Efficiency is (Often) Bad For the Planet

Jevons Paradox and the Failure of The Energy Transition

Smashed cars at a junkyard. Junkyards drive down the cost of maintaining a car, making the technology more accessible. From a limited equity perspective, this is good (I took this photo while getting some parts for my car that I couldn’t otherwise afford). But from an ecological perspective, lower barriers to entry — in this case, increased efficiency created by the re-use of automotive parts — leads to higher overall consumption. Photo by the author.

This piece is an excerpt from the 2021 book I co-authored, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, which examines the problems with mainstream responses to the climate crisis.

The book makes the case that solar and wind energy, electric cars, efficiency programs, and green cities are failing to protect the planet, because in large part these approaches aren’t designed to do so. Rather, they’re aimed at protecting empire from the effects of peak oil and ecological collapse — sustaining industrial civilization, not the natural world.

This excerpt is taken from Chapter 7, “Efficiency,” and has been slightly edited for publication here.

Chapter 7: Efficiency

Through the green economy an attempt is being made to technologize, financialize, privatize, and commodify all of the earth’s resources and living processes.

— Vandana Shiva

In 2007, Google began to invest heavily in “renewable” energy technology, especially in startups and research. Their goal was to generate electricity more cheaply than could a coal-fired power plant, and to do so within a few years.

In 2011, the project was shut down.

Two Google renewable energy engineers who worked on the project, Ross Koningstein and David Fork (each of whom holds a PhD from Stanford), later stated they “came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions.”

In other words, they’d realized that the premise of their work—that cheap green energy would significantly reduce emissions—was false.

In case you’re new here, this is Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, overshoot, greenwashing, and resistance. It’s written by me, Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It and co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass. If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. In return for supporting my activism, paid subscribers receive access to occasional private posts containing behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts.

Koningstein and Fork explained further:

“Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work.... Our study’s best-case scenario modeled our most optimistic assumptions about cost reductions in solar power, wind power, energy storage, and electric vehicles. In this scenario, the United States would cut greenhouse gas emissions dramatically: Emissions could be 55 percent below the business-as-usual projection for 2050.

While a large cut in emissions sure sounded good, this scenario still showed substantial use of natural gas in the electricity sector. That’s because today’s renewable energy sources are limited by suitable geography and their own intermittent power production. Wind farms, for example, make economic sense only in parts of the country with strong and steady winds. The study also showed continued fossil fuel use in transportation, agriculture, and construction.

Even if our best-case scenario were achievable, we wondered: Would it really be a climate victory?”

They continued,

“Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use....

This 2024 Reuters headline confirms that we’re more or less on the track that Google’s researchers predicted 13 years ago.

Those calculations cast our work at Google’s RE<C program in a sobering new light. Suppose for a moment that it had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario.

Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking: Not only had RE<C failed to reach its goal of creating energy cheaper than coal, but that goal had not been ambitious enough to reverse climate change.”

While the Google engineers do suggest reforestation as a partial answer to global warming, their primary hope seems to be the technological equivalent of wishing upon a star: “technologies [that] haven’t been invented yet.”

Part of the foundation of any plan for a green economy is “efficiency.” We could have predicted these headlines: “EVs Will Save the World (With Help From Energy Efficiency & Renewables),” “Save Energy, Save the World,” and “Save the World by Saving Energy in Your Home.”

As part of his “100 percent clean energy transition,” prominent green energy advocate Mark Z. Jacobson calls for a 40 percent improvement in overall energy efficiency in the global economy. The word efficiency appears 33 times in his widely applauded 16-page Energy Policy article from 2010. The word nature appears not at all.

We’ve discussed some of the problems with other parts of his plan elsewhere in this book. What about efficiency?

Here’s a question that gets to the heart of the efficiency question: Which scenario would cause less harm to the planet: all cars traveling 100 miles per gallon of gasoline or all cars traveling one mile per gallon?

Jacobson rests comfortably (in the driver’s seat of his $100,000 Tesla Roadster) in the more-miles-per-unit-of-energy club. Most mainstream environmentalists, bright greens, and indeed most people in general, have by now joined him in this not-very-exclusive club. A car that gets 100 mpg is more efficient, more cost effective, more advanced. It’s clearly so much better for the planet that the question seems absurd.

