It depends on what exactly you are aiming for/meaning with efficiency. But in terms of “doing the same or similar thing at substantially reduced resource/human/environmental cost” I would see as generally a highly desirable goal. While that is unlikely to solve the whole problem and out right reduction may be essential above and beyond that, it at least reduces the current and future ‘costs’ while longer term solutions (political/cultural/environmental) can be developed.
I’m not entirely sure that’s purely industrial I feel that you may be mixing the current form of capitalism and industry. Capitalism is more about the constant need for growth and profit, rather than industry which I would argue is more a manner of producing that which is needed or wanted, based on scale, machinery and standardization rather than artisan production. You could arguably have a steady state economy (non-capitalist), that was industrial, where essentials were produced under that approach with no excess or need for constant growth.
Thanks.
Yes that is what I’d expect. However, I would tend to see that as a flawed mindset, just because one person needs a feature doesn’t mean that we need to support the feature or expand the base to incorporate it. If it is only one person, then it may make more sense to see if they can learn to do with out or to produce a separate ‘simple tool’ that preforms that function.
Yeah that tends to happen a lot, it’s especially bad when it actually works for a long time. That legacy system in undocumented C code from the late 90’s or the COBOL code from the 70’s that worked well for 20-40 years and now is finally not working, but no one is left who understands how it works (and shock horror you may have lost the source code, and the developer is long gone). Easy to see in software, but happens in the physical world as well.
Overpopulation to me equals taking resources at a greater rate than what the earth can sustain. This can be mitigated by using less resources or having less people that consume those resources. So any population will incur costs, it’s more about what’s a sustainable population the earth can support (which of course is relative to population consumption).
But once you do that, Jevon’s Paradox mostly guarantees that a lot more people will do that thing, using more resources than when you started trying to make it more efficient.
On paper, yes. In reality, I think that’s a far larger question - the two are woven together so tightly that I’m not sure they can meaningfully be separated. The non-capitalist industrial civilizations that have been tried (notably the USSR) had lots of issues, and tended to end up worse for the environment than the capitalist ones, because they simply didn’t care about waste. In a capitalist system, waste generally is an inefficiency to be reduced, and the USSR just… didn’t care.
Unfortunately Jevon’s Paradox contradicts your thinking on these lines. Any time humans make some activity “more efficient” in terms of resource consumption, we end up using more of that resource, not less.
No, I mean “industrial” as opposed to other forms of capitalism (such as pure land-orientation). Industrialism is the mechanization and efficiency-seeking activities of concentrated and often centralized production methods - that is to say, the word “industry”. Industrial civilization, by definition, seeks scale, mechanization, and efficiency - in other words, “more”.
I do not agree that it is possible to have an industrial civilization that is steady-state. There are many reasons for this, but they all fundamentally boil down to the fact that industry is of necessity ultimately extractive, and since the density of extraction decreases over time, it must grow in order to sustain inputs at a steady state. This is contradictory, and therefore a steady-state is not possible to retain over the long form - efficiency must be reduced, production must eventually drop, and eventually you end up no longer being industrial by any meaningful definition - you come back to localized, small-scale activities in the long-term. While the phrase “cottage industry” might apply in a very loose sense, it’s not meaningfully the real sense of “industry”. So unless you want to argue semantics (which I don’t) - I mean exactly what I said about “industry”.
However, I think you’re confused about capitalism. Capitalism is not predicated on growth. Capitalism is predicated on control of capital. Capitalism was approximately steady-state during the feudal middle ages - it was industrial agricultural practices that forced particular modes of capital to require expansion, not capitalism itself. Industry has been a tool used heavily by capitalism, and it is what has demanded and forced growth, from industrial agriculture to industrial production, since it provides the highest rate of return on capital, but capitalism in many various forms can exist on a very local and low-productivity scale as well as it can on an industrial scale.
Yet if you don’t make things more efficient, resource use will still grow as a result of increased population growth and increasing incomes. Having a very quick look at the literature around Jevon’s paradox I can’t see any clean controlled studies showing it’s actual effect (any one got any decent studies showing the effect?). Rather there seems to be some discussion that it isn’t truly feasible to measure if the effect is real or to what extent it occurs. As by introducing the increased efficiency into the economic system you perturb the system to such an extent that you are unable to determine if any observed growth in resource is due to increased efficiency or is simply a consequence of what was happening in the society, population growth or income growth. Thus, Jevon’s paradox can potentially become an excuse to not increase efficiency or do things ‘better’ because theoretically any change could make things worse…
Again as above, is there proof of this, especially in all cases? Certainly fort something this maybe the case but to assume every/any time is a big step.
Secondly say we assume the paradox is true in all cases, then would you argue we should not be making any change as it will just make things worse? In which case the paradox becomes an excuse to do nothing? Even if it is true it doesn’t not necessarily apply to all possible scenarios.
