom Kane, Tim Kaplan, Steve Karabarbounis, Loukas Karpov, Anatoly Kasparov, Garry Katz, Lawrence Kauffman Foundation Kayak Kelly, Kevin Kelvin, Lord Kennedy, Robert F. Kerala, India Keynes, John Maynard Khan, Salman Khan Academy Kia Kim, Heekyung Kinect KinectFusion King, Martin Luther, Jr.

The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis by Ruth Defries

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, food miles, Francisco Pizarro, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jevons paradox, John Snow's cholera map, out of africa, planetary scale, premature optimization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, social intelligence, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

For women between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine years old, being overweight is defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of between 25 and 29.9; obesity for women in this age group is defined as having a BMI of 30 or above. 194Moose, caribou, and a variety of plants: See Kuhnlein et al. (2004), who analyze the changing dietary patterns and the obesity of the Inuit in modern times as an example of how the Big Ratchet is changing diets even in remote locations. 194Traditional, healthy options: Drewnowski and Popkin (1997) discuss this irony. 194More than a billion are overweight: Popkin et al. 2011. 194Eight people were overweight: Some 870 million people (approximately 12.5 percent) were chronically hungry around the world in 2010–2012 (UN FAO et al. 2012); 1.4 billion people (approximately 20 percent of the world’s population) were considered overweight in 2008, with “overweight” being defined as having a body mass index of greater than 25 (WHO 2013). 195Tractors, fertilizers, and pesticides: Popkin (2006) discussed the underlying global forces for the nutrition transition, including globalization, agricultural practices, supermarkets, and mass media. 195Overweight by the year 2030: Wang et al. 2008. 195Diseases related to being underweight: Hossain et al. 2007. 196Dismay, and for good reason: For example, see Tilman et al. (2011) and Foley et al. (2011). 196Contributions to greenhouse gases: DeFries and Rosenzweig 2010; Foley et al. 2011. 196Producing a pound of potatoes: Fiala 2009; UN FAO 2006. 197In the atmosphere climbs: Hatfield et al. (2011), Lobell et al. (2011), and Morton (2007) are a few sources in the large amount of literature on the impacts of climate change on agriculture. 197Sufficient for the coming demand: See Bogardi et al. 2012 and recommended readings listed in that source. 197Fields and pastures to grow food: In many countries abandonment of agriculture and tree plantations have led to a recovery of some of the lost forest cover (Rudel et al. 2005). 198Fast-food chains in the United States: Kaimowitz et al. 2004. 198Chicken, pigs, and cattle: Maximum exports of palm oil from Indonesia were to India and China, and soybeans were to Spain and China in 2010, according to the United Nations’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAOSTAT), http://faostat.fao.org/. 198Pushes food prices higher: Fargione et al. 2008. 198Unable to put food on the table: Many studies have quantified the contribution of biofuels to competition for land and increasing food prices, such as Mitchell (2008). 198“Food Security Rattled in 2008”: Daily New Egypt 2008. 198“Riot Warning”: Al Bawaba 2008. 198“Egyptians Riot over Bread Prices”: London Daily Telegraph 2008. 198“Hungry Haitians Expand Food Riots”: Associated Press 2008. 198“Food Riots Will Spread”: Cleland 2008. 198Drawing to a close: Rosegrant et al. 2012. 199Where people have the means: Popkin (1999) characterized a final stage in the nutrition transition in which people switch to healthier alternatives. 199Blow are far from assured: Clay (2011) and Foley et al. (2011) discussed ways to reduce the environmental impact of food production. 200Most obvious and immediate problem: The English economist William Jevons noted in the 1800s that gains in energy efficiency from coal use during the industrial revolution counterintuitively led to an increase rather than a decrease in demand. This is known as “Jevons’ paradox” (Alcott 2005). A similar paradox is true for food. As efficiencies in food production have increased, the amount consumed has also increased beyond physiological requirements. 201Learned to do long ago: An example of waste recycling comes from Adarsh Vidya Mandir, a college not far from Mumbai, India, with an award-winning experiment in the use of specially designed toilets to recover nutrients from human waste.