From the perspective of a salmon, however, or an old-growth forest, things look much different. A car that gets only one mpg would probably be far less harmful to the planet, because low efficiency creates a disincentive for driving, and indeed for the existence of cars at all.

If you get one mpg, and gas costs $3 per gallon, you’re paying three bucks a mile. Suddenly, walking starts to look a lot more attractive. For example, recently I drove five miles each way to eat at a wonderful taqueria, but there’s no way I would have paid an extra $30 for the admittedly delicious tacos. If every car got one mile per gallon, why would any of us buy a car in the first place? Why pay thousands of dollars for what essentially amounts to a pricey motorized wheelbarrow?

If cars are that inefficient, why build them?

Building highly efficient cars, on the other hand, reduces the cost of driving and lowers barriers to commerce. More cars will be built, and with economies of scale, the cost of each car will fall. This makes the technology accessible to more people, accelerating the cycle of production and consumption. More car sales drive car culture as a whole by creating greater need for asphalt, roads, parking lots, and so on. Suburban sprawl becomes not only feasible but inevitable. Politics follows this momentum. Government budgets shift, adding trillions of dollars in road construction to the subsidies for car manufacturers. More land is bulldozed, more factories are built, and more concrete, steel, and plastics produced. Toxins and global warming increase, and biodiversity declines.

If you value technological escalation and human mobility for those who can afford it, then 100 mpg sounds great. If, on the other hand, you value the millions of animals (more than a trillion, including insects) killed by cars each year, the mountains destroyed for mineral extraction, the habitat fragmented by roads, or the air polluted by the manufacture, distribution, operation, and disposal of cars, then one mpg—a level of efficiency that disincentivizes car culture itself—might seem a better option.

Earlier, we cited Richard York saying that for every unit of green energy brought online, only a tenth as much fossil-fuel generated electricity is taken offline. He’s a sociologist and co-author of The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, and author of articles with titles like, “Do Alternative Energy Sources Displace Fossil Fuels?” (spoiler: no) and “Choking on Modernity: A Human Ecology of Air Pollution.”

In an interview, he told me: “Efficiency sets in motion certain models of development that can have unintended consequences.... Look at whaling. It was the main source of oil for lamps for a long time. But whaling expanded after the rise of petroleum oil, not because there was a demand for whale oil but because fossil fuels expanded the reach and effectiveness of the whaling fleets. Then the whalers found markets in which to sell their whale oil. Production drove demand.”

A core reason technological efficiency is harmful to the land is that low efficiency limits growth. For example, in desert regions such as Las Vegas, there isn’t enough water to keep building new homes and businesses indefinitely, and real estate without water is monetarily almost worthless. As long as the number of households remains the same, efficiency might be good for the land, since greater efficiency means less water taken for use by humans. But that isn’t what happens. Instead of reducing overall water demand, efficiency in arid areas frees up water for new subdivisions, leading to more urban sprawl and habitat destruction. As before, all the water is stolen for human use, only now the situation is worse than it would have been otherwise.

The efficiency of American homes tells the same story. Between 1970 and 2014, American homes became almost a third more energy efficient, but average house size grew by 28 percent. The average home today uses the same amount of energy it did 40 years ago, but the extra size also means more embodied energy, greater material demands for construction, and more rooms to be filled with cheap Ikea furniture. Did efficiency advances—in production of raw materials, labor, construction, and so on—enable the size increases, or did size increases drive a greater need for efficiency? The truth is that growth and efficiency are all wrapped together. And through all of this, the earth loses.

Productivity and efficiency go together outside of individual home construction, too. In business, increased efficiency lowers costs and raises profits. Since businesses in capitalism have a growth imperative, a portion of the profits or savings from any efficiency increase will be reinvested in growth. On a macroeconomic scale, increased efficiency leads directly to growth.

Economists have understood this since at least 1865, when William Stanley Jevons, a British mathematician and pioneer in economic theory, published his book The Coal Question. This was in the midst of the industrial revolution, and the U.K.’s economy depended on coal. Coal-fired steam engines pumped water, ground grain, propelled trains and boats, excavated canals, powered factories, and dug more coal. Jevons wrote, “[Coal] is the material energy of the country—the universal aid—the factor in everything we do.”

