Artist's impression of Boeing 787 in flight

As far as post titles go, that's a doozy - isn't it? If the word 'Postulate' had an 's' on the end, the whole title could be an outrageously hip band.

Anyhoo.... The media is awash with news of Boeing's latest flagship aircraft - the 787 Dreamliner - and with 677 current orders for the aircraft, they'll soon become a common sight in our CO2 rich skies.

The aircraft is billed, relatively speaking, as an environmentally friendly aircraft (emphasis on the 'relatively speaking' part, of course). Rather than typical aircraft aluminium, much of the aircraft's fuselage is made of a plastic/carbon-fibre composite. This, of course, makes the aircraft significantly lighter - resulting in greater fuel efficiency. The outcome?

"The aeroplane will use 20 per cent less fuel for comparable missions than today's similarly sized airplane," Boeing said in a statement. - ABC.net.au

Many environmentalists are realists, however, and recognise that these relatively significant fuel efficiency savings may actually lead to increased energy consumption(!):

While even environmentalists welcome the attempts to make planes greener, they don't think the 787 is going to do much to reduce the impact of aviation on climate change.

They believe that fuel-efficient planes are simply going to allow airlines to carry the same number of passengers, more cheaply. And that allows them to cut ticket prices - which in turn will encourage more of us to fly.

Result: the airlines buy more planes anyway. - BBC

This is where we get into the 'Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate' part of the post. The postulate is a controversial, but generally acknowledged correlation between increased energy efficiency and increased energy consumption. In the example above, for instance, we have a new aircraft that is stated to be 20% more fuel efficient than a comparably sized competitor, but, as the BBC article suggests, this increased energy efficiency may lead to cheaper flights - ultimately resulting, in an unregulated market, in increased patronage; more customers, more flights, more aircraft. It's a paradoxical, but potentially very real, absurdity of our competitive free market mechanisms.

This has previously been shown to be the case in similar circumstances:

The introduction of wide bodied passenger aircraft, to replace smaller aircraft, was forecast to reduce the number of flights. In fact the resulting lower cost per passenger led, in a competitive market, to a large increase in air travel that more than offset the increased size of the aircraft. The raised productivity per aircraft called for more aircraft, not fewer.... - The Open University

Governments, seemingly frustrated with years of apparent energy efficiency measures not bringing expected results, are beginning to look at this issue closer:

The Government’s proposition that improvements in energy efficiency can lead to significant reductions in energy demand and hence in greenhouse gas emissions remains the subject of debate among economists. The “Khazzoom-Brookes postulate”, while not proven, offers at least a plausible explanation of why in recent years improvements in “energy intensity” at the macroeconomic level have stubbornly refused to be translated into reductions in overall energy demand. - 'Energy Efficiency' , a Government Response to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee Report (PDF)

Although popularised in the 1990s, this is not a new theory. William Stanley Jevons in his 1865 book, ‘The Coal Question’, argued:

William Stanley Jevons 1835-1882

‘It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth’ …. ‘The reduction of the consumption of coal, per ton of iron, to less than one third of its former amount, was followed, in Scotland, by a ten fold increase in total consumption, between the years 1830 and 1863, not to speak of the indirect effect of cheap iron in accelerating other coal-consuming branches of industry'. In other words, an increase in the fuel efficiency of iron production led to increasing production of iron, and hence to a dramatic increase in the consumption of coal. - Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research (PDF)

Mr. Jevons' 1865 observation (known as Jevons Paradox) was essentially that as James Watt's steam engines were able to go further on a given amount of coal than earlier machines, more coal was mined to feed the increase in demand for the services these more energy-efficient engines provided.

The implications of this are frighteningly huge. If these concepts are played out throughout our economies, theoretically at least, a concerted drive for increased efficiency could, in our current competitive unregulated markets, result in a ramping up of resource consumption and CO2 emissions.

In a bid to bring this whole concept down to tangible terms I can relate to, I tried to think of a personal situation where this theory could be played out. Perhaps I buy a more fuel efficient car, but then discover that with my fuel savings I can now afford to drive to the corner store, instead of walking. Or, for example, the BBC recently ran an article on the enormous amount of food wasted in the UK each year. An earlier article along the same lines stated that up to a third of the food grown for humans in the UK was discarded. Considering that about one fifth of greenhouse-gas emissions are a direct result of food production, to toss a third of all this away, is more than significant. Now, let's say I fit within this category, and decide to become a lot more conscious about how I manage my kitchen's inventory. Going by the BBC figures, after one year I could have saved a significant amount of money - up to a third of my grocery bill - and CO2 emissions.