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Deep Wells and Prudence: Towards Pragmatic Action for Addressing Groundwater Overexploitation in India. World Bank, Washington, DC. Zamir, D. 2001. Improving plant breeding with exotic genetic libraries. Nature Review Genetics 2:983–989. Chapter 10: Farmer to Urbanite Al Bawaba. 2008. Riot warning. April 10. Alcott, B. 2005. Jevons’ paradox. Ecological Economics 54:9–21. Associated Press. 2008. Hungry Haitians expand food riots. April 9. Bloom, D. 2011. 7 billion and counting. Science 333:562–569. Bogardi, J., D. Dudgeon, R. Lawford, E. Flinkerbusch, A. Meyn, C. Pahl-Wostl, K. Vielhauer, and C. Vorosmarty. 2012. Water security for a planet under pressure: Interconnected challenges of a changing world call for sustainable solutions.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

What is the purpose of life? For us, the answer will be clear, established and for all practical purposes indisputable: The purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles.” Long before planners realized it, Jacobs had realized the problem of “induced demand” that roads create. This is also known in effect as Jevons paradox. That is, if you make something more abundant, the price of it will fall, and people will use it much more than they previously did. William Stanley Jevons was an English economist in the nineteenth century who looked at coal. Jevons noticed that when James Watt improved the efficiency of the steam engine, so that it did not need anywhere near as much coal to use, the result was not that demand for coal fell.

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People will start using them as delivery vehicles to run errands. Sam Schwartz imagines businessmen taking meetings in Manhattan sending their cars to drive around in circles rather than find a parking space. As the technology gets cheaper, more and more people will buy them, and use them for ever more outlandish things. It will be chaos. Jevons paradox will win again. And yet, inevitably perhaps, given he is a car executive, Musk does not think that this means we should not all buy autonomous vehicles. Rather, the solution, apparently, is “some combination of tunnels and double-deckering freeways.” He did admit that “flying cars” are not the answer, because people do “not want the skies to be swarming with helicopters.”

The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future by Michael Levi

addicted to oil, American energy revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, crony capitalism, deglobalization, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, manufacturing employment, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, stock buybacks

It can actually result in more. 138 • THE POWER SURGE The claim that efficiency does not actually reduce resource consumption became known as the Jevons Paradox, and more than a century after his death it lives on in fights over the true promise of greater efficiency in American energy use. “Mr. Wizard, meet Mr. Jevons,” one prominent skeptic of improved fuel efficiency wrote mockingly on his blog.96 Yet reality appears to disagree with the strong skeptics. When it comes to cars, the naïve invocation of the Jevons Paradox leads to a simple conclusion: if all Americans start buying new cars that are twice as fuel efficient as their old ones, they will drive more, because the cost of driving will have been cut in half.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

They’d urge the steelmaker to slash prices, expand production, take market share from their competitors, and earn larger profits overall (even though per-unit profits would shrink). As Jevons realized, this would force competitors to do the same, by getting hold of their own coal-conserving technology, or be forced out of business. And here’s the painful irony of what’s come to be called the Jevons paradox, or the rebound effect—even though our hypothetical steelmaking sector has converted (quite swiftly, in fact) to the new coal-conserving technology without any government subsidy, it is using more coal than ever. The invisible hand of the market giveth, and it taketh away. Things only get worse from here, as the effects of cheap steel made with efficient coal-produced power ripple through the economy.