Prior to the publication of The Coal Question, several new steam engine designs and improvements, starting with Boulton’s and Watt’s improvements in the 1790s, had boosted efficiency. A key section of The Coal Question examined the impact of this increased efficiency on coal consumption. Jevons concluded, “The economical use of coal [will not] reduce its consumption. On the contrary, economy renders the employment of coal more profitable, and thus the present demand for coal is increased.”

This is crucial: Increased efficiency not only doesn’t generally reduce demand, but instead increases it. This is called “the rebound effect,” and we see it all the time.

Total global energy use by human beings has been increasing for at least the several hundred years for which data is available, and almost certainly for 10,000 years, since the beginning of civilization. During this time, the efficiency with which human civilizations use both energy and materials has also risen more or less steadily. Today, farms feed 10 times as many people per acre as in early agricultural societies. Has that increase in efficiency meant less land under cultivation or, instead, greater population? Of course, it’s the latter. Likewise, has the increase in water-use efficiency meant more water left in rivers, or more land under irrigation? Of course, once again, it’s the latter. Has the near doubling in automobile fuel efficiency standards over the last 40 years meant less gasoline is burned? Of course not.

Efficiency has risen in production, too. Early factories were powered by mills or steam engines, with this power then transmitted through mechanical straps, gears, and shafts that were only about 25 percent efficient: three-quarters of the energy was lost to friction. Later, these mechanical systems were replaced by DC electric lines powering motors, then the more efficient AC. Today, electrical transmission and distribution in the U.S. results in only about a 10 percent loss in energy. New high-voltage direct current (HVDC) cables are being used to carry power long distances with even greater efficiency. In the near future, superconducting power lines may reduce transmission losses to almost zero. Has that increase in electrical transmission efficiency meant less electrical generation? Of course not.

The trend has remained constant for hundreds (and probably thousands) of years. As efficiency has increased, so has total energy use.¹

The Jevons Paradox obviously applies not just to energy use. A 2017 article in MIT News, entitled “Technological progress alone won’t stem resource use: Researchers find no evidence of an overall reduction in the world’s consumption of materials,” discussed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-led study that “gathered data for 57 common goods and services, including widely used chemical components such as ammonia, formaldehyde, polyester fiber, and styrene, along with hardware and energy technologies such as transistors, laser diodes, crude oil, photovoltaics, and wind energy. They worked the data for each product into their equation, and, despite seeing technological improvements in almost all cases, they failed to find a single case in which dematerialization—an overall reduction in materials—was taking place.

In follow-up work, the researchers were eventually able to identify six cases in which an absolute decline in materials usage has occurred. However, these cases mostly include toxic chemicals such as asbestos and thallium, whose dematerialization was due not to technological advances, but to government intervention. There was one other case in which researchers observed dematerialization: wool. The material’s usage has significantly fallen, due to innovations in synthetic alternatives, such as nylon and polyester fabrics. In this case, Magee argues that substitution, and not dematerialization, has occurred. In other words, wool has simply been replaced by another material to fill the same function.”

One of the lead authors notes, “There is a techno-optimist’s position that says technological change will fix the environment. This [study] says, probably not.”

I’m walking in a forest near the coast of Washington. I come to a broad meadow. Endangered Makah copper butterflies live here. Labrador tea grows in acidic boggy soil. Cedar waxwings gather huckleberries from tall shrubs. Many threatened and sensitive plant species, including Alaska plantain, Vancouver groundcone, swamp gentian, and goldthread live here, too.

The land begins to slope down, and the forest closes back in. The soil is moist, even now in the heart of summer. Skunk cabbage and beargrass grow on either side of the path. I smell the ocean. I hear sea lions barking. The trail is steeper now. After passing through thickets of salal and nettle, I step out of the forest and onto the beach. Rocky, forested islands rise in the offshore mist. The water is still. A heron wades in the tide. Seaweed lies in great mounds, where winter storms piled it.

This place is still rich in life, even in the midst of the biotic cleansing that has been underway for centuries here, millennia around the world. I cannot imagine how fecund it was in the past.

This is Makah land; the word Makah means “generous with food.”

I turn north, and after a time come to the site of an old Makah village. According to their histories, the Makah lived here since the beginning of time. Scientists can carbon-date their existence here to at least 2,500 years ago, and likely 8,000 or more. And if you believe Vine Deloria Jr. and some new archeology, human habitation of the West Coast may be much, much older. Whatever you believe, they lived here a long time.

