Monte, I posted the debunked article because I knew there was something amiss. My next post provided some clarification but still I wasn't satisfied.
Last night I looked again. Here's what I found published in
Nature 2011 (all comments are worth reading).
The rebound effects need to be considered, but they do not have to be viewed as paradoxical: they amount to economic expansion. Indeed, some researchers think that energy efficiency itself is a fundamental driver of economic growth, freeing up resources that can be used for other things, the deployment of low-carbon energy among them.
Despite its concerns about the rebound effect, the Breakthrough Institute argues that energy efficiency should nonetheless be pursued for exactly these reasons. Encouragingly, the discussion prompted by its report has led to plans from academics and industry experts on all sides of the debate to meet to wade through these issues.
The debate indicates that there must be deeper study of what energy efficiency could do if systematically deployed across an entire economy. The world cannot solve all of its energy and climate woes with energy efficiency alone; low-carbon energy technologies must be developed as well. But there seems to be no fundamental physical or economic reason that countries can't decrease their overall energy consumption while maintaining growth, and thus put the ghost of Jevons to rest.
The statement I made about JP being small is mostly true. Here is a good
reference which quantifies rebound according to energy source (see Table 1):
In summary, the relevant research shows that benefits from energy efficiency policies and programs significantly outweigh any increased energy consumption from rebound effects. Energy efficiency rebound effects have contributed only marginally to energy consumption, while the primary drivers of increased saturation or utilization of energy consuming appliances are growth in income and reduced prices, especially for the energy consuming equipment, itself. Even in the presence of the rebound effect, energy efficiency policies remain strikingly successful in moderating growth in energy use, increasing productivity, providing more comfort, lowering energy costs, and improving overall social welfare.
Notice that appliances and lighting have almost no rebound whereas water heating and cooling have a rebound of up to 50%. Here is another study which concludes that the rebound on
transport fuel is around 60%. And then there is this commentary on a Nature article published in
HuffPost 2013.
Trying to put the rebound effect for energy efficiency in its rightful place is like playing a game of wack-a-mole. Predictably every couple of years, someone new discovers the counter-intuitive appeal of showing how more efficient energy policies may lead to more energy use. Wham! Told you there's something wrong with those clean-car standards. Well, not so fast.
Yes, the rebound effect is real. But it's also small. And what's there is actually positive! Why shouldn't people who can now afford to, due to more efficient energy technologies, be able to improve theirs lives?
Together with three co-authors (Ken Gillingham at Yale, Dave Rapson at University of California, Davis, and Matt Kotchen, currently on leave from Yale to serve as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment and Energy at the U.S. Treasury), I surveyed a bajillion+1 energy efficiency rebound studies. Nature then made us cut down those references to six. We settled at nine.
We couldn't find a single study that has the rebound above 100 percent or anything close to it, what's necessary to nix energy efficiency savings. The maximum number you can get is 60 percent, and that's already quite a stretch. Think 30 percent as the upper bound for actual behavioral responses. Yes, we are more efficient today than we were a hundred years ago, and we also use more energy today. But that's far from talking about the rebound effect. It's simply economic growth.
When designing energy efficiency policies like clean-car standards, consider the rebound effect, much like the government already does. The Department of Energy's model uses a highly appropriate 10 percent rebound figure for the car standards. And that's about it. Not much else to see here.
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. H. G. Wells.
Fatih Birol's motto: leave oil before it leaves us.