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“self-driving,” 38 early self-steering schemes, 5–6 modern-day myths about future, xv–xvi scan, study, and steer as basic tasks, 34–38 self-driving shoes, 52, 53 three big stories of the driverless revolution, 16–20, 187–88, 238, 248, 253 see also financialization of mobility; materialization; self-driving vehicle research; specialization driving as coming-of-age story, 21–22 cruise control and, 24–25, 26 decline in teen driving, 22–23 distracted driving, 25, 28–29, 32–33 drinking and, 24 graduated licensing, 23 drones, 40, 127, 246–47 EasyMile, 60, 103–4, 104 Ebee, 129 e-commerce, 17, 117, 118–19, 120 see also Amazon; continuous delivery Edgar, John, 247 electrification and automation as symbiotic technologies, 54–55 electronic tolling, 169–72 Endeavor space shuttle, 74 English Civil War, 161 e-Palette, 125, 142 EUREF, 129 Evans, Alex, 116 éX-Driver (anime series), 149–50 Facebook, 67 fear of intelligent automobiles, 39, 43, 45 FedEx, 27, 130 “fifth-generation” (5G) wireless grid, 42 financial crisis of 2007–2008, 7, 164, 182 financialization, general, 163–64 financialization of mobility curb pricing and curb-access fees, 220–21, 222–23 electronic tolling, 169–72 monetization of vehicle owner data, 32 overview, 17, 163–65, 244 realignment of money and power, 181–83 see also congestion pricing first mile, 60 fleet learning, 37 Florida Automated Vehicles Summit, 55 Ford, Henry, 12 Ford Motor Company, 12, 32, 58, 218–19, 231, 233 forecasting vs. predicting the future, 13 free roads, end of, 163, 165 free transfer in transit system, 89, 90, 91 Frey, Carl Benedikt, 153, 154, 236 Frost, Robert, 249 fulfillment centers and distribution centers, 121, 123, 132, 136–37, 152, 158, 196n fulfillment zone, 187, 188, 196–99, 198–99 Futurama (1939 World’s Fair), 5 future car of the 1950s, 50–52, 51 Future of Humanity Institute, 238 future shock, 120 Gao Lufeng, 65 Gates, Bill, 237–38 General Motors (GM) AVs tested in San Francisco, xv disengagements by Chevy Bolts, 41 Futurama (1939 World’s Fair), 5 in-car surveillance and driver monitoring, 32 Super Cruise, 29 Gensler, 191 ghost cars, 27 ghost Main Street businesses, 140–42 ghost restaurants, 139–40, 197 ghost road, defined, xvi Gibson, Mel, 28 Gibson, William, 10, 245 GitHub, 248 Glaeser, Edward, 130, 206 Goldsmith, Stephen, 222 Google ambitions, 183 Android operating system, 7 busing of workers, 100 self-driving car project, xiv–xv, 7, 8, 35, 84, 133, 230 and vehicular specialization, 54 Waze acquired by, 87 see also Waymo Gould, Jay, 180 GPS tracks, 35 Grab, 177 graduated licensing, 23 Green Summit, 139 guardian angels, 246–47 Hackett, Jim, 32 Hawking, Stephen, 237–38 Heppner, Henning, 129 Herron, Ron, 74 Hidalgo, Anne, 220 highwaymen (England’s East Midlands), 161 Hitachi, 67, 79 HopSkipDrive, 95 horsecars, 174–75 houses, increased size of, 116 human intelligence tasks (HITs), 41 IBM, 36 Icebox, 243–44 IDEO, 125 IKEA, 72–73 Image of the City, The (Lynch), 228–30 immutable objects, 49 Impellitteri, Vincent, 165 Induct, 103, 104 infill housing, 204, 253–55 informal transit, 99–100, 106 Inrix, 9 Intel, 8, 35 “Introducing the self-driving bicycle in the Netherlands,” 62 Intuit, 125 Jacobs, Jane, 57, 228 JD.com, 118, 119, 137 Jelbi MaaS app (Berlin), 109, 110, 216 Jevons paradox, 144–45 Jevons, William Stanley, 143–44, 145 just-in-time inventory approaches, 157 Ju, Wendy, 40 Kalanick, Travis, 140, 179 Kamen, Dean, 62 Keller, David H., 84–85, 94 Keolis, 104 Khashoggi, Jamal Ahmad, 178 Khosrowshahi, Dara, 98, 179 Kia, 31 Kim, Sangbae, 46 King, David, 132, 247 King, Steven, 42 kipple, defined, 142–43 Kitchen United, 139 Kiva Systems, 136, 137 Kiwibots, 57 Knightley’s (Wichita, KS), 192 Koch, Charles and David, 40 Kohlhase, Janet, 130, 206 Kohn Pedersen Fox, 209, 211 Koolhaas, Rem, 206 KPMG, 117, 218 Kurzweil, Ray, 234 Ladd, Brian, 80 last mile continuous delivery and, 121–29 conveyors and, 124–25 cost savings, 130 driverless shuttles, 60, 123n falling costs and demand, 130–32, 131 in food delivery, 140, 147 freight AVs, 125–26, 130 Hannah school buses, 127 nighttime delivery, 128–29, 130, 217 origin of term, 122 package lockers and, 127, 130, 219, 221 piggybacking deliveries, 126–27 term use in shipping, 123n legibility, 229–30, 231 Legible London, 230 Leonhardt, David, 8–9 Les Vergers Ecoquartier (Switzerland), 202 Levandowski, Anthony, 40, 68 Levy, Frank, 150, 151, 152 lidar, 34–35 Ligier Group, 103 Lime Bike, 67 “Living Machine, The” (Keller), 83–85, 94, 237 loss aversion, 50 Lowe’s, 116 Lufa Farms, 147 Luks, George, 174 Lyft competition with Uber, 177–78, 179 initial public offering, 97, 177 market cap, 97 number of vehicles, 10 relationship with transit, 215 specialization and variety of rides, 95, 96 subscriptions, 244 taxibots, 97 traffic congestion and, 168 Lynch, Kevin, 228–30 MaaS.

Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned From Programming Over Time by Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, Hyrum Wright

anti-pattern, computer vision, continuous integration, defense in depth, en.wikipedia.org, functional programming, Jevons paradox, job automation, loss aversion, microservices, reproducible builds, supply-chain attack, transaction costs, Turing complete

If your tasks require effort that scales with lines of code, that’s concerning. 19 This is not to say that decisions need to be made unanimously, or even with broad consensus - in the end, someone has to be the decider. This is primarily a statement of how the decision making process should flow for whoever is actually responsible for the decision. 20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Chapter 2. Build Systems & Build Philosophy Written by Erik Kueffler Edited by Lisa Carey If you ask Google engineers what they like most about working at Google (besides the free food and cool products), you might hear something surprising: engineers love the build system1. Google has spent a tremendous amount of engineering effort over its lifetime in creating its own build system from the ground up, with the goal of ensuring that our engineers are able to build code quickly and reliably.

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

,” SciScoop Science, posted September 17, 2005; Robert Bryce, “Green Energy Advocate Amory Lovins: Guru or Fakir?” Energy Tribune, posted November 12, 2007; Robert Bryce, “An Interview With Vaclav Smil,” robertbryce.com, posted July 2007. 29. This is known as the Jevons Paradox or the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate. In one sense, the Jevons Paradox has fading relevance in a world of declining energy resource availability: in the future, efforts to increase efficiency will probably not lead to declining resource prices, merely to prices that are not rising as fast as they would without such efforts. However, another, somewhat analogous trend will come into play: In order for society to save large amounts of energy through efficiency, very large investments in new and more energy efficient infrastructure are required (railroads, electric cars, etc.).

