Thought du Jour

Columnist John Tierney reports that increased energy efficiency cannot be relied on to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and are likely to increase emissions. The problem is known as the ‘rebound effect’ or ‘Jevons paradox‘, named after English economist William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882). Improvements in fuel efficiency, Jevons warned, do not reduce total consumption of fuel.

[A] growing number of economists say that the environmental benefits of energy efficiency have been oversold. Paradoxically, there could even be more emissions as a result of some improvements in energy efficiency, these economists say.

The problem is known as the energy rebound effect. While there’s no doubt that fuel-efficient cars burn less gasoline per mile, the lower cost at the pump tends to encourage extra driving. There’s also an indirect rebound effect as drivers use the money they save on gasoline to buy other things that produce greenhouse emissions, like new electronic gadgets or vacation trips on fuel-burning planes. ….

Consider what’s happened with lighting over the past three centuries. As people have switched from candles to oil-powered lamps to incandescent bulbs and beyond, the amount of energy needed to produce a unit of light has plummeted. Yet people have found so many new places to light that today we spend the same proportion of our income on light as our much poorer ancestors did in 1700, according to an analysis published last year in The Journal of Physics by researchers led by Jeff Tsao of Sandia National Laboratories.  ….

But if the benefits of energy efficiency have been oversold, then that’s more reason to consider alternatives like a carbon tax ….

John Tierney, “When Energy Efficiency Sullies the Environment“, New York Times, 8 March 2011.

[T]he environmental threats that matter are the slow, continuous ones, not the telegenic sensations like oil spills. BP’s spill is known to have killed just over 1,300 birds so far. Just one wind farm, at Altamont Pass in California, was until recently known to kill perhaps 1,300 birds of prey every year. If BP really wants to kill birds, it should indeed go beyond petroleum and into wind, an industry that kills far more rare birds per joule of energy produced than oil does.

Matt Ridley, “Natural resilience”, The Rational Optimist, 19 July 2010.

Biologist Matt Ridley (1958-) is author of several works of popular science, most recently The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (HarperCollins, 2010). He is a former science editor of The Economist.

Posted without comment at Steve Landsburg’s blog.

Oxford economist Paul Collier has written a superb column on the ethics of environmentalism that contains this wonderful passage:

The valid moral insight in environmentalism is that natural assets are special: we did not create them, yet we are depleting them. But the romantic wing of the movement then wrongly infers that the exploitation of nature intrinsically infringes the rights of the future. Economists should be bringing the insight that natural assets matter not because of their intrinsic purity, but because they are valuable. Our obligation to the future is not to preserve purity but to pass on equivalent value for the natural assets we deplete. If, by converting natural assets into more productive assets, a poor society can escape poverty, then it should do so.

Paul Collier, “Towards a new ethics of nature”, Financial Times, 26 May 2010.

Access to the full column requires subscription.

Professor Collier is author of The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Oxford University Press, 2007) and was Director of the Development Research group at the World Bank from April 1998 to April 2003. Bill Easterly wrote a critical review of Collier’s book. For positive reviews, see Martin Wolf and Niall Ferguson . I expressed my own (very positive) opinion of the book long ago in a TdJ:

This is an amazing book that is a very good read–no footnotes, no bibliography, no charts, no tables–even though it was written by an academic economist. Everyone–economist or not–will learn something from it.

“Why poor countries should not emulate Cuba”, Thought du Jour, 31 August 2007.

Craig Venter, the US genomics pioneer, announced on Thursday that scientists at his laboratories … had succeeded in their 15-year project to make the world’s first “synthetic cells” – bacteria called Mycoplasma mycoides.

“We have passed through a critical psychological barrier,” Dr Venter told the FT. “It has changed my own thinking, both scientifically and philosophically, about life and how it works.” ….

“Venter is creaking open the most profound door in humanity’s history, potentially peeking into its destiny,” said Julian Savulescu, ethics professor at Oxford University. ….

Experts warn of the risks as well as the benefits of synthetic biology. “We need new standards of safety evaluation for this kind of radical research and protections from military or terrorist misuse and abuse,” said Prof Savulescu.

Clive Cookson, “Scientists create a living organism”, Financial Times, 21 May 2010.

M mycoides is a simple microbe with no immediate application. Researchers are now moving on to more useful targets, such as the design of synthetic algae to capture carbon dioxide from the air and produce biofuels.

Dr Venter claims to have created “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer”. Not everyone is convinced

Dr. Venter’s assertion that he has created a “synthetic cell” has alarmed people who think that means he has created a new life form or an artificial cell. “Of course that’s not right — its ancestor is a biological life form,” said Dr. [Gerald] Joyce [a biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California].

Dr. Venter copied the DNA from one species of bacteria and inserted it into another. The second bacteria made all the proteins and organelles in the so-called “synthetic cell,” by following the specifications implicit in the structure of the inserted DNA.

“My worry is that some people are going to draw the conclusion that they have created a new life form,” said Jim Collins, a bioengineer at Boston University. “What they have created is an organism with a synthesized natural genome. But it doesn’t represent the creation of life from scratch or the creation of a new life form,” he said.

Nicholas Wade, “Researchers Say They Created a ‘Synthetic Cell’”, New York Times, 21 May 2010.

Science Magazine has published the findings of Dr Venter and his co-researchers. The full text of their article can be downloaded here.