“All the lights in my house use energy-saving technology because they use less energy and more importantly, they cut some of my energy bill!” said one neighbor who has been religiously saving her money in order to travel the world to complete her Instagram’s story highlight. At that time, she had no clue that her action actually caused more carbon emissions than what she initially wanted to save. Then, the pandemic happens — but we won’t talk about it in this essay since most of us are already fed up talking about the mentioned topic anyway. It is about time that we shift our focus on something else, perhaps just as crucial, which has occurred for a long time yet rarely talked about in public discourse.
The prior case pictures the reality nowadays that we might be unaware of and can be detrimental towards the environment in the defense of technology. Even though we should admit that at individual level the impact won’t affect the environment badly right away, collective actions and things done unaccounted for by big corporations right here will definitely count.
The development of technology has put us to become more able in producing something with greater efficiency, i.e., when Ford introduced the moving assembly line and now, AI to accelerate and integrate its whole production process, that is also expected to reduce absolute environmental impact. But it has also undeniably enabled us to become more ‘unapologetic’ in damaging the earth because we thought we were already doing our part in saving the planet by using the so-called environment-friendly tools and efficient energy management in factories — just like the tale earlier. One study emphasizes that notion where people’s inability to determine trade-offs on different actions links to difficulty in deciding accurate carbon numeracy. Putting that in our mind, it’s not surprising that we might know so little about technology, given our little knowledge to our own actions, when technology is actually like a double-edged sword in which it gives birth to the term rebound effect.
Rebound Effects Revisited
Rebound effect can be defined as a phenomenon where efficiency from new technology doesn’t lead to proportional reduction in environmental damage and energy consumption. In the 1980s, two economists, Daniel Khazzoom and Leonard Brookes, emphasized this further by presenting the fact that even though increased efficiency makes energy consumption at micro level (individual/household) goes down, it will be cancelled due to increased (combined) use at the macro level. Furthermore, rebound effect itself can be dismantled into two components which are direct rebound and indirect rebound. They both have significant influence in shaping the paradox phenomenon, but differ in terms of how the expected energy saving is used to offset the efficiency. For direct effect, energy efficiency results in higher demand in the same area such that the installation of loft insulation will make people heat their homes more or with higher temperature because the operating cost has decreased (read). For indirect effect, higher demand due to efficiency occurs in other areas with the example in the same manner as our first opening scenario. To give a much clearer vision on this one, we can also use another every-day example such as when we have diverted the use of plastic bags towards reusable bags but on the other hand, we’re still binging on consuming red meats which apparently contribute greenhouse gas emissions hugely (Figure 1).
Contemporary Issues on Rebound Effect
In the following years, there are many debates circulating on the significance of rebound effect and whether we should take it more seriously or not, especially in the era of rising technology’s significance. One of the debates even still discusses about the eligibility of the equation that was long invented by Paul Erlich and is used to identify the paradox, which is:
I = P.A.T
where environmental impact or degradation (I) is proportional to population (P), affluence or average consumption (A), and technology (T). The insight is that the increase in efficiency due to technological development wouldn’t be enough to decrease the environmental impact on humans because other factors, such as population and affluence could be increasing. Later on, Khazzoom argued that rebound in this analysis happened because the calculation on technological improvement was gratuitous in the condition of holding the demand constant (Khazzoom, 1980). However, this equation is appearing to become a mere ‘fancy mathematics’ as most said that it doesn’t, whatsoever, consider the different influence of the three factors on the growth of the impact as they are attributed with the same weight. In fact, we know that different factors may generate different weight depending on its influence and relevancy on the said impact. Some eye-opening insights were also being delivered by Patricia Hynes of the Institute of Women and Technology in North Amherst, Massachusetts, in which she figured the ‘eye-pat’ formula is just simply a political naïve because it only counts what is countable but ignores the manipulation, the oppression, and the profit that only some parts of the whole population could have done (Meadows, 1995). In short, this equation ignores the existence of economic and political power that shape the growth in population, consumption, and technology because after all, those things don’t happen just because they can, but because certain people want those to happen.
On the other hand, as much flawed as it is, this equation is still being used by particular organizations, such as IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), on the grounds that it can assist us in understanding the general factors that give change to environmental impact. Thus, the application is limited and to some extent and only covers evaluation on a single variable measure of environmental impact, in which commonly used to measure air pollution (IPCC, 2001). Moreover, it now comes to the question whether we should take the rebound problem seriously or not and the answer for some people is: it depends. According to American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), direct rebound effect is not a problem. They argued that “the savings (from rebound effect) aren’t lost but are put to other generally beneficial uses” which translates into “a larger economy and increased consumer amenities”. Nonetheless, some are concerned by the notion that this may only be the case in developed countries (at macro-level) or high-income households (at micro-level) as direct rebound effect is generally insignificant due to less price sensitivity associated with those groups. This can be shown in one study where it is found that for household energy services, direct rebound effect in OECD countries is roughly less than 30% (Sorrell, Dimitropoulos, & Sommerville, 2009). In concordance with direct rebound effect, indirect rebound also displays larger effects on emerging economies rather than OECD Countries (Antal & Bergh, 2014).
