Clean energy can’t solve global warming (on its own)

We are often told these days that, to bring down greenhouse gas emissions swiftly, we need an “environmentalism that builds” – specifically, one that builds lots of wind turbines, solar farms and transmission towers and does so quickly. Doing so is necessary to “make clean energy cheap,” pushing fossil fuels to the periphery of our energy system and, eventually, out of the picture entirely.

Unleashing this torrent of clean energy, it is argued, is worth making what are framed as tough “trade-offs” – including actually increasing the amount of fossil fuels produced in the short- to medium-run as part of a political grand bargain of the kind proposed by the (now-deceased) Manchin-Barrasso “permitting reform” bill, one of several such fossil fuels-for-clean energy packages to come up in Congress in recent years. 

Trade-offs and compromises are certainly going to be necessary on the path to a zero-carbon future, at least as long as climate change remains an (irrationally) secondary concern for actors across the political spectrum. 

But the single-minded focus on expanding clean energy capacity – and the increased willingness of some policymakers to accept growing U.S. fossil fuel extraction; increased pollution and destruction of public lands; and the erosion of longstanding environmental protections in order to achieve it – is misplaced. 

To understand why, we first need to understand how today’s promising new energy technologies interact with a very old theory from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And we need to be ready to revisit our “priors.”

Starting with me.

Jevons’ Paradox reconsidered

If you spend much time thinking about energy and climate, you’ve probably run across Jevons’ Paradox. The idea, first put forward by 19th century English economist William Stanley Jevons, holds that improving the efficiency with which energy is used can, paradoxically, lead to greater energy consumption, both by making energy-consuming services cheaper (inducing more consumption of them) and by putting more money into people’s pockets that can be used to buy more of those and other services. 

Jevons’ Paradox has been used to challenge the effectiveness of energy efficiency standards for things like cars and home appliances. But the inconvenient truth of Jevons’ Paradox is that it applies in equal measure to policies that “make clean energy cheap” – the approach that we are now told holds the key to unlocking swift climate action in the U.S.

Making energy cheaper reduces the cost of energy-consuming services, just as energy efficiency does. Making energy cheaper puts more money in people’s pockets, just like energy efficiency. 

Follow the logic and, if you ascribe to Jevons’ theory, it’s likely that adding more cheap renewable energy to the system will result in increased energy use. Not only that, but making clean energy cheap and broadly available might not eliminate (nor even, necessarily, much reduce) our use of fossil energy, so long as fossil fuels themselves remain cheap. (Which, by recent historical standards, methane gas and motor gasoline currently are.)

I had long been a skeptic of Jevons’ Paradox, at least as it applies to a modern, mature economy like the United States. There is a world of difference between 19th century Britain, where the vast majority of people experienced what by modern standards would be considered abject energy poverty, and the extreme wealth and energy abundance of the modern-day United States. It should not be a surprise that an energy-hungry Britain would plow the gains resulting from efficiency back into buying more energy. It’s just common sense.

The experience of the United States over the last 40 years, however, has been different. Tremendous improvements in energy efficiency, driven largely by public policy, have resulted in America not just reducing per-capita energy use but also keeping total energy use in the U.S. relatively flat – despite rapid growth in GDP, household income and the sheer number of energy-using goods and services that Americans consume on a daily basis. 

Total U.S. primary energy consumption was lower in 2023 than it was in 2005.Photo by U.S. Energy Information Administration | Public Domain

The “green growth” strategy for addressing global warming hinges on the idea that this process can continue – that economic growth can be decoupled from carbon-emitting combustion of fossil fuels, not just relatively but absolutely. This would require the gains from cheap clean energy to be plowed into other forms of economic growth that don’t produce a corresponding increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

Until recently, that logic seemed plausible to me – at least up to a point. [1] After all, there are only so many miles a person can drive and so many electronic devices a person can use at one time. And heating one’s home beyond a certain point goes beyond being wasteful to being downright uncomfortable. There had to be an upper limit to the amount of energy that a society could consume to fulfill human needs or even human desires. There just had to be.

