“With my much shorter commute in my car that gets half the gas mileage of a Prius, I am actually using less natural resources than the Prius owner!”
In economics, the Jevons Paradox is an observation made by William Stanley Jevons, that as technological improvements increase the efficiency with which a resource is used, total consumption of that resource may increase, rather than decrease. It is historically called the Jevons Paradox as it ran counter to Jevons’s intuition. However, the situation is well understood in modern economics. In addition to reducing the amount needed for a given output, improved efficiency lowers the cost of using a resource – which increases demand. Overall resource use increases or decreases depending on which effect predominates.
“The future will probably go more towards a hydrogen economy with the energy to crack that hydrogen provided by solar, nuclear, wind, and geothermal sources – but thats still quite a ways off.”
I won’t hold my breath for that one.
Ethanol has a very poor EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) You get the same amount of energy out as the amount you put it in. Strike it off the list. With the arable soil and water demands makes it a completely stupid idea. Please take note of the food riots.
Electric cars will never be scaled up to any level close to what we see for personal transport today for numerous reasons.
What we are seeing right now on the oil market it is an accelerated decrease in crude available to the world market due to increased consumption in oil exporting countries. We are actually down about 4.1 % since 2006 in exportable crude. At the current rate of price increase we will double every 14 months with a slightly quicker increase in basic food prices. Once we fall off the the current world production plateau of crude, which most likely will happen in 1-3 years, the decrease in available crude will exponentially grow. I’m sure you could imagine what will happen to prices when this happens along with spot shortages which are happening ever so more often around the globe.
The larger question is can we deploy any meaningful changes before our economy grinds to a halt from high prices. Currently we are pretty far off from anything scaleable if you really dig down and study the alternatives. Most leave more questions than answers. Unfortunately we do not invest in mass transit, electrified rail works great ask japan and europe. And with the capital impaired world we are entering it is unlikely we will.
Also, can we have GDP growth ever again with less and less available total energy.
Another question to ask yourself is what do airlines going BK, food riots and IMO our foreign policy have in common. If you can understand that you can envision what is to come.
Heres to hoping for the “just in time” technology fairy because we are going to need it…