All those findings point out to the fact that developing nations have unfulfilled energy demand (Milne & Boardman, 2000), higher growth rates, more intensive use of energy, higher energy cost, and for some, being in the earlier stages of the diffusion curve for key energy using services, like China (Brockway, et al. 2017). To see this, empirical results from Lin & Li (2014) indicate that rebound effect from heavy industries in China is approximately 74.3%; making the actual saving on the energy reaches only about 25.7%. This is not an awful lot of number, since it hasn’t reached the magnitude of 100% yet in which it signals the “back-fire” point, however, it is clear that energy efficiency improvement still has a long way to go.
In such a manner, although if we scrutinize it further will result in huge variations even among the same group of countries, it can at least shed a light that by considering the importance of rebound effect not to be a problem is misleading as majority of people still practically live in emerging economies and hence, most economic activities also be held in these very countries. Those huge occurrences can’t be denied because we need those to design and reform our policies in conserving the energy timely.
Future Pathways to Mitigate the Effect
The risk of rebound effect from one decade ago and one decade to come must be different; even, we don’t need to foresee that far, what happens in the near future will lead to different challenges along with different ways to adapt to the situation. There are somewhat three predictive storylines published in Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP), which were developed by climate change research community, that in essence include: (1) rebound effect declines and natural capital is stable but degraded and at risk, (2) the rebound effect turns negative with strong declines in natural capital, and (3) rebound effect disappears for some time while natural capital is stabilized but then return (Freeman, 2018). From those three scenarios, one similarity can be found: rebound effect will decline or disappear, but not permanently. The best scenario is obviously storyline (3), but it requires the solution of impact cap in which one of its approaches requires a perfect circular economy where we will come to the matter in this account soon. While we’re at it, it is best to also ponder on how to minimize the occurrence of other scenarios while heading towards a perfect circular economy. Thus, we need to have another way of thinking on how we can benefit from technology. Rather than having the objective from inventing technologies is only to improve efficiency — despite the fact that we understand the end goal could be to reduce environmental impact, we need to put more and more emphasis on the objective of using technology for limiting pollution and rationing energy use. With that being said, technology should not be used to serve humans’ greed, instead it should provide humanity with sustainable options that could turn the table around on de facto conditions. This can be done by focusing our orientation on eco-economic decoupling.
By the term decoupling, one should not be misled with this term as absolute separation between economic activity and environmental impact because it’s just impossible (for now). Instead, we should refer to ‘relative decoupling’ as a reduction in eco-intensity and ‘absolute decoupling’ as a decline in eco-impact (Nørgård & Xue, 2016). Technology’s role in relative decoupling is vital for the reason that the technology itself contributes to the intensity towards increasing environmental impacts. In light of this, technology should prioritize consumer-side efficiency by sharing and also prolonging the useful life expectancy of durable consumer goods (Nørgård & Xue, 2016). This pathway might have already been enacted nowadays, however its full potential is hampered by the GDP-growth mindset that is still prevailing in most economies. Besides that, as common as it sounds, technology can also be used to nudge people’s behavior to follow the agenda in the precursory notion through cutting-edge advertising.
Additionally, in the effort to encourage absolute decoupling, technology should be allowed to reinvent itself — not always in the form of another new technology, but alternatively as an apparatus in supporting other policy measures with the goal of reducing eco-impact. On this subject, we can make reference to impact cap. Perfect circular economy might be too far-off given our condition at the moment. But, little (or even, big) steps can definitely be made through technology by allowing it to partake in stepping up the whole process. Take as an example the GIS technology in monitoring pollutant emissions. We can map air quality by using it in specific regions so that it would be helpful in shaping better policies because now we can determine the allowed limited pollution impact that can happen to natural capital.
Whilst technology is seen as the tool to achieve aforementioned objective, it is clearly acknowledged to be too delusional if we think such as the only prime way — by the reason of this is also being the cause. We can start by utilizing the variables in the formerly mentioned ‘eye-pat’ equation. Although in the previous section we had already discussed the oversimplicity of the ‘eye-pat’ equation and how for some experts it doesn’t mean anything much, this equation still can give us a taste of actual interdependency between population, affluence, and technology. This would later point out to the rather extreme proposition of degrowth society to back our preceding proposal. People may ask, why degrowth? It is because the growth imperative that has been growing in the current economy has led us to this menace and we need to confront this hegemony for the sake of long-term human prosperity. In doing so, practicing the technological part as we have mentioned won’t work without considering the agenda involving other factors should also be pursued. It is unavoidable as well that other debates will be up and running on this subject, but still, we have to deal with it by gradually implementing this notion to certain capable (developed) nations first and to developing nations afterwards. And yes, there should be some compromises in this matter, though it will certainly be difficult.
We have to be honest with ourselves in this matter; we can’t afford to lose any other better opportunities just because we are afraid of reorienting our goals that don’t involve growth. The real deal is we need to be more assertive in calculating our gains and losses from the perspective of real economy terms. Because after all, decent human life alongside a preserved and enhanced environmental ecosystem should be at the core of our real objectives for long-term survival. Those steps should already make us aware of the existence of rebound effects and why we should make a move now, boldly.
Author: Sendy Jasmine
Editor: Executive Council Progresa ID
Illustrator: Gayatri Wulansari
References
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