On this day 13 August 1882, William “Coal Question” Jevons died
Eh? What AM I talking about?
Well, Jevons (a very interesting character) had written a book called “The Coal Question” in 1865. In it he pointed out that if you make a procedure more efficient, you don’t actually reduce the total amount of resources used, because when a producer is now using less of a resource, the price drops, more producers enter the market and the total consumption of the resource goes up. This is known as “Jevons Paradox.”
And somebody even made a video about it.
And for more on this, see, http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/02/16/207532/debunking-jevons-paradox-jim-barrett/
PS 1882 happened to be the First International Polar Year.
On this day atmospheric PPM was – dunno, 292 ppm, according to the ice cores. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
The rebound effect matters very much
What happened next?
Fourteen years after Jevons died, Svante Arrhenius’s work on the build-up of carbon dioxide was released…