In 1865, economist William Stanley Jevons published The Coal Question,
describing the crucial role that coal played in British economic
development. Here, he enunciated what has come to be known as the Jevons
paradox, which stated that improvements in resource efficiency leads to
greater resource use as the expansion of scale occasioned by lower
operating costs overwhelms the savings due to greater efficiency. The
implications for any sustainability scenario are enormous and a major
theme of this book. While The Coal Question provided the theory that
was a precursor to peak oil and resource limits to growth, it was
followed six years later by the Theory of Political Economy, the first
English-language work of neoclassical economics, which denies the
importance of energy as a special commodity.
In spite of this apparent contradiction, in this book biophysical
economist Kent Klitgaard makes clear that there is no epistemological
break between The Coal Question and Theory of Political Economy.
Indeed, the Jevons paradox makes little sense in the absence of a
behavioral theory grounded in marginal utility, which recognizes the
satisfaction that each of us gains as consumers of one more unit of a
good or service. Jevons could not solve this paradox in light of his
belief that coal mines were becoming exhausted and more expensive to
operate, and that there was no substitute for coal. However, he was
uninterested in questions of sustainability; rather, he wanted to
maintain British industrial and imperial dominance. Did the eventual
substitution of oil for coal simply allow us to run through other
resources at an accelerated rate? Indeed, the petroleum economy of the
20th and early 21st centuries has presented vastly expanded
opportunities for the operation of the Jevons Paradox. This book shows
the connections among the different paradoxes in Jevons' work, and
exposes the potentially fatal flaws that confound technological
solutions to the sustainability challenge.