Third even if it was true, I would argue efficiency is still desirable but needs to be coupled to secondary actions and policies to control or limit the rebound effect. This could be via taxes, limits or other measures.
At the end of the day everything is interlinked and no one solution or change ever fixes everything, rather a combination of actions need to be taken addressing the problem at multiple levels. That doesn’t mean though that none of the actions should be taken.
We do need to reduce our population and our level of consumption as a society/species, but at the same time we should also be aiming to increase the efficiency of our resource use, and be actively implementing policies that reserves the savings from efficiency use for the benefit of the entire ecosystem.
As far as I’m concerned there is plenty of obvious and sufficient evidence to see that on macro-scales it’s true. I don’t need formal proof to see which way the wind’s blowing on a given day.
But, look at it from another perspective: we’ve been increasing efficiency madly in the past few decades, and as I pointed out in the other post, our net consumption continues to grow. More efficiency is obviously not the answer - and I don’t mean this in the sense you indicate:
What I take it to mean is efficiency is the wrong metric. We need to focus on consumption as a whole. Jevon’s paradox doesn’t say we can’t reduce our consumption and also increase efficiency - it says we don’t. That’s a choice, but it’s also an observation of human nature.
This is not a bad philosophy, but it ignores the fact that many of our most recent efficiency gains are not actually more efficient from a resource, ecological cost/damage, pollution, end-of-life, or other impact assessment. They’re very narrowly an in-use energy efficient technology which through externalities shoves actually increased costs off to the side. To me, this is another false metric. If we’re going to look at efficiency at all, we must include all externalities or we are fooling ourselves. By that metric, the vast majority of modern tech is out.
It seems to me from your lines of argument that you haven’t actually read the book we’re discussing yet. Would you like to do a chapter-by-chapter read-along/discussion in this thread so we don’t end up repeating a lot of it in snippets?
I’m certainly interested in that - I don’t know exactly what it looks like, though.
Jevon’s Paradox is one of those “Observational rules of thumb.” I’m not sure it’s been rigorously proven (or how you’d even go about doing it), but “If every time you do X, Y happens,” it’s a reasonable bet that the next time you do X, Y will also happen.
Jevon’s Paradox is one of those “Observational rules of thumb.” I’m not sure it’s been rigorously proven (or how you’d even go about doing it), but “If every time you do X, Y happens,” it’s a reasonable bet that the next time you do X, Y will also happen.
I think, mechanistically, Jevons’ Paradox is only really applicable on the macro scale. Sure, you may drive a bit more because you get 50mpg instead of 25mpg, but the effect really occurs due to it becoming more affordable for some people, who were previously getting around differently, to drive. Induced demand, though not by adding lanes to roads.
Lower costs also make you buy bigger versions. How much larger is your fridge than your grandmother’s? How many do you have. And if you’re an outlier, do you realize that for most WEIRDos (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic people), our lifestyles have grown to roughly maintain a cost of lifestyle rather than level (SUVs instead of station wagons, keep the old fridge in the garage for sodas, larger homes, tighter expectations of what’s a comfortable temperature, etc.)
This wiki link discusses the micro- and macroeconomic effects, which may lead you to a source to meet your requirements.
Right that make more sense to me, than my initial reading of the previous comments on efficiency, that efficiency is just bad.
Yes, it’s sitting next in the reading pile just under the interesting (fictional) ‘Ministry for the future’.
That would be interesting, but consider the lack of time I’ve got for reading at the moment unlikely to work very well. Would be helpful if people flag the associated chapter when discussing specific points though.
In Seattle the recycling bucket was ‘free’, ‘green’ (compost) bucket was X, and ‘black’ (garbage) was 4X or so.
First thing? Built a compost pile, told them to stuff the green bucket. Second thing - moved the ‘black’ bucket to the second smallest size. Smooshed everything as compact as possible. Third thing? Hell yeah there was a ton of wishcycling. And the occasional dump run for big items.
If you’re going to charge stupid fees, people are gonna game 'em.
Compost / compact things, and heck, I could always do a sneaky forced air burn barrel. Not in the bin, no longer my problem.
Waste is a separate, but related issue (mostly serving to demonstrate the absurdity of “but circular economy!” claims). BGL points out in the sections on recycling that even on highly recycled materials like aluminum, you still need new materials to make useful alloys out of the mixed scrap you get.
It’s depressing just how much waste certain activities generate. A single takeout meal generates about the same volume of non-recyclable waste as most of a week of our other activities by the time you factor in the waxed beverage containers and such. We don’t do it often, but it’s certainly a common enough activity, if reports of my friends who do venture-capital-funded food delivery have anything to say about it (oddly, most of those things are “Don’t use those services”).