Now, the only question remains - what will I do with those savings? Hmm... perhaps a holiday in the tropics?

It quickly becomes obvious that efficiency cannot work without self-restraint - or, to use an old fashioned, and currently unpopular word - without temperance.

Because of its specific relevance to this post, I will again share a Wendell Berry quote I've shared before - as it drives the point home so well:

One possibility is just to tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely. This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy…. This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don’t know how to use energy, or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy. Nuclear power, if we are to believe its advocates, is presumably going to be well used by the same mentality that has egregiously devalued and misapplied man- and womanpower. If we had an unlimited supply of solar or wind power, we would use that destructively, too, for the same reason.

Perhaps all of those sources of energy are going to be developed. Perhaps all of them can sooner or later be developed without threatening our survival. But not all of them together can guarantee our survival, and they cannot define what is desirable. - Wendell Berry, The Agricultural Crisis, A Crisis of Culture. p. 16, 17

What can all of this mean to us as a society? I'd be very interested in your thoughts on this topic. It would seem that, in our current unregulated market, our contemporary tendency to 'be all that we can be', and to live up to the very edge of our incomes and ability, can translate to maximum levels of consumption - no matter how much efficiency we apply to our industrial world. At the worst extreme, we may become increasingly efficient at depleting our resources and hastening our own destruction.

In light of our dire need to scale back energy consumption and emissions, the logical conclusion to this is mandatory caps or a rationing system. Being a closet libertarian (see also), this is a situation I'm loathe to embrace, but sense is ultimately inevitable. Like a child that has abused his privileges, he inevitably loses his freedoms.

What's the alternative?

In the example above, instead of my taking a holiday with my food-waste savings - what if I use them instead to insulate my home, or purchase a bicycle for commuting to work - or simply save it as part of a long-term land purchase goal, so I can live out my dreams of rural self-sufficiency? In addition to the CO2 emissions and resource savings I've made in not wasting food - I now have extra funds to invest in further savings.

This 'sensible', prudent scenario can be applied in the corporate and political arena just as easily as at the personal level. It's simply all about priorities.

In an Earth Council study, Subsidising Unsustainable Development, our spending at a government level is examined - and found, like our personal spending, to be wanting in prudence.

There’s something unbelievable about the world spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to subsidize its own destruction. It seems more the stuff of myths, like the North American Indian tales of the trickster coyote snatching fire from right under the noses of fierce guardians. To cite just one example: The heavily subsidized burning of fossil fuels spews more than six billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere each year; yet the globe’s oceans and forests can naturally absorb about a third that amount. - Subsidising Unsustainable Development p. 35 (1.5mb PDF)

Many of today’s subsidies encourage practices that are economically perverse or trade-distorting or ecologically destructive or socially inequitable. Sometimes several of these harmful things at once. And most subsidies hinder progress towards sustainable development, the Brundtland Commission goal of meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of future generations.

... By the cautious calculations of this study, the world is spending at least $700 billion a year (and maybe $900 billion) on subsidies in just four economic sectors: water, agriculture, energy and road transportation. Since that amounts to somewhere between three and four per cent of Gross World Product — and close to current global spending on armaments — it seems worthy of attention from governments on the dollar value alone. Especially since the evidence indicates that a lot of those dollars are wasted because the subsidies no longer serve their original purposes. - Subsidising Unsustainable Development p. 1 (1.5mb PDF)

If, at a personal level, a ceiling is to be placed on our lifestyles, then it only makes sense that our vastly misplaced government expenditure is also re-evaluated. In fact, the former cannot be justifiably enacted without the latter.

To summarise, is it necessary for our economies to run like a souped-up sports car, with a brick placed on the accelerator - finely tuned, but running at full throttle - or will we put a governor in place, and moderate our lifestyles according to goals that climate science dictates?

In the end, the answer lies with you and me. Wouldn't it be better, though, if we could avoid both scenarios, by doing instead by free will what we may eventually be pleading government to force us to do?

Further Reading:

• Global Warming & Civil Liberties