Jevon's paradox
 

Good read Frank.

Food for thought.

What a vicious circle. I guess it's only a paradox if you don't think about it.

Frank -

Een-tay-rest-ink. As I read the first two paragraphs I was thinking of a solution to the paradox. Then I read the last paragraph and realized that it was the same solution. It also sounds like an argument for the EU fuel tax that keeps gas prices high.

It's nice to have a name for something that allows for a concise explanation.

CarloSW2

Yeah, if I had Jevon's Paradox and a manure spreader, I could go fertilize the back 40 :-)

Consider a practical example. The Prius uses gasoline about 3-4 times more efficiently than a typical SUV, so if Jevons' Paradox was correct, Prius owners should drive many more miles in a year than the owners of less-efficient vehicles, and should drive their new Priuses much more than the less-efficient vehicles they replaced. Is there any sign of this behavior in the real world? (In fact, I'd be willing to bet that Prius owners drive rather less, on average, than the typical SUV owner.)

So how many miles do Prius and SUV owners put on/year?

Interesting, the Javons paradox, founded on the study of actual data reveals a trend in coal consuption 150 years ago.

So sombody takes that data, then universally applies it, without further study, to all forms of fuel, including gasoline.

Great pseudo science to make pseudo arguments with. Well done.

So I did my own rather unscientific study using the internet to come up with this.

I found two graphs that look very official. The first is a graph of Total US Gasoline Retail Deliveries by Refineries from 1985 to 2010;

U.S. Total Gasoline Retail Deliveries by Refiners(Thousand Gallons per Day)

The second is a pdf file with a number of graphs on it, but the one I like is on page 5 and it shows the fleet CAFE standards observed from 1976 to 2010

http://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/rul...ary_Report.pdf

As far as I know, this exclusive study is the first one of it's kind in 150 years attempting to corelate the Javons Paradox to what I will now call, Rooster's Paradox.

My exhaustive study which took me about 15 minutes, mostly searching with Google has led me to a conclusion about gasoline and the Javons Paradox.

They don't line up.

In the graph concerning fuel deliveries (I have to believe that all the fuel delivered was used, so fuel delivered = fuel consumed) you can see some wild swings in fuel consumption. And on the graph concerning fleet average fuel economy, you see a much more steady track. In fact, between 1985 and 2005 there appears to be no corelation at all between the two, as if consumption of fuel was driven by some factor that excludes efficiency alltogether. The graphs do corelate after 2005 however, in that there was a dramatic increase in fleet fuel economy between 2005 and 2010 while fuel useage dropped significantly over the same period.

There, I've done all the work I want to for now. As I see it, the Roosters Paradox states that either there is no corelation at all, or fuel efficiency actually does lower fuel consumption. So the Roosters Paradox is actually a paradox of Javons paradox...sooo...crap I think I just made a black hole with that sentence.

I'm sure we can find more graphs elsewhere and change the argument. However, because I'm the first, by default my Paradox is right, and it must remain so for at least 150 years...until someone tries to correlate the Rooster's paradox with peak unicorn tear consumption.

But as Mark Twain once said "There are three kinds of lies. Lies, Damned lies and statistics." Or something to that effect.

About the same. Though I don't know of any source for exact numbers, if the difference was anywhere near as great as predicted by Jevons' Paradox, there would be an obvious difference, and there's not.

In fact, as Rooster suggests, fuel consumption is primarily driven by factors other than cost. The major factor is time: people use their cars mostly for commuting, plus travelling for recreation & vacations, etc. There are only so many hours in a day, people are only going to spend just so much time commuting, and once they're settled in a house/job, commuting time isn't easily changed. So if they start with an SUV and trade for a Prius, their daily drive doesn't change even though their driving cost has gone way down, because the primary cost of driving is time, not fuel.

Yeah, some people tend to do that. The last time we saw Jevon's paradox, ie the increase in efficiency is more than offset by an increase in consumption because of that increase in efficiency (not anything else), was the early 1900s during the expansion of the grid. The rebound effect is common, but efficiency improvements still cut consumption in that context, they just don't cut it "perfectly" so to speak.