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

In his 1865 book The Coal Question, Jevons analyzed British economic growth and its dependence on tapping coal reserves.5 He projected that within less than a century, economic growth would have to stall as coal production peaked and declined. Moreover, he saw efforts at energy conservation as inevitably doomed. Making the case for what came to be known as the “Jevons paradox,” he argued that increased energy efficiency would simply lead to more energy consumption because the cheaper power would be used more. What Jevons could not have known was that, while his assessments of coal reserves were broadly correct, the advanced capitalist economies would soon shift their energy base to petroleum.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean tech, double helix, full employment, higher-order functions, hive mind, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, late capitalism, Late Heavy Bombardment, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Neolithic agricultural revolution, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, post scarcity, precariat, quantum entanglement, retrograde motion, rewilding, Skinner box, stem cell, strong AI, synthetic biology, the built environment, the High Line, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent

The many delicate physical, biological, and legal situations were so tightly knitted together that none of the cosmic engineering they were doing elsewhere in the solar system could be fitted to the needs of the place. Despite this, people tried things. So much more power than ever before was at their command that some felt they could at last begin to overturn Jevons Paradox, which states that the better human technology gets, the more harm we do with it. That painful paradox has never yet failed to manifest itself in human history, but perhaps now was the tipping point—Archimedes’ lever brought to bear at last—the moment when they could get something out of their growing powers besides redoubled destruction.

…

This organization had never gotten much traction in its stated goal, but it was an already existing agency, and these had been identified by the Mondragon as the best of the bad options for channeling assistance. Wahram had thought it generally agreed that the whole development-aid model had been demonstrated to be an example of the Jevons Paradox, in which increases in efficiency trigger more consumption rather than less; increased aid had always somehow increased suffering, in some kind of feedback loop, poorly theorized—or else theorized perfectly well, but in such a way that revealed the entire system to be a case of vampiric rich people moving around the Earth performing a complicated kleptoparasitism on the poor.

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The rebound effect occurs when that lower price induces consumers to buy more energy, which in turn partly or wholly cancels out the engineering improvements. There is now a substantial literature on rebound effects. They were first identified by the British economist William Stanley Jevons, who found that improvements in the efficiency of coal use led to increased consumption of that resource. The Jevons paradox was resurrected in 1980, when the economists Daniel Khazzoom and Leonard Brookes used it to analyze the gains in energy efficiency of the 1970s. They argued for a strong version of rebound, in which efficiency improvements actually increase the demand for energy. If true, it’s a classic case of blowback.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

Whereas the Romans experienced diminishing returns from military expeditions, we are receiving diminishing returns as the oil companies mine the furthest reaches of the globe for fossil fuels. Like the Romans, we've used up the low-hanging fruit. Can technology save us? Tainter thinks not. He points to what is known as the “Jevons paradox,” which shows that whenever technology makes the use of a resource more efficient, this only increases its use, as consumption goes up to exploit the new efficiencies. The oil industry's recent desperate rush into tar sands and “fracking” seems to confirm Tainter's thesis, as our global economy invests billions of dollars into technological solutions to extract ever more fossil fuels, even while their carbon emissions are threatening the future of our civilization.24 Many have looked at this situation and arrived at the same gloomy prognosis.

