Ref. :  000037155
Date :  2014-07-15
langue :  Anglais
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Energy efficiency: a threat for climate change


According to BP (2014) the Gross World Product will grow by some 3.5% until 2035, but since energy intensity (energy expended per unit produced) will fall by 1.9% each year, the world will consume 36% less for each unit produced. This is celebrated as an achievement, since less energy consumption means less emissions. However, looked at in absolute terms, carbon emissions will increase by 29% in this period, raising the mean temperature of the planet by some 4° C. What then are we celebrating? Undoubtedly, human stupidity.

It is commonly argued that growth of the Gross Product is inevitable, if not desirable, and that the reduction of energy intensity is a benefit. In fact, this could have an inverse interpretation. As costs diminish due to energy efficiency, there are lower prices and hence increased consumption. That is to say, the growth of the Gross Product will in reality respond to energy efficiency.

Let’s look at some data that support this. By 2005, automobiles in the United States had increased efficiency by some 40% compared to 1960. But the increase in the use of automobiles resulted in the average per capita consumption in private cars, in 2005, having increased by 30% (Hildyard et al, 2014).

According to a study by the World Energy Council (2004) energy intensity fell consistently since 1980 by an accumulative annual average of 1.5%. This means that energy intensity has been reduced on a global level by 36% over the last thirty years. Nevertheless, the world doubled its energy consumption during this same period, from 6.633 Mteps in 1980 to 12.476 in 2012 (BP, 2013).

The cited new BP report recalls what the future has in store. Between 2012 and 2035 energy intensity will fall by 36% but the consumption of energy will be tripled due to a tenfold increase in the Gross Product.

This has its correlation in the intensity of carbon, that is to say, the quantity of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere per unit of energy consumed.

China boasts that it has reduced the intensity of carbon in their electrical industry from 900 gCO2/kWh to 740 gCO2/kWh between 2003 and 2012 (IEA 2013). But in the same period the consumption of electricity went from 1910 TWh to 4938 TWh. That is to say, the energy intensity of electricity in China was reduced by 18% but the net emissions of the sector grew by 125%.

At the global level, energy intensity will fall by 8% between 2012 and 2035 according to BP, but emissions from the energy sector will increase by 29%.

There is nothing new here. This is a truth that has been known since 1865, when Jacob Stanley Jevons noted that technological improvements in steam engines had achieved greater production, but there was no reduction in coal consumption, rather it had increased. “It is a total confusion of ideas to suppose that the economic utilization of fuel is equivalent to a reduction in consumption. The truth is just the opposite,” he wrote (Jevons, 1865). Since that time this phenomenon has been known as the “Jevons paradox”, or in today’s terms, the “rebound effect.”

Energy efficiency in the use of fossil fuel (or of electricity generated by fossil fuels) does not result in a reduction of energy consumption or carbon emissions, rather these are increased, as indicated by the numbers presented above. Only a drastic reduction, in absolute terms rather than relative terms, in the consumption of fossil fuels could lower emissions.

This could only happen with a reduction of the Gross Product, since renewable energies are incapable of supplying the quantity of energy needed for the expected level of economic growth.

It is argued that growth is necessary to eradicate poverty. It is hardly necessary to adduce numbers to show the increase in Gross World production over the last fifty years and how little this has resulted in a diminishing of poverty. I will only mention that from 1980 to the present we still have a billion people without access to electricity and 2.5 billion people who continue to collect biomass for cooking in spite of the fact that the consumption of electricity has doubled (IEA, 2011)

It is not true that an increase in the Gross Product is necessary to reduce poverty. Nor is it true that energy efficiency will reduce emissions. Rather it appears that in both cases, the contrary is true.

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

Gerardo Honty is a researcher for CLAES (Centro Latinoamericano de Ecología Social)


Bibliography cited:

(IEA) International Energy Agency (2011) “Energy for all. Financing access for the poor. Special early excerpt of the World Energy Outlook 2011”. Paris. International Energy Agency.

(IEA) International Energy Agency (2013) “Redrawing the energy-climate map” Paris. International Energy Agency.

BP (2013) “Statistical Review of World Energy 2013”. Londres. BP.

BP (2014) Energy Outlook 2035. http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/energy-economics/energy-outlook.html

(WEC) World Energy Council (2010). 2010 Survey of Energy Resources. Londres. WEC.

Hildyard Nicholas, Larry Lohmann y Sarah Sexton (2014) Seguridad energética ¿para qué? ¿para quién? Ed.Libros en Acción, Madrid

Jevons, William S.: The Coal Question. An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines. (1865) Macmillan and Co. Londres.


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