More on the rebound effect--almost made it into the New Yorker!
Well, my letter almost made it into the New Yorker, but I just learned today that they had cut it for space reasons. They did a nice job shortening and editing it, though, and I was pleasantly surprised. Edited version follows:
“Owen’s article conflates two different effects: the rebound effect (people who buy a more efficient device use it more and so "take back” some of the energy savings) and the wealth effect (society gets richer so consumers buy more goods and services). Measurements of the true rebound effect almost universally show that the effect is either zero (for devices like cable boxes, where user behavior doesn’t affect energy consumption much) or small (like for automobiles). Proponents of the effect have argued that energy efficiency alone has caused people to buy bigger homes, more appliances, and more household goods, but there isn’t convincing evidence for this hypothesis. Instead, it’s technological improvements, productivity gains, and general wealth increases that are the major contributors to the overall rise in consumption. “
And this, I think, is the crux of the matter. The people who argue that rebound effects overwhelm efficiency don’t understand that rebound is only the "takeback” that can be attributed to efficiency alone, everything else being held constant.
And then there are the people who are willfully misrepresenting the research, like those at the Breakthrough Institute. A press release of theirs was quoted in a recent Climate Wire article as saying “"Greater energy efficiency helps us to become wealthier, which increases our overall demand for energy,” This statement reflects what I would call the “macro” rebound effect. Energy efficiency saves money, which is then respent on other goods and services. The problem with this line of argument is that energy is less than 10% of the economy, so that less than 10 cents of each dollar saved and respent (on average) can be directly attributed to increases in energy use. Therefore there’s no way that this macro rebound can wipe out all of the energy savings unless people only respend savings from efficiency on energy alone, and that’s just not a plausible scenario.
The folks who argue for what I would call “micro” ‘rebound have also failed to show that this effect is big enough to wipe out the energy savings, because there are no peer reviewed measurements that demonstrate this result. If anyone can point me to such results in the peer reviewed literature I’ll be happy to look at them, but odds are they just don’t exist.
So the people arguing for big rebounds don’t have much of a leg to stand on. I just wish they’d get another hobby so the rest of us with serious work to do can get on with it…
