Is Energy Efficiency Bad? Jevons’ Paradox: the more efficiently you use a resource, the more you will use it.

Piggy Principle: instead of saving the energy conserved though efficiency; we find new ways to spend it, leading to greater consumption than before while raising the carrying capacity of the human population. (The more we can the more we do.)
We live on a crowded planet thanks to one thing, oil. The historical jump in population initiated by easy containing and easy to burn fuel allowing us to spend lots of energy. The more energy we spend the more we allow our uncontrolled population to grow. But there other is limiting factors such as water and disease from overcrowding. Science is continually suppresses these limiting factors so the rising populations continue to flourish and expedite resource consumption eating away at our natural life supporting systems. Instead of learning how to use energy more wisely we need to focus more on using less energy. I am an advocate for energy efficiency but it needs to be seen as a tool to transform society and not make the Earths poison cheaper.
The Four System Conditions for Sustainability (review)
1. In the sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing concentration of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust.
2. In the sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing concentrations of substances produced by society.
3. In the sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing degradation by physical means.
4. In the sustainable society, people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs.
Anything that does not meet these demands is not sustainable. Energy efficiency is great, although we are still users, consumers and destroyers. This planet is more complex and intricate then we can imagine. The mysterious natural cycles and systems create life and let it thrive. We forget how delicate it is, how the simplest organisms and the simplest molecules are what give us everything we know and breathe. We need to break out of the “clockwork” way of thinking(that everything functions in separate parts) and understand that we need to ponder the interwoven nature of all things.
Until humanity reaches a new level of enlightenment where we care for others more than ourselves (“greed is good”), the more we think it is ok to burn energy the more we will buy.
What it will take for everyone to realize this is a massive grass-roots movement. Either a revolution or our civilization has ever seen. We need to stop thinking the problem is too big for us to handle and get off your ass and act. Seek the knowledge and teach – Go door to door and talk to the people next to you on the bus on the street at school, work – everywhere and everyone. There is no time to be shy anymore!
Everyone does not need and fully understand the science… They just need to comprehend that this planet is the one and only; that it is possible to burn down the temple that we reside in. New theology or faiths can be transformed to influence people to do what needs to be done. Whatever it takes is fine with me but just relying on energy efficiency may make things worse. We need that paradigm shift now more than ever and we need our firesouls to be easily accessible and easy to use create the new historical jump of population of people who understand the need to live sustainably.
“…the climate is a problem that can just be fixed or quickly solved by technological fixes without addressing the larger structure of ideas, philosophies, assumptions, and paradigms that have brought us to the brink of irreversible disaster… There are certainly better technologies to be deployed, and far better ones soon to come. But the climate is not likely to be reestablished by any known technological fix quickly, easy, or painlessly.” (Orr, David Down to the Wire, 2009)