Greening Digital and the Rebound Effect

Highlights

• 2024-04-09 22:25 In the first case, you’re talking about how much energy is needed to perform a given amount of computation. In the second case, you’re talking about how much hardware might need to be created by extracting material from the environment, refining it, then turning it into electronics that we run computation on in isolation. It’s quite hard to argue against efficiency, and we can point to literally years of data showing how increases in efficiency in computing have blunted what might otherwise be eye watering increases in the amount of energy consumption and other resources we have gone through

• 2024-04-01 16:32 And these indirect effects, as you said, it’s not only about direct effects. This is very much about indirect effects, are or can be so much more powerful than the direct footprint.

• 2024-04-09 22:28 And unfortunately, it’s not only the positive effect. So it’s not only how can we do society and economy more sustainable, by the way, society is sustainable as well. We’ll talk mainly about environment today, but much of what we discuss applies to societal implications as well.

• 2024-04-09 22:29 The topic of this is greening the rebound effect. And I’ve touched on what the rebound effect is. But for the uninitiated, who want to learn more than what I just said, what is the rebound effect? And maybe you could tell us a little bit about where it comes from and whether it’s a new thing. Okay, thanks. So, as you said in the introduction, your introduction, the very first time that we know this has been mentioned was in 1865 by the british economist William Stanley Jones, who wrote a book, the Coal Question, it’s called, and it was about what we today call rebound factory, call it such back then.

• 2024-04-09 22:34 So what Jevons noticed was that the more efficient steam engines and other, you know, coal using machinery was becoming in the 19th century. At first glance, paradoxically, the overall coal consumption was not decreasing, but increasing and increasing at a very larger rate. So this is not necessarily counterintuitively, but yet it requires an explanation why.

• 2024-04-09 22:35 And of course, the explanation is that the amount of engines was increasing because the more efficient machines were becoming. And by the way, some of these machines were steam engines that were helping in the very coal extraction. So coal extraction itself was becoming more efficient and thus cheaper. So both running the machines was becoming cheaper and accessing coal was cheaper

• 2024-04-09 22:36 And this is basically what we now call the direct rebuff, which means a good or a service becomes more efficient because the energy is more efficient or some other material that flows into it. So it is more efficient to produce that good or service. Thus it becomes more affordable, and thus, as we know from neoclassic since Adam Smith, basically the demand for it tends to increase

• 2024-04-01 19:06 Yeah, it’s that basically we are, or a consequence of Kumis law, actually a consequence, not directly Kumis law is that we use all our gains for more computing and not for less energy intensive computing.

• 2024-04-09 22:43 Teleworking has been around long before sort of the worldwide web made it into the homes. Since the seventies they started talking about this. And the first papers have titles such as traffic reduction by telecommuting and similar things.

• 2024-04-09 22:44 If you only need to commute, say, twice per week to work, you might be very tempted to move much farther away from working on nice countryside where the kids can play in nature and safely and so on. And then you only commute twice instead of four or five times per week, but for much longer distance. And perhaps you can no longer do it by public transportation because you’re not urban anymore, but you have to do it by car, and that’s a classic. And this became more and more clear.

• 2024-04-09 22:46 hat Dyson was the first on roads to invent them, they also became so much more efficient. So they used to consume 1.5 to two kilowatt of power, and now they are four or 500 watts. So a factor of, it’s like 20% to 25%, a factor of four to five reduced power. And the question is, do we vacuum much more? So it is of course cheaper to run them. Do we vacuum much more? Probably we do it a bit because they’re also more convenient, they’re cordless very often, and so it’s easier to grab them. Certainly this rebound is relatively small and not, you know, 400%. It doesn’t overcompensate with certainty because, well, you only need so much to vacuum your house. And it’s probably also not the most people, the favorite activity for most.

• 2024-04-02 17:10 And again, a short example, outside visualization is led lamps. Right? There is certainly, once you have led lamps, there is certainly a rebound in the sort of light rebound in the amount of light that you are using, you will, because they take six watts and not 60 anymore, you are not so concerned with turning it off anymore. There is some light rebound, but in terms of energy, the rebound is really small because even if you leave it twice as much, you will still save 80% and not 90%.

• 2024-04-02 17:25 Also, by the way, the energy consumption in our devices for model inference, because, for example, I have now a paper under review where we measured a bakery chain in Germany, and they deployed AI to predict the demand for bread, thus to reduce food waste.

• 2024-04-09 22:48 gree taxi service, in your example, what would I have done? If the assumption, if the baseline is I would have used, you know, a very inefficient internal combustion engine powered car instead. Then of course, depending also a bit on the electricity mix of the grid, usually it will be positive, right, the overall impact. But the thing is, it might have replaced public transportation or no trip at all. And then it’s a rebuffer. So if I am keen, I am taking a taxi and it just tells me, hey, if you now take the green one instead of this, then I would say it’s probably a reasonable assumption. We have some production issues. So from a lifecycle assessment, of course it’s a bit complex. Then it’s probably pictured, but in essence it’s probably not incorrect. But overall what happens is that if a taxi ride is cheaper or if I have what is called a moral hazard, so I have a clear, conscious, oh, I’m going green, so then I can take it. And then I’m taking one that would not have existed in the counterfactual, then of course the net effect is there. Okay, so that last point is like, I get an Uber or I get an electric taxi and so I serve to a restaurant and I then decide to eat a big fat steak as an example, like as a way to kind of balance these out. Like there’s maybe an indirect. There’s a direct saving, but systemically I still have created more of an emissions.

• 2024-04-09 22:49 This year’s edition will be end of June in Stockholm, Sweden, and I am co organizing with a couple of other researchers, with Mathiasue at the KTH, with Christa Bremer in Lancaster, Charlie Wilson in Oxford, and then Sheen in Bristol. We are organizing a workshop on this very topic, indirect effects of for the weight. No longer sure what acronym stands for, but something with indirect something. So a workshop on assessing indirect effects. So there are a couple of venues that are scientifically dedicated to this, but there is no, unfortunately no, like, you.