THE CAR OF THE FUTURE - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 137

guess: lower U.S. oil use prompts strategic producers to cut back out-
put in an at empt to prop up prices. If, for example, you make the
same assumptions about this dynamic as we did in Chapter 3, the
upshot is that for every i ve-barrel reduction in U.S. oil consumption,
world demand falls by four barrels in total, thus preserving most of
the climate benei ts of any cut in U.S. oil use.
As we saw in Chapter 3, though, there is a small but not trivial
risk that big cutbacks in U.S. and others' oil consumption, probably
combined with gains in U.S. and other oil supplies, could create a
i ght among strategic producers for share of a shrinking or stagnant
global oil market, leading to an oil price crash in the process. Low oil
prices would prompt people to use more oil, which would undermine
the climate gains from the cutback in U.S. oil consumption, even as
low oil prices increase its economic and security benei ts. h

is pos-

sibility is worth keeping in mind.
h e second potential problem with a move toward more ei cient
cars and trucks owes its intellectual heritage to William Stanley
Jevons, a towering i gure in nineteenth-century economics. Born in
Liverpool, he had a front-row seat for the i rst great fossil-fuel rev-
olution: the rise of coal. Yet as the use of coal became ever more
ei cient, Jevons observed, coal use did not fall; instead, it increased
even more rapidly. By 1865, coal production had skyrocketed, which
made the topic Jevons published that year— h e Coal Question —all
the more persuasive. 95 Warning of the eventual exhaustion of British
coal resources, Jevons made an argument that would last well beyond
his time.
His case was simple: greater ei ciency in the use of natural resources
should reduce demand for them. h e same factory that once used a
hundred tons of coal a day might be able to get away with using only
i t y once it becomes more ei cient. We all know, though, that fall-
ing demand for anything, coal included, results in falling prices—and
when something gets cheaper, people will buy more. Perhaps, having
become more ei cient, each factory will double in size, or perhaps other
industries will start using newly cheap coal. In any case, the upshot
is straightforward: greater ei ciency need not ultimately lead to lower
consumption. It can actually result in more.