one thing making climate change so tricky to fight is that many people have assumed advances in renewable energy would automatically lead to a decrease in fossil fuel use. but what's happened instead is we just consume more energy total. we take advantage of cheap renewables in order to consume more, and keep burning fossil fuels, too.
this is part of a bigger pattern: our society is oriented toward doing more of everything and calling that progress. what we need: reduce/replace harmful things.
thinking of this bc of news lyft wants out of the bikeshare biz: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pka3kn/lyft-the-largest-bikeshare-operator-in-north-america-wants-out-of-the-business
sf could buy out the local system, municipalize it and lower the prices that have skyrocketed under lyft. but that's another money-losing program when we have budget problems
but if we think of it as something that's gonna *reduce* car trips (+asphalt area city has to maintain, impacts of crashes/air pollution etc), no reason it couldn't pay for itself, long run
no one thinks of it that way tho. when we add bike share, build a new subway, bus rapid transit line, it's just: ok now you can use this new option, and you can drive, too!
case in point: knowing the van ness brt was months from completion, the city planning commission rubber stamped a new development along van ness to exceed the parking maximum. those structured parking spaces will be there for generations, requiring paved streets to serve them, enticing residents away from transit
@scott In economics this is called the Jevons Paradox and discovering it in 2011 is the reason I lost faith in greenwashed tech and became a full-on doomsday prepper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Basically he noticed in the 1860's that more efficient steam engines didn't use less coal; people used the same amount (or more) coal to do more work.
@sidereal @scott thanks for teaching me the name of Jevon's Law!
I feel like that's a cousin to **Parkinson's Law** ("work expands to fill the time allotted") with the refinement that work and energy use almost always expands to *exceed* the allotted resource
(which then leads to whoever has the most social power winning the lion's share of the newly-scarce resource, ditching any more sensible preagreed allocation strategy)
edit: Wikipedia agrees!
> Parkinson's Law can be generalized further as:
> "The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource (If the price is zero)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law#Generalization
Agreed. I have met opposition here for pointing this out. Even otherwise thoughtful folk are in denial about it.
Just to move in the right direction on energy we need the combination of rapid build of renewable capacity, improved storage and grid, efficiency improvements, mass electrification, an end to fossil fuel infrastructure build and subsidies, GHG emissions taxes, and for transport green hydrogen, public transport and reduced air travel.
Many of the other issues we face also require several policy changes.
@scott The US's fossil fuel consumption has been flat or declining for a decade, ditto for most of the developed world. All while our populations and GDPs continue to grow.
https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels
The growth in consumption basically all comes from the developing world, which is both good and bad. It's good because it means those people are no longer energy-impoverished (yay), but bad because we haven't driven costs down on zero/low-carbon energy enough that they aren't the *default* for a country building out its energy infrastructure.
several people have made the counterpoint that CO2 emissions have been falling somewhat in the US for a while. I’ll acknowledge that. doesn’t mean they’re falling fast enough (they’re not) or that the phenomenon I describe isn’t real (it is, and is called Jevons paradox and has long been documented, as several people have also pointed out)
@scott Jevon's Paradox still doesn't apply here, since total *energy utilization,* not just carbon emissions in OECD countries has decreased. It's true that *some* of our increased efficiency has been offset by increased consumption, but not all of it.
I agree with you that we're not reducing carbon emissions fast enough, but that's because we've been half-assing this problem for the past couple of decades. Governments have started taking climate change seriously and we're going to see those curves look even more impressive over the next decade.
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