It's not really a paradox, though, if you think about it. There are a number of useful things that can be done with a resource, if it becomes cheap and plentiful, but those things themselves have limits. So if for instance you suddenly get A/C running off cheap grid power, you may cool your house, but you don't keep the thermostat set at 32F in the summer.

It's the same principle as with driving. The cost of gasoline only becomes a limiting factor if it's expensive relative to your income (which for the great majority of people in this country it's not), it's the amount of time you're willing to spend driving. So if gasoline suddenly started selling at $0.30/gal, we wouldn't see people driving 10 times as much.

Driving miles would jump up, and SUV/PU miles accrued would, and SUV/PU sales would too.

No, but we'd see more driving, and probably more warming up in the winter, both of which is more use. Maybe not 10x, but definitelk some sort of statistically significant increase.

Why? Oh, there might be some small increase in driving, but most people already drive as much as they care to: they just whine about the cost of gas. And in the limit, they're just not going to be able to drive 24 hours a day.

Likewise for pickups & SUVs, the barrier isn't the cost of gas, it's the cost of the vehicle, and basically everyone who wants & can afford to buy one of those already has one.

PS: In fact, it works just the opposite, as "resource scarcity" - the automakers decision basically not to build decent small cars & pickups - pushes up the market price of the few that are made. Try finding a small 2-seater not in the luxury car price range.

To me, Javen's Paradox is very self evident. Over the past 30 years, we have come up with loads of new technologies to both make our vehicles more fuel efficient, and our drilling opperations more efficient and productive as well. The result, petroleum consumption has been ever increasing, and petroleum production has been plateauing. We have been forced to drill more and more dangerous places.

Another way to view it is from an urban development standpoint. Historically, during periods of cheap petroleum, more developments crop up on the outer fringes, people think "hey, I can live 30 miles from work, and it'll still only cost me a buck!". When energy is expensive, we see more urban infill, smaller homes, higher density, more public transit and cycling. So, if 100 mpg because the standard for all automobiles, we can just expect people to be living further on the urban fringe, and burning the same amount of petroleum as before.

That does not mean that the personal goal to use energy as efficiently as possible is not a noble one, it just means that on a larger scale, as a society, we will burn what's cheap.

...my translation of Javen's Paradox: "...making it easier to be wasteful...."

I think it has been widely reported that miles driven somewhat tracks cost.

Are you talking about world petro consumption or U.S. petro consumption? If it's U.S. we've pretty much been the same since the late seventies even though we've added about a hundred million people. We're at about +/-18mbpd currently, so even with more people and bigger vehicles efficiency improvements have kept total consumption flat and dropped per capita consumption by a third. The world picture is different because a lot of countries are industrializing, but even then world oil production right now appears to be where is was in the late seventies in the U.S. People also won't drive a whole lot more than they will now in the U.S. VMT has been dropping.

Except that for some reason, we don't seem to have made our vehicles - as a group, there are a few exceptions - notably more fuel-efficient.

But consumption has increased because there are more people using it (increased population, developing countries, etc), not because the existing population was driving more.

Execpt that this is what I was talking about earlier: the primary cost of commuting isn't fuel, it's time. People are willing to spend only so much time travelling to and from work (roughly an hour per day: Is Getting There Half the Fun? - NYTimes.com ). For most people, the fuel cost is a miniscule fraction of income, and one that's easily reduced by buying a more fuel-efficient vehicle, carpooling, etc.

I'd like to see your statistics relating commute distance to fuel cost, because that's not at all the pattern I see historically. It seems to have much more to do with the simple availability of transport, and affordability of different housing types.

I want to site a source but can't yet cause I'm a newbie, so apologies for the next couple posts.

The source is coming...just one more...

Motor Vehicle Fuel Consumption and Travel in the U.S., 1960

Notice that, Average miles per gallon has gone up, but Average Fuel Consumed per Vehicle and Average Miles Travelled per Vehicle has gone up as well.

...we should've done all our driving back in 2003, when our miles-per-gallons were higher!

...now, we'll just have to walk!

I like my statistics better, because they do a better job of proving "Rooster's Paradox".