But then came Bitcoin. And NFTs. And AI.

In the last few years, my skepticism about Jevons’ Paradox has, unfortunately, evaporated as we’ve come to see humanity squander vast amounts of energy on some of the stupidest, if not most downright self-destructive stuff imaginable. Today, we burn natural gas to facilitate money laundering, construct vast energy-guzzling infrastructure to make deceptive AI videos, and combust coal to supply wrong answers to high school essay writers and generate recipes for horrible food. 

Simply hauling barrels of oil into the street and lighting them on fire would be better than some of the things we are currently using energy to produce. Far from Jevons’ England, where energy savings were reinvested in technological advances that could at least make some claim to making the immediate material conditions of society better, today’s energy-guzzling technologies promise a transcendent increase in human potential and “flourishing” in some far-off distant future … but often deliver slop.

How AI could really destroy the world

So, we are now seeing the resurgence of Jevons’ Paradox in real time, as incredible amounts of societal wealth are being poured into energy-intensive endeavors like artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency whose public benefit, or even usefulness, is questionable. While AI has inarguably led to some important societal benefits in the near term – and will likely lead to more as it continues to develop – some worry that unconstrained energy-intensive advancement of AI might lead to significant negative impacts, and perhaps in the extreme case even destroy the human species, with dire warnings about AI’s potential harms coming from none other than the Nobel Prize-winning “Godfather of AI” himself, Geoffrey Hinton.

But whether artificial general intelligence decides that humans are superfluous and gets us out of the way or not, AI might still contribute to “destroying the world” (for all intents and purposes) through a different mechanism: by sucking up renewable megawatt-hours that should be used to replace the fossil fuels that are – as we speak – tipping the world into a state of growing climate instability and creating widespread misery. 

This is not a theoretical issue; it is happening right now as electric utilities delay plans to shut down coal and gas power plants and lay plans for expansion of fossil fueled power generation to accommodate an anticipated increase in electricity demand. At a critical moment in human history when we need to be bending the curve of greenhouse gas emissions sharply downward, a detour from that mission is something we can scarcely afford.

Jevons’ Paradox suggests that “supply side” clean energy interventions – whether they be clearing hurdles for renewable energy or bringing nuclear power plants back from the dead – cannot solve global warming, at least not on their own. Supply-side interventions fail because they do not address the cause of the problem: the burning of fossil fuels. 

Reducing fossil fuel use requires a different set of actions than (most of) those incorporated in laws like the Inflation Reduction Act. Enforceable caps on greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon taxes. Constraints on fossil fuel supply. Societal self-restraint in the consumption of energy-intensive goods and services. Or some combination of the above. 

Without those kinds of actions, supply-side incentives for renewables result in us using more renewable energy and unacceptably large amounts of fossil fuels. As I told Heatmap in August, “more of everything” is not a solution to the climate crisis. It just perpetuates the problem.

The real role of renewable energy in addressing climate change

Cheap renewable energy cannot solve the climate crisis. But it can enable us to continue to, as they used to say, “enjoy the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed” while we’re tackling climate change.

Expanding renewable energy “works” to address climate change by enhancing society’s comfort level with phasing out fossil fuels. [2] The advances made in renewable energy generation, energy storage, electric vehicles, heat pumps and other technologies demonstrate that a future is open to us that preserves many, if not most, of the modern comforts we enjoy today without reliance on fossil fuels. That’s a big deal.

But while increasing clean energy production is important, it’s the constraint on fossil fuels that does the essential work of fighting climate change. Perhaps that constraint comes in the form of the soft limits on overall societal energy use that have held sway for the past few decades; limits that have allowed renewable energy to push some fossil fuel use to the wayside. Or, perhaps, it must come in the form of hard constraints on carbon emissions, fossil fuel production, or energy consumption. 