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See International Monetary Fund imperialism Christian justification for, 311–12 cultural, 17–18 European, 16, 18, 20, 91, 273, 293, 300–315 British, 248–49, 308–309, 311–14, 382–83 New World, conquest of, 306–12 Portuguese, 303 Spanish, 306–308, 309–12 European mind-set and, 301–307, 315, 329, 333 pseudoscientific justification for, 16, 313–15 Inca Empire, 113, 307, 309, 310 Incarnation, 227–28, 339 India Alexander the Great's invasion of, 304 Arab knowledge of, 317, 318 British colonization of, 248–49 “colonies” of, 305–306 indentured laborers from, 313–14 modern, 19–20 Muslim invasion of, 248 partition of, 505–506 religious tolerance in, 247–49 See also Ashoka Indian civilization and thought, 114, 161–77 Aryan sources of, 133–36, 138, 162–65, 173, 483 atman/Brahman identity in, 165–66, 171, 172–73, 174 Brahman in, 165–69, 174–75, 177, 261 Buddhism in, 249, 252 Chinese thought, contrasted with, 180, 185, 188, 190–91, 210, 252, 261–62, 520 dualism in, 172–73, 177 Five Great Sacrifices in, 164 Greek thought, compared with, 136, 161–62, 166–71, 175, 177 Harappan sources of, 130–33, 162–65 interiority in, 164–65 mathematics and, 319 reincarnation in, 163–64, 166, 254 religious tolerance of, 247–49 senses, renunciation of, 167–69, 177 shamanic sources of, 173–75 transcendence in, 162, 177, 210 Vedic synthesis, 163–66 Yoga in, 163–66, 171–73, 176, 185 See also Sanskrit; Upanishads Indo-European languages, 133–34, 137, 140, 162, 205–207, 302 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and, 198–99 Indra, 137, 162 Industrial Revolution, 18, 313, 324–25, 330, 350, 378, 383, 434 inequality agriculture as source of, 110–11, 112, 297–300 global, 315, 377, 386–88, 428–33 sedentism as source of, 105–106 in United States, 386, 437, 530 Inquisition, 335, 347–49 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 385 internet artificial intelligence and, 422–23 effect of, 407–408 emergence, as example of, 367–68 human superorganism and, 426–28 language, compared with, 57–58, 59 social transformation, potential for, 439, 541 “Investigation of Things” (ge wu), 262–64 Inward Training, 210 isfet, 120–21 Islamic civilization and thought Christianity, conflict with, 246–47, 273 European thought, contrast with, 354 extent of, 318 Greek thought, relation to, 319–21, 341–42 natural sciences, attitude to, 321–24 religious divisions within, 320–23 religious intolerance of, 246, 322–23 scientific achievements in, 319–20 scientific revolution, “failure” to achieve, 320–24 Israel, 104, 223 Jewish people, as name of, 216 nation, biblical, 144, 217–20, 241–43 Israelites. See Jewish people Jainism, 164, 247, 248 James, King, 270 Japanese culture, 212 language, 207 Jefferson, Thomas, 383 Jericho, siege of, 242 Jerome, Saint, 230 Jerusalem, 217–20, 246–47 Jesus. See Christ, Jesus Jevons paradox, 415 Jewish people, 140, 223 anti-Semitism toward, 245–46 Christianity, relation to, 227 as Hebrews (Israelites), 215–20, 241–43 history of, 217–20 jnana, 136, 169 John (apostle), 227–28 Jones, Sir William, 133 Josiah, King, 218–19, 222 Judah, kingdom of, 217–18, 220 Justinian, Emperor, 245 Kaifeng, 251, 273 Kalinga, 304–305 Kangxi emperor, 250 Kanzi, 48 Karnak (temple complex), 122 Kasparov, Gary, 423 Katha Upanishad, 167, 168–69, 169–72, 174, 488 Kauffman, Stuart, 371 Kauffman, Yehezkel, 221 Keats, John, 362 Keeley, Lawrence, 95–96, 470, 474 Keeling, Charles, 392 Kena Upanishad, 171 Kepler, Johannes, 282, 345–47, 349, 351, 523 Khan, Kublai, 272–73 Khwarizmi, Muhammad ibn Musa al-, 319 kilin, 329 Ki-Moon, Ban, 395 Kindi, Abu al-, 319, 321–22 kittum, 130 Korten, David, 387–88 Koyukon people, 84–85 Krauthammer, Charles, 287 Krishna, 174 Kuhl, Patricia, 60–62 Kuhn, Thomas, 372 !

Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

There are fundamental (thermodynamic, mechanical) constraints to these improvements, but we have pushed some processes close to the practical efficiency limits, though in most instances, including such common energy converters as internal combustion engines and lights, there is still much room for further improvement. Box 1.6 Efficiency improvements and the Jevons paradox Technical advances have brought many impressive efficiency gains, and the history of lighting offers one of the best examples (Nordhaus 1998; Fouquet and Pearson 2006). Candles convert just 0.01% of chemical energy in tallow or wax to light. Edison’s light bulbs of the 1880s were roughly ten times as efficient.

