by Nick Rendell
Peter Cook and Rowan Atkinson’s ‘End of the World’ sketch from The Secret Policemen’s Ball is a timeless piece of comedy because, like with all great comedy, we instantly recognise the target of the joke. Every generation throws up its own cultists, convinced that they alone can anticipate and possibly avert the ‘end times’.
If the bloke who stood, with sandwich boards proclaiming “the end of the world is nigh” in my childhood town had had access to social media, who knows, he may have become the Greta Thunberg of his day, with millions hanging on his every word.
Greta always puts me in mind of two characters: one fictional, Violet Elizabeth Bott of Just William fame, the spoilt brat from next-door who would yell, “I’ll thcream and thcream till I’m thick!” (translation: I’ll scream and scream until I’m sick); and, Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, who almost brought down Henry VIII, so popular were her visions and prophecies.
While Greta chucked in school when she was about 12, Barton never went. Despite this, and again, like Greta, Barton met repeatedly with Henry’s senior ministers, though her meetings ended rather less well for her than did Greta’s. It was Thomas Cromwell who, worried that the Barton cult was getting out of hand, had her executed on trumped up charges and a number of her followers hung, drawn and quartered.
Perhaps humans are pre-programmed to adopt apocalyptic cults. After all, the Abrahamic religions all anticipate the end of the world as we know it. Christian breakaway sects, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christadelphians, appear to expect Judgement Day any time soon, but perhaps no sooner than those ‘green’ zealots who set up a trestle table each Saturday in our town square, cover it with baize and pamphlets and, literally, try and frighten the children. Ironically, their pitch is immediately opposite the Jehovah’s Kingdom Hall! Take your pick, they’re all selling the same thing.
Personally, I have my doubts that observance or otherwise of any religious dogma will make much difference, but it’s not something that’s easily proven, maybe prayer will work? However, on the ‘green’ front, I’ve recently come across the ‘Jevons Paradox’, a concept that rather wonderfully illustrates the utter futility of expecting Net Zero policies to succeed in ridding the world of fossil fuels by 2050 or any time prior to the sources of such fuels becoming exhausted.
English economist Jevons’s 1865 book The Coal Question set out to answer the question why, as steam engines become more efficient, does demand for coal increase rather than decrease? The rather obvious answer was due to the laws of supply and demand, identified by John Locke and later expanded upon by Adam Smith. It wasn’t just the upfront purchase price of a steam engine that affected demand but also their running cost. As the running costs went down due to greater efficiency, demand for steam engines went up even faster and the number of applications to which they could be applied increased exponentially. Coal became the great driver of progress, and Britain had loads of the stuff.
What was true for coal in 1865 is just as true for electricity now: whether that electricity is generated by coal or wind, globally we just can’t make enough of it.
This point was very much brought home to me by our own Tilak Doshi in a recent article titled ‘Barclays Sounds the Alarm on Renewable Energy’. He observed that renewable energy had become additive, not substitutive. Illustrating the point with the following chart showing global energy consumption by source since 1800.
Globally, as we generate more renewable energy we don’t use less fossil fuel generated energy, we use it all and still want more!
Recently I saw the additive nature of new forms of electrical generation while driving through a semi-desert area of Morocco. Beside the road were multiple small, fenced fields equipped with solar panels powering a pump and a healthy looking crop. While a power station was unlikely to be able to be built and deliver electricity to these outlying farms, localised solar systems were perfect. They didn’t need 24/7 power, just enough to keep the cistern tanked up.
Greens have yet to recognise the Jevons Paradox, but examples abound. Take LED lighting. LEDs didn’t simply substitute for pre-existing bulbs, instead they massively expanded the market for lighting. We now have LEDs everywhere. Where we used to have a couple of 60W bulbs in our kitchen we now have 36 5W LEDs in the ceiling, countless others under the kitchen cupboards, more inside the cupboards and several built into each kitchen appliance; we’ve even got them in the floor. Our demand for energy for lighting hasn’t gone down, it’s gone up, despite LEDs being 10 times more efficient than old tungsten filament bulbs.
Driverless cars will prove to be another example. When you finally take delivery of your driverless car will you:
- Use the car less than at present?
- Use the car the same as at present?
- Use the car more than at present?
You don’t need to be uniquely insightful to suspect that the correct answer is ‘c’. Without the need to drive yourself, you’ll start driving to the pub or restaurant rather than walking or taking a taxi. You’ll start sending your car on unaccompanied journeys to run errands, to collect your mates before you go to the pub, or perhaps you’ll send the car to collect your elderly mother then get the car to drive her home again. Rather than making one round trip to go and see her your car will make two.
An innovative 2018 study by Harb and colleagues gifted households a chauffeured car (as a proxy for a driverless car) and monitored usage compared to their usage before and after the period of time with the accessible chauffeured car. Cars were dispatched all over for trivial tasks, friends were collected and driven home, nothing was too much trouble, because these additional tasks were, for the driverless car controller, no trouble.
Of course, the most obvious example is AI. The Jevons Paradox is working out for AI data centres in exactly the same way that in the 1860s it worked out for steam engines, where it was the coal rather than the steam engines themselves which were the constraining factor in their adoption. With AI it’s the availability of competitively priced electricity rather than the data centres or the software.
The tragedy for Britain is that, to date, we’ve failed to grasp the Jevons Paradox. We’re operating on the basis that renewable energy need only substitute for fossil fuel generation, but this only holds true if we’re happy to stand still or go backwards, while our competitor nations focus on generating as much kWhs as possible at the lowest cost.
Net Zero echoes Malthus rather than Jevons. We’re imposing our own ‘limits to growth’ by constraining our own electricity generation industry and so both making our traditional heavy industries uncompetitive and strangling our prospective new industries, such as AI, at birth.
Looking further ahead we already see Elon Musk talking about solar powered data-centres in space. Operating at close to absolute zero, data-centres will have no need of the cooling systems that on earth consume both a big chunk of the energy and account for the vast majority of its mass. Additionally, with no cloud cover in space and the opportunity to always have line of sight to the sun, solar power will be able to power orbiting data-centres 24/7.
It’s nonsensical virtue signalling of the worst kind not to exploit our own natural resources: we’ll simply get left behind as demand for electricity increases to power new applications.
In the same way that Malthusians were wrong about the constraints on food production, so they’ll prove to be wrong about both the future demand and supply of electricity.
The truth is, particularly in a world where the power of global institutions is waning, it will be cost not virtue that will dictate the energy mix. We need to ditch the hair shirts and embrace abundance.
