Jevons described this as a ‘paradox’, but if you think about it it’s not particularly surprising. Under capitalism, growth-oriented firms do not deploy new and more efficient technologies just for fun. They deploy them in order to facilitate growth. The same is true at the level of the whole economy. Ask any economist and they’ll tell you: efficiency improvements are good because they stimulate economic growth. This is why we see that, despite constant improvements in efficiency, aggregate energy and resource use has been rising for the whole history of capitalism. There’s no paradox; it’s
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