…

New actualistic data on the ecology and energetics of hominin scavenging opportunities. Journal of Human Evolution 80:1–16. Pogue, S. 2012. Use it better: The worst tech predictions of all time. Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pogue-all-time-worst-tech-predictions. Polimeni, J. M., et al. 2008. The Jevons Paradox and the Myth of Resource Efficiency Improvements. London: Earthscan. Polmar, N. 2006. Aircraft Carriers: A History of Carrier Aviation and Its Influence on World Events. Vol. 1., 1909–1945. Lincoln, NB: Potomac Press. Polmar, N., and T. B. Allen. 1982. Rickover: Controversy and Genius. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization by Jeff Rubin

addicted to oil, air freight, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, big-box store, BRICs, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, energy security, food miles, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Just-in-time delivery, low interest rates, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, profit maximization, reserve currency, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, work culture , zero-sum game

Aside from Colin Campbell, Matt Simmons, whom I once shared a podium with many years ago in Calgary, was one of the first people to alert me about the growing dangers of oil depletion. He has been a lonely but very prescient voice for decades now in the US oil and gas industry. CHAPTER 3: HEAD FAKES p. 87: Daniel Khazzoom and Leonard Brookes are modern day exponents of the Jevons paradox. Both Khazzoom and Brookes independently studied the impact of energy saving measures on energy consumption following the two OPEC oil shocks. Their counter-intuitive finding that gains in energy efficiency boost energy consumption instead of promoting energy conservation is now frequently referred to as the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate.

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

At the turn of the last century, Britain exported almost a third of its total coal production. By 2010, the UK was importing almost 60 percent of its coal. Resource depletion in domestic coalfields was first documented in the 19th century by British economist Stanley Jevons. He’s the namesake of the Jevons paradox, a concept that points out how an increase in the efficiency of resource extraction leads to an increase in resource consumption. For a discussion of the paradox, also known as the rebound effect, see pages 118–29 of my first book, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller (2009). this page: Japanese regulations require reactors to close every thirteen months for maintenance and inspections.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

But oddly enough, exactly the opposite happened: coal consumption in England soared. The reason, Jevons discovered, was that the efficiency improvement saved money, and capitalists reinvested the savings to expand production. This led to economic growth – and as the economy grew, it chewed through more coal. This odd result became known as the Jevons Paradox. In modern economics, the phenomenon is known as the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate, named after the two economists who described it in the 1980s. And it doesn’t just apply to energy – it applies to material resources too. When we innovate more efficient ways to use energy and resources, total consumption may briefly drop, but it quickly rebounds to an even higher rate.

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are Thekeys to Sustainability by David Owen

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, delayed gratification, distributed generation, drive until you qualify, East Village, Easter island, electricity market, food miles, Ford Model T, garden city movement, hydrogen economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, linear programming, McMansion, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, Murano, Venice glass, Negawatt, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, peak oil, placebo effect, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, unemployed young men, urban planning, urban sprawl, walkable city, zero-sum game

How people react to increases in energy efficiency is a question of environmental significance. In 1865, the British economist William Stanley Jevons, in a book called The Coal Question, observed that coal consumption had increased, rather than declined, following the introduction of steam engines that used less of it—a phenomenon still known as the Jevons Paradox.48 Whether you find it paradoxical may depend on how closely you observe your own behavior. Internet usage is analogous. The evolution from dial-up connections to cable connections, which are hundreds of times faster and therefore enable users to complete in seconds tasks that used to take minutes or hours, did not lead to a steep drop-off in connection time; on the contrary, that tremendous gain in efficiency helped to foster an even huger increase in usage.

