• Paraphrase
• Claim
  • earth-friendly, justice-supporting consumers cannot translate their values into meaningful impact.
• Evidence
• “the shading and distancing of commerce” Princen (1997) is an effect of information assymetry.
  • producers up and down a supply chain can hide the negative social and environmental impacts of their operations, putting conscientious consumers at a disadvantage. //
• this is a result of the evolution of alienation accelerated by the industrial revolution that created the dualistic abstractions of producers and consumers.
• Before that, producers and consumers lived often one and the same in small village settings
• After the Industrial Revolution, producers became manufacturers with imposing factories that were cutoff from the general population

• This set the conditions for opaqueness that have plagued us ever since. //

• time constraints, competing values, and everyday routines together thwart the rational intentions of well-meaning consumers (Røpke 1999)

• assigning primary responsibility for system change to individual consumers is anathema to transformative change (Maniates 2001, 2019)

• This can be broken down into three broad categories of reasons:

  • Rebound effects
    • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=jevon%27s+paradox
    • increases in consumption consistently thwart effciency-driven resource savings across a wide variety of sectors (Stern 2020). -sustainability scholars increasingly critique “effciency” both as:
      • a concept (Shove 2018)
      • as a form of“weak sustainable consumption governance” (Fuchs and Lorek 2005).
    • Many argue that, to be successful, effciency measures must be accompanied by initiatives that limit overall levels of consumption, that is, “strong sustainable consumption governance.

  • Attitude-behavior gap

  • Behavior-impact gap

Jevon's paradox and rebound effects.

Will this conference debate rebound effects of efficiency? If not, it will not have the desirable net effect.

My linked In comments were:

Alessandro Blasi, will this conference address the rebound effect? In particular, Brockway et al. have done a 2021 meta-analysis of 33 research papers on rebound effects of energy efficiency efforts and conclude:

"...economy-wide rebound effects may erode more than half of the expected energy savings from improved energy efficiency. We also find that many of the mechanisms driving rebound effects are overlooked by integrated assessment and global energy models. We therefore conclude that global energy scenarios may underestimate the future rate of growth of global energy demand."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032121000769?via%3Dihub

Unless psychological and sociological interventions are applied along with energy efficiency to mitigate rebound effects, you will likely and ironically lose huge efficiencies in the entire efficiency intervention itself.

Also, as brought up by other commentators, there is a difference between efficiency and degrowth. Intelligent degrowth may work, especially applied to carbon intensive areas of the economy and can be offset by high growth in low carbon areas of the economy.

Vaclav Smil is pessimistic about a green energy revolution replacing fossil fuels https://www.ft.com/content/71072c77-53b3-4efd-92ae-c92dc02f09ad, which opens up the door to serious consideration of degrowth, not just efficiency improvements. Perhaps the answer is in a combination of all of the above, including targeted degrowth.

Technology moves quickly and unexpectedly. At the time of Smil's book release, there was no low carbon cement. Now there is a promising breakthrough: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/28/carbon-free-cement-breakthrough-dcvc-put-55-million-into-brimstone.html

As researchers around the globe work feverishly to make low carbon breakthroughs, there is obviously no guarantee of when they will occur. In that case then, with only a few years to peak, it would seem the lowest risk pathway would be to prioritize the precautionary principle over a gambling pathway (such as relying on Negative Emissions Technology breakthroughs) and perhaps consider along with rebound effect conditioned efficiency improvements also include a strategy of at least trialing a temporary, intentional degrowth of high carbon industries / growth of low carbon industries.

ReconfigBehSci. (2021, January 14). RT @jimtankersley: The Biden ‘American Rescue Plan’ goes big: $1.9T, incl almost every Dem stimulus priority under the sun: State/local… [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1349993219988328449

Tankersley, J., & Crowley, M. (2021, January 14). Biden Outlines $1.9 Trillion Spending Package to Combat Virus and Downturn. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/business/economy/biden-economy.html

Vaughan, A. (n.d.). Global CO2 emissions have already rebounded above pre-pandemic levels. New Scientist. Retrieved 3 March 2021, from https://www.newscientist.com/article/2269628-global-co2-emissions-have-already-rebounded-above-pre-pandemic-levels/

Jones, S. R., Lange, F., Riddell, W. C., & Warman, C. (2020). Waiting for Recovery: The Canadian Labour Market in June 2020. IZA Discussion Paper, 13466.

Miller, Joe, and Martin Arnold. ‘Eurozone Industry Fears Rebound from Virus Crash Will Be Shortlived’, 23 August 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/7a739543-a39e-4301-830d-dddc8a0f503b.

Fairlie, R. W. (2020). The Impact of COVID-19 on Small Business Owners: Continued Losses and the Partial Rebound in May 2020 (Working Paper No. 27462; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27462

This is so important to note. This is in a way is comparable to the Rebound Effect squared. Where the Rebound Effect goes mostly unnoticed and takes places on a subconscious level, this is rather a "Well, f**k it then...", which is more severe...