A forced air burn barrel would be interesting, though I doubt it would get hot enough to deal with plastics properly.
I sometimes wonder if plastics buried isn’t - at least from a carbon point of view - some of the best results we can get, especially if they take so long to degrade.
But then again plastic that isn’t LEGO annoys me. So much packaging could be paper or metal or glass but it’s all plastic these days.
I also thing that there’s some disingenuous discussion when it comes to waste as there’s waste and there’s waste. A common thing is the billions of gallons of water to grow an almond milk for example - but where does that water go and how is it the cycle? Saving gallons of water used to wash dishes by instead using disposable wrappings are another example - everything involves tradeoffs and I’m not certain we’re picking the right ones.
I have a similar suspicion of those no-flush urinals that instead have to be refilled with some weird blue goop. Water and piss I know what is, blue goop I don’t know from Adam.
I would argue that burning it for energy is better, for several reasons.
You spend X energy extracting Y carbons for plastic, then bury it.
You then also spend Z energy expending A carbons for fuel to do whatever.
If you use the plastic for fuel after processing it, you save Z energy.
The optics of “Plastic is so horrid we burn it for energy because we can’t recycle it meaningfully” is way better for eliminating plastic than “Oh, golly, it’s super duper recycled because we count it as recycled the moment the container leaves our shores!” And even with that, it’s still piss-poor recycling numbers before you count the “plastic burned in third world countries” value of “recycling.”
The argument against metal or glass is “But it’s heavy and will emit more carbon during transport.” This is why you end up with super thin crinkle plastic surrounding water bottles - it’s cheaper than the alternatives, once you’ve accepted plastics.
Blockquote A common thing is the billions of gallons of water to grow an almond milk for example - but where does that water go and how is it the cycle?
I believe almost all of it goes into the California desert sky as they water those almond trees almost daily, and not just a little bit.
I remember reading Cadilac Desert a decade or so ago and hearing that Idaho’s volcanic soil means excellent drainage. And because of that, we use 14 AcreFeet per acre to water potatoes. Marc Reisner called our potatoes hydroponically grown (14AF/acre = 14 feet deep of water dumped on the ground in one irrigation season!!). I’m not sure the situation has improved, but we’ve shifted some of the acreage to grow hay to feed dairy cows. Apparently, the reliability of irrigated hay harvest means more steady annual milk production, so great swathes of US dairy herds have moved from Wisconsin etc. to Idaho. This link says we grew from 160k to 270k from 2005-2015: Idaho DHIA.
That’s now up to 600k according to this (warning video autoplay): Idaho is known for its 'Famous Potatoes,' but there's a new cash cow in the state | ktvb.com
4x growth in 15 years, 2x in 5. Wow.
Re: water savings in irrigation, I’m actually not convinced that flood irrigation is worse than center pivot irrigation. I read long ago that the Egyptians learned to over irrigate because otherwise their soil turned too salty and yields dropped. Apparently that took about ~500 years to manifest, but when you’re there for millennia, it matters. It seems they learned if you over irrigate, that pushes the salt content (built up over centuries, plus last season’s solute) down out of the root zone. And yields improved after decades of decline. I haven’t been able to find the source I read this in (probably 15 years ago?), but it makes sense to me. If someone has a source, especially one that contradicts me, please post.
Here in the western US, we’ve only been irrigating for ~100 years. So it’ll be a while before soil salinity impacts us (probably). Peak oil will probably hurt yields much sooner than salinity, but who knows.
It’s hard to repair and reuse - even if it’s cheaper! I just had two situations where I had to stop myself from “buying new” - I have a Speed Queen commercial washer/dryer combo (where we’re only using the washer for now) that had the seal go bad - replacement part is something like $150.
And there’s a real temptation to instead think “that’s a $150 discount on a brand new one” even though the new part will work fine and make it completely serviceable.
(though the $40 mainboard will get it working, this one will likely be taken out of service at some point simply to save on energy costs, I’m sure I can get something that beats a dual 5520 Zeon system that is 10 years old for pretty cheap - I’ll want to get it used of course).
Amusingly on that I smelled the release of the magic smoke a MONTH ago - but it was still running so I didn’t touch it - and it finally shut off yesterday.
As an off-topic aside, WOW that Speed Queen was easy to work on. You can totally tell a product that has been refined over the years instead of trying to make a new model each year - minor things I noticed:
There’s a bracket with bolt holes in it the door mounts to, and said bracket is cut so it “fits” in place easy enough to line up with your hand holding it from below without disassembling the whole machine.
The frame has a small cutout just where a ratchet with extension would be when tightening a hard-to-get-to bolt.
Compared to other washers I’ve worked on it really is a step above - similar to server-grade hardware vs standard commodity PCs.
give or take a few billion, but yes
And the occasional dump run for big items.