A slow mudslide destroyed the village around 275 years ago; the people survived, but most families moved elsewhere. The village was finally abandoned in the 1930s when it became illegal to keep children out of school, and the last Makah occupants were forced to move to Neah Bay.

Now, the bluff where the village stood is mostly overgrown. A cedar longhouse built in the 1980s stands as a memorial to the site. Winter storms are slowly eroding the soil of the bluff, exposing layers of history.

I pick my way across driftwood toward the hillside. Shells and small bones are exposed here and there. I spot two whale bones, barely visible, caked in dirt. I look closer, and see a vertebra three feet across, and a fin bone with a triangular cross-section.

The Makah were one of a few nations in this region to hunt whales, rowing in cedar canoes to harpoon Gray and Humpback whales, then attaching seal-skin floats and towing their bodies to the village through cold Pacific swells. A single hunt could feed the village for weeks.

The Makah used each part of a whale; oil for rendering, meat for food, bone and sinew for tools, gut for storage containers. Even “trash” served a purpose: bones discarded nearby fed minerals to the trees and served as chews for mammals.

You could call this “efficiency,” but the term doesn’t fit. A better alternative might be “diversity.”

In the natural world, diversity is a functional counterpoint to the industrial idea of efficiency. Most natural communities, looked at in parts, are not efficient at all. Grizzly bears, for example, often eat only the fattiest parts of salmon, leaving behind the rest. But because natural communities have evolved around diversity and not efficiency, there are thousands of other beings—trees, shrubs, mosses, beetles, slugs, coyotes, wolves, eagles, ravens, and so on—who eat the remainder of the salmon. The strength of the community comes not from its efficiency—its ability, to use the dictionary definition, to “achieve maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense”—but from its diversity.

If we’re going to talk about capitalism’s obsession with efficiency and productivity, we need to talk about Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Born to a wealthy Philadelphia family in 1856, Taylor was from childhood fixated on efficiency. A boyhood friend noted that Taylor would “endeavor to discover the step which would cover the greatest distance with the least expenditure of energy; or the easiest method of vaulting a fence; the right length and proportions of a walking staff.” At 17, Taylor went to work at Enterprise Hydraulic Works, a factory that made steam-powered pumps and machinery. He became obsessed with the contrast between the efficient precision of machinery and the wasteful fallibility of human beings. As one history notes, “The industrial revolution had ushered in a new era of technology [but] the management structures that held everything in place had not changed since the days of artisans, small shops, and guilds: knowledge was largely rule of thumb, acquired through tips and tricks that would trickle down to aspiring craftsmen over the course of long apprenticeships.” As Taylor wrote, this was highly inefficient; “It had no scientific basis.”

Taylor didn’t hide his contempt for workers. In his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor describes the average laborer as “so stupid and phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type.... He is so stupid that the word ‘percentage’ has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before he can be successful.”

And Taylor saw himself as that more intelligent man. For the next 25 years, he worked relentlessly to “train” the “oxen.” “Armed with a pen, a ledger, and a stopwatch, Taylor hovered over workers on the shop floor, timing every procedure, tweaking their actions, and timing again. He hired an assistant to catalogue the duration of every variant of every procedure. Determined to be as ‘scientific’ as possible in his optimizing, he followed the reductionist impulses of classical mechanics, breaking every job down to its most granular elements.” Based on these measurements, Taylor would prescribe a new set of procedures for each worker, laying out the most efficient actions they should take to carry out their job and time requirements that must be met. Employees who didn’t meet the required speed would be fired.

The results were, for the capitalists, astonishing. “The cost of overhauling boilers dropped from $62 (around $2,000 today) to $11; machining a tire could now be done in one-fifth of the previous time; making a cannon projectile now took just ninety minutes instead of ten hours; 1,200 could now do work that would have taken 2,000 people at any other company.”

Taylor put in place similar procedures in hundreds of businesses. Scientific management overran the nation, then the world, moving from factories into government, schools, and private homes. “Best practices” for everything from the best way to lay brick to the correct way to insert paper into a typewriter to the most efficient way to sit at a desk became standardized.

