The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, And Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy And Climate Problems Worse (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
Owen makes the case that increasing efficiency is bad for the environment, because increasing efficiency is equivalent to lowering a price. When you lower the price of something, people often either buy more of it, or use the money saved to buy something else. The notion is called Jevon's paradox, after the Victorian British economist who enunciated it.Own intermixes this basic idea with a fair amount of what might be called ranting, against for example organic farming and locovore movement. His point is usually that these comparative expensive actions can have aide-effects, such as requiring more land for agriculture and thereby reducing land available for other species, and more importantly that these actions are distractions that will never ameliorate our most important environmental problem, climate change. However, I think he overdoes it, as I sometimes felt he was basically telling the other resto of the world to get off his lawn. Conundrum is basically about energy & our quest to conserve it. Owens feels that modern man is essentially an inveterate consumer & that technological solutions to energy conservation have the perverse end effect of more consumption.He makes his case by citing any number of examples such as rapid transit and more efficient automobiles. He argues that real conservation will only be achieved by a fundamental change in attitudes which may only happen with a basic change in the economics of energy. Cheap energy, in his opinion, is not a solution to anything. Very thought provoking.
What do You think about The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, And Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy And Climate Problems Worse (2012)?
I notice myself thinking about the environment and sustainability in a completely different way now.
—Alting
Give away book received from Goodreads first read give-away.
—rebecca
4.5. Why won't goodreads let you give halves?
—t0uchin
