This week’s post presents several important concepts that I believe should be understood by anybody interested in the subject of energy efficiency as it relates to environmentalism. It is intended to serve as a bridge between last week’s examination of one particular aspect of the recent changes to the National Construction code - an increase in the stringency in the energy efficiency provisions - and next week’s post, in which I will attempt to tie it all together by examining the implications of these concepts on the idea of ‘green’ buildings, and indeed on the deeper meaning of ‘house’ itself.

Technique

In his book The Technological Society (1964), the French philosopher Jacques Ellul defines technique as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity." As this definition makes clear, Ellul’s concept is not limited to technology in the material sense, but also encompasses process and procedure, methodology, bureaucracy, labour organisation, and so on. In Ellul’s view, technique is not a mere tool or function of people in society, but rather, in James Fowler’s explanation, “the defining force, the ultimate value, of a new social order in which efficiency was no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity” by which “rationalistic proceduralism imposed an artificial value system of measuring and organizing everything quantitatively rather than qualitatively.”

The Jevons Paradox

The English economist and logician William Stanley Jevons was the first to describe what has become known as the Jevons paradox or the Jevons effect in his book The Coal Question (1865). The paradox is this: any increase in the efficiency with which a resource is consumed will result in an increase in the overall consumption of that resource. Jevons observed that the increase in the efficiency of steam engines - their ability to do more work with the same amount of coal, or use less coal for the same amount of work - resulted in an overall increase in the consumption of coal, not a decrease. This is because more efficient steam engines are cheaper to operate and thus become economically viable in a wider variety of applications: although the amount of coal required per steam engine to do a given amount of work goes down, the total number of steam engines, and the total consumption of coal, goes up.

The Jevons paradox is more of a counter-intuitive statement than a true paradox, but ‘paradox’ has proven to be a good term, as it gives a sense of just how resistant so many people are today to really internalising its meaning. Not because it is a particularly difficult concept to understand, but because it cuts to the heart of, and has uncomfortable implications for, the dream of ‘green’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ technology and the whole superstructure of technique that has grown up around it. The Jevons paradox gives the lie to the ideal of efficiency in the service of the environment, by pointing out that any energy or resources you save will just be used by someone else.

Perhaps rather than ‘counter-intuitive’ we should call the Jevons paradox ‘counter-ideological’, because the validity of entire green industry rests on the implicit assumption that the opposite is true: that an increase in the efficiency of consumption results in a decrease in overall consumption. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his worldview depends on his not understanding it.

Complexification

In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), the American anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter puts forward the thesis that technology plays a major role in the collapse of civilisations. Very simply put, the mechanism is this: problems are identified in society and novel technologies are developed to solve them; these technological solutions by their nature give rise to new problems, which in turn give rise to new technological solutions, and so on, with technology or technique piling on itself, increasing like the heads of the Hydra in a fractal-like multiplication and elaboration at ever-finer levels of complexity.

As an example of this phenomenon, Tainter has given the problem of vehicular CO2 emissions, which resulted in the mass-market hybrid car, where the solution was arrived at by providing cars with two power units instead of one, representing a huge increase in complexity. The solution itself was arguably a success, given that hybrids like the Toyota Prius can achieve fuel efficiencies of around 5 litres per 100km, impressive numbers when compared to a modern internal combustion-only car, but still only about the same as the Citroen 2cv, first produced in 1948.

But what about purely electric vehicles like the Tesla? you might ask. The increase in complexity in modern vehicles is not limited to the powertrain, of course: it is also driven by comfort, safety, the need for speed, reliability, and a whole host of other factors. I don’t mean to suggest that these things are bad, or in any way not genuine improvements, just that we should also accept that they come with costs. Electronification in particular has vastly increased the complexity of cars, and has been made possible by the invention of the transistor, then the integrated circuit, then increases in the processing power of silicon chips and the efficiency of their manufacture.

Weight is a good proxy for complexity in cars: the 2cv weighs in at around 585kg; a Prius is more than double that at around 1200kg. Teslas weigh anywhere from around 1700kg to 2400kg, and a single Tesla battery alone doesn’t weigh that much less than an entire 2cv. These weights are representative not only of energy consumption per unit distance, whether than be petrol or electricity, but also of the sheer amount of material and energy embodied in the manufacture of the vehicle itself.

Here we see the Jevons paradox at work, both at the resource level and at the product level: despite increases in chip efficiency, world silicon production has increased from around 4 million tonnes annually in 1990 to around 9 million today; cars per unit are ever-more efficient in their fuel consumption, but the total number of cars produced goes ever upwards.

Fungibility and Liebig’s Law

In discussions of resource availability and depletion, it is often assumed that resources are fungible: that is, when any particular resource becomes unavailable or too expensive through scarcity, it can simply be swapped out for another without significant effects. This assumption is especially common in regard to energy, the ‘master’ resource upon which the extraction and utilisation of all other resources depend. As the thinking goes, coal replaced wood as the primary energy source at the beginning of the industrial revolution, then oil and gas overtook coal, and now ‘renewable’ energy sources such as solar, hydro, and wind are poised to replace fossil fuels. This leads us to Liebig’s law, or the law of the minimum, developed by the German botanist Carl Sprengel in 1840. Liebig’s law states that the growth or health of any system is limited not by the total resources available, but by the availability of the least available resource. To illustrate this concept, let’s take an example from agriculture, the field where Liebig’s law was first formulated: it doesn’t matter if you have perfect rainfall, sunlight and heat, and your soil is perfectly balanced in all other essential minerals; if the soil is deficient in nitrogen, then it is the level of nitrogen that will determine the ultimate health and yield of your wheat crop.

A joule from a wind turbine may be fungible with a joule from a coal-fired power plant, but this doesn’t mean that the energy sources themselves are equivalent in other ways. Fossil fuels are taken so for granted that it’s easy to forget what a miracle they are in terms of their energy density, storability, and ‘readiness’. Coal in particular can be literally dug out of the ground and burnt to obtain energy without processing or any other intermediate steps. Wind turbines must be built (of large amounts of concrete, steel, fibreglass, and rare elements), transported, erected, and maintained, and all of these stages require their own energy inputs; they have a limited lifespan and eventually fail; and they are ultimately harvesting a low-density source of energy: wind (which is really a form of solar energy). The same things are true of photovoltaic solar. People will often counter these objections by an appeal to technological omnipotence: claiming that when rare-earth elements become scarce, we will go to space and mine them from asteroids; or that wind turbines will eventually be made by and with self-replicating bacteria; or some other iteration of “they (scientists) will think of something.” But these fantasies are based on nothing more than a kind of quasi-religious faith in technology and progress.