The Classical School by Callum Williams

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, helicopter parent, income inequality, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, new economy, New Journalism, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, Ronald Coase, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income

“His main mistake”, says John Bellamy Foster, “was to underestimate the importance of coal substitutes such as petroleum and hydroelectric power.”2 In no way did Britain’s coal supply restrict economic growth over the 19th or 20th centuries. But one bit of Jevons’s reasoning has survived the test of time. He proposed what came to be known as “the Jevons paradox”. Jevons wondered whether Britain could reduce its consumption of coal with a view to postponing the day when the stuff ran out altogether. He dismissed that idea out of hand. In fact, he thought that as energy efficiency improved, energy consumption would rise, rather than fall. As the cost dropped, the means of using energy would be brought within the reach of more people.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Since 2008, Sweden has led the world in purchasing green cars, but car emissions have steadily increased. It appears that while the newer, more efficient cars produce less carbon emissions, the drivers have increased the amount of time they spend in their cars. Why this might be is a cause of some controversy. For some, such as New Yorker and writer David Owen, this is an example of the Jevon Paradox, named after the Victorian English economist William Stanley Jevon, who proposed that as technology makes energy use more efficient, we are likely to use more of it, rather than less. Cleaner engines, therefore, might reduce emissions; they also encourage us to increase car usage. This, in the end, will more than likely result in still too many cars in the gridlock.

A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice by Tony Weis, Joshua Kahn Russell

addicted to oil, Bakken shale, bilateral investment treaty, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, failed state, gentrification, global village, green new deal, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, liberal capitalism, LNG terminal, market fundamentalism, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, profit maximization, public intellectual, race to the bottom, smart grid, special economic zone, WikiLeaks, working poor

So while new technologies can indeed decrease the relative impacts of production, this focus fails to mention how efficiency gains are often offset by the growth in overall production, a well-established tendency in the history of resource exploitation in capitalism that is referred to as the Jevons paradox. The point is that technological innovations are being driven with the goal of enabling both increasing profitability and increasing volumes of bitumen extraction. The imagery of technological solutions is also coupled with a portrayal of the tar sands as a highly regulated industry, when regulations have in fact been limited, geared towards facilitating expansion, and often gone unenforced.21 For example, a recent television advertisement by the federal government claims that it is “protecting the environment with new fines for companies that break the law, returning developed land to its natural state, increasing pipeline inspections by 50 percent, [and] requiring double hulls for tankers,”22 claims that are very clearly designed to neutralize some of the criticisms associated with the Northern Gateway pipeline proposal by appealing to innovations in technology and legislation. 5.

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark matter, epigenetics, gravity well, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, mandelbrot fractal, microbiome, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, precautionary principle, printed gun, quantum entanglement, traveling salesman, Turing test

The plateau after the leap, the big S shape of all life, perhaps; in any case of the population growth patterns as first calculated by Verhulst in the nineteenth century, and since shown to be common in many other processes. So, the logistic function, as applied to history. Or has humanity enacted its own reversion to the mean, and become in some ways less than they briefly were? Fulfilled the Jevons paradox, and with every increase in power increased their destructiveness? Thus history as a parabola, rise and fall, as so often postulated? Or cycling, always rising and falling and then rising again, helplessly, hopelessly? Or a sine wave, and in these last two centuries on a down curve, in some season of history invisible to them?

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Silicon chips use so little power that they are everywhere and in aggregate their effect mounts up. A search engine may not use as much energy as a steam engine, but lots of them soon add up. Energy efficiency has been rising for a very long time and so has energy consumption. This is known as the Jevons paradox after the Victorian economist Stanley Jevons, who put it thus: ‘It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth. As a rule, new modes of economy will lead to an increase of consumption.’ I am not saying fossil fuels are irreplaceable.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

But Peel’s technological innovations didn’t lead to joblessness, any more than efficient Boulton and Watt steam engines led to a conservation of coal. The great English economist Stanley Jevons noted 150 years ago that more efficient engines led to more coal consumption, because people figured out more uses for steam engines that used less fuel and were consequently less costly to operate. That Jevons paradox is relevant almost everywhere. Electric cars emit less carbon than conventional cars, but they are also cheaper to drive longer distances. Thus, we should expect additional driving encouraged by electric vehicles to undo some of the energy savings created by more fuel-efficient engines. The global industrial boom of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected a vast increase in the use of machines to produce thousands of different and often new products.