The 'rebound' effect of energy-efficient cars overplayed

[GliderGuider]

15. It's not simply an article of faith.

H.T. Odum came up with the underlying idea in the late 1970s: "During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency."

One of the implications of that insight is this. If self-organizing complex adaptive systems (of which human societies and civilization as a whole are canonical examples) do maximize their power intake and energy transformation, then one of the ways they will adapt in order to do that is to become more efficient. Efficiency reduces the power requirement of one part of a system so that energy can be shifted to other parts that are under-supplied, or be applied to the growth of the system as a whole.

A human example of this is making American coal plants more efficient and then exporting the coal that is spared to China to produce power there.

If you see an example that appears to demonstrate energy conservation through efficiency, I invite you to ask where the energy that is spared in that operation ends up? Does it stay unused or is it used for other things in other places? I suggest that you may have a bit of "boundary blindness" that can be alleviated by understanding the system in a larger context. There is after all a global market for goods, services and energy, so looking at single-industry or national statistics will tell you very little about how the whole thing works.