From the perspective of addressing climate change then, the question we must ask of any particular policy is: how does it move us closer to phasing out combustion of fossil fuels? Looked at through that lens, the “trade-offs” contemplated in bills like Manchin-Barrasso raise serious concerns. 

Trade-offs and buy-offs

The debate over “permitting reform” has been framed as one of trade-offs. And, for earlier versions of permitting reform legislation, that was a mostly accurate description.

“Trade-offs” involve sacrificing one value for another. The original Manchin permitting reform bill, for example, mostly posited trading off environmental protections for expedited construction of energy infrastructure. People could disagree about whether that was a wise or necessary trade-off, or what ends it would lead to, but a trade-off it was.

The Manchin-Barrasso bill, however, was less about trade-offs than it was about buy-offs, giving the fossil fuel industry what it wants – expanded access to public lands and offshore areas to facilitate drilling, and relaxed environmental controls on what it does with them – in exchange for a set of procedural reforms in how electric transmission is built and relaxed environmental controls on clean energy development on public lands. 

No one in the climate world can reasonably argue that expanded fossil fuel production from public lands, taken on its own, is good for the climate. (And any claims that accelerating exports of U.S. natural gas abroad might lead to reductions in global emissions were obliterated in a new study released this week by the U.S. Department of Energy.) The only compelling rationale for this approach from a climate perspective is that it is a necessary sacrifice to buy the acquiescence of entities that fundamentally do not share the goal of decarbonizing the economy. And that sacrifice is only necessary because those entities have a sufficient stranglehold on power in Congress to hold the necessary transition to a clean, zero-carbon economy hostage. 

Breaking that dynamic is the only real path forward for meaningful climate action. That requires building broad-based political support for action on climate and reducing the fossil fuel industry’s sway over U.S. politics (which the coalition-splitting approach of fossil fuel-friendly permitting reform fails to do). It also requires considering a broader range of possible “trade-offs” in addition to the “easy” trade-off of sacrificing land, water and threatened species for a shot at boosting clean energy growth. 

We might, for example, at least contemplate trading off a bit of our international dominance in oil production for leadership in the clean energy technologies of the future. We might trade off a couple of extra bucks at the gas pump for an energy system that isn’t just better for the global climate but is also better for our health. Or we might imagine trading off a bit of non-essential material consumption now – or even just reducing the amount of food, energy and stuff we waste – for a livable climate for our kids and grandkids in the future.

Trade-offs of this kind are often derided as politically impossible, when they are considered at all. But if we are, in fact, living in William Stanley Jevons’ world, we need to adjust our thinking to match. That means avoiding buy-offs that reinforce the strength of the fossil fuel economy; insisting on the consideration of a different, better palette of potential trade-offs and compromises; pursuing paths to clean energy growth that minimize trade-offs in the first place (including by maximizing efficiency and conservation and engaging in thoughtful consensus-building around the shape of the clean energy system of the future); and building the political capacity for a real energy transition that includes a rapid transition away from polluting fossil fuels. 

None of that can happen overnight or even very soon – and, at a time when signs of climate stress are flashing red, turning down trade-offs that could meaningfully accelerate clean energy in the short run is a tough pill to swallow. That’s especially true for those of us who have spent decades working to achieve a clean energy future. 

But if the severity of the climate crisis demands that we move forward quickly, it also demands that we avoid ill-considered steps backward. A clear-eyed understanding of what we need to do to address the problem, and of the paradoxes that often foil our best efforts, can help us to stay on track, particularly in the challenging years ahead.

[1]  The idea that decoupling alone could lead to emission reductions of the speed and scale needed to keep us within, say, the 2 degree C limit set in the Paris Climate Agreement never struck me as plausible. The idea that relative decoupling of economic growth and fossil fuel use would continue struck me as likely. Now I’m not so sure.

[2] If we want to be technical here, we need to phase out “unabated” use of fossil fuels, but the abating part is costly, energy intensive and unproven at scale, so, for now at least, the qualifier is really unnecessary.