 Please note that these increases in productivity did not lead to increases in leisure (which Jevons could have predicted)—as in the laborers doing their jobs in less time and then going home to have fun with their families—but rather to increases in profits and production. For bosses, it was a revelation. But for workers and for the planet, it was a disaster.

Workers who had been trained in a more human workplace, where attitude and experience were valued more highly than raw productivity, went on strike. Managers fired them en masse, since the new standardized procedures meant even skilled workers could be replaced by a smaller force of cheaper unskilled laborers.

It’s hard to overstate the influence of Taylor and his “disciples.” Scientific management deeply influenced American capitalism and shaped Lenin’s economic approach in Soviet Russia. Management expert Peter Drucker ranked Taylor with Freud and Darwin as some of the most influential people who have ever lived. Journalist Ida Tarbell called him “one of the few creative geniuses of our time.”

Historian Robert Kanigel wrote, “It could seem that all of modern society had [by the late 1920s] come under the sway of a single commanding idea: that waste was wrong and efficiency the highest good.”

Taylor, a devout Quaker, believed that his efficiency programs would abolish class divisions by raising wages and enabling more efficient production of goods which could be distributed fairly and cheaply. He was, of course, dead wrong. Just like efficiency doesn’t reduce overall consumption, it doesn’t abolish class divisions.

“In my judgement,” Taylor wrote, “the best possible measure of the height in the scale of civilization to which any people has arisen is its productivity.”

When you’re working for the most powerful businesses in the world, it makes sense to say this. Productivity is what leads nations and corporations to power. Productivity is what manufactures guns, drives factories, enables more resource-extraction from more colonies.

Whether they admit it or not, most  bright greens—and others who value production over life on the planet; those who are trying to save civilization and its industrial production even as it grinds away at life—agree with Taylor’s comment above. Productivity does lead to further “progress,” and “progress” defines civilization.

Taylor’s conceit is a common failing. As the great Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan said, “Progress is a sort of madness that is a god to people. Decent people commit horrible crimes that are acceptable because of progress.”

Including, clearly, the murder of the planet.

The results of Taylorism are entirely predictable: efficiency leads to profit, profit leads to growth, and more money goes to managers, owners, and stockholders, not to the poor. Industries expand. The middle class grows, but only in the heart of empire. More forests fall, more mountains are mined, and more products are manufactured.

Remember that it’s possible to have a carbon-neutral civilization and still destroy the planet. Remember this as if your life depends on it, because it does. Global warming plays a role in only a small percentage of the two hundred species driven extinct every day. Salmon were nearly exterminated before climate change became significant. So were bison. So were old-growth forests and ancient grasslands and so many rivers. Fossil fuel is an accelerant, but it’s not the reason. The catastrophe is civilization itself.

The roll is so long and so grim. The Syrian elephant was hunted to death for its ivory before 100 B.C.E. The Roman Empire sent the Atlas bear into decline, captured by the thousands so their deaths could be enjoyed in the Coliseum. The Mauritius blue pigeon was rare by 1755 and extinct by the 1830s when its island was deforested. Its scientific name, Columba nitidissima, means “most brilliant pigeon” for its metallic blue feathers. Three taxidermic specimens are all that remain. The casualty list of species taken with the pigeon is harrowing: an owl, a parrot, a duck, a heron, two giant tortoises, a small flying fox—the list goes on, an utterly senseless requiem. The Japanese Hokkaido wolf was exterminated in 1889, killed en masse with strychnine, which is “an atrocious death.” It wasn’t always thus. The indigenous Ainu called the wolf Horkew Kamuy, or "howling god". Many Ainu believe they are the descendants of a goddess who mated with a wolf, and their culture requires respect and care for wolves. In case it needs saying, you care for your family; you don’t torture them to death.

The choice before us is stark. We can try to find more fuel sources to devour the last of the living, or we can fight to save our wild and blessed kin.

1. Many bright greens pretend the Jevons Paradox is bunk, but their refutations rely on vast oversimplifications—essentially looking at small parts of the global economy in isolation. By separating a single minor portion of the global economy (such as air conditioners) for their analysis, they distort the focus of the Jevons Paradox. In the 1860s, coal was core to the British economy. In an increasingly globalized, integrated world, the Jevons Paradox can’t be applied in isolation. Its lessons are systemic. Yes; in isolation, energy efficiency can lead to lower proximal energy use. But there is no isolation in today’s economy.