Counterknowledge, Google, and Amory Lovins

Damian Thompson coined the term Counterknowledge, but did not invent the concept. "Counterknowledge," according to Damian Thompson is that which "purports to be knowledge, but is not knowledge". Counterknowledge refers to knowledge claims that can be easily contradicted. An examples of countraknowledge include the notion that the United States Government, with or without Israeli help, was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

An example of Thompson's style will be sufficient:

It will come as no surprise to long-time readers of this blog that the culprit is our old friend(s) Harun Yahya, whose lavish (but bollocks) “Atlas of Creation” - aptly branded a “glossy tome of lies” by one recent Amazon.co.uk reviewer - was sent out to schools all over the world in 2007.

Thompson has his set of pet peeves, and he knows what to do with them all. Unfortunately Thompson is British, and the work of Amory Lovins has yet to enter his awareness. This is most unfortunate because Amory Lovins is not an ordinary run of the mill crackpot. e is a