OVER THE TOP Jevons’ Paradox
CURSE OF THE VICTORIANS: EPISODE IV, JEVONS’ PARADOX Words by Neal Romanek
Saving the planet means looking beyond efficiency and technical tweaks
echnology won’t save us. There, I’ve said it. And, boy, do we ever need saving. As the last koala goes
the icecap and submerge New York”. In the 1970s, Shell, BP and Exxon began to research the impact their industry could have on the climate. And climate models have been really accurate in predicting how the climate will respond to increasing CO2 levels for almost 50 years*. I guess we all thought the truth would win out. That when people understood the science, they would do the right things. But people are funny. The choice between a heart attack and one more bacon cheese burger can be, strangely, a difficult one. TOOLS IN THE HANDS OF TOOLS Technology – or ‘tools’ as John Tyndall and the Victorians called them – are by definition, human implements that amplify human behaviour. If a tool can’t help me to do something better, faster, smarter than I could without it, it’s not a tool, it’s a toy. Most of the chatter around fixing climate change for the last two decades has been around using tools – technology – to increase efficiency. The idea goes: if we could do
up in flames like a cheaply made pyjama case and Jakarta’s tourist industry is taken over by submarine tours of downtown, it’s dawning on people that these are not ordinary times. The fossil chickens (which would be dinosaurs, I guess – literally) have come home to roost. We’ve known most of what we need to know about fighting climate change since the late 1980s, when James Hansen appeared before the US Senate. In fact, the principles behind how CO2 and other greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere was well understood back in the 1850s, when Irish physicist John Tyndall explained the heat absorptive properties of different gases and how these kept the Earth from turning into an ice planet. Then it’s basic number-crunching to figure out how much warming will result from a given amount of additional greenhouse gases. As far back as 1959, ‘father of the hydrogen bomb’ Edward Teller told the American Petroleum Institute that increased atmospheric CO2 could “melt
WE ALL THOUGHT THAT WHEN PEOPLE UNDERSTOOD THE SCIENCE, THEYWOULD DO THE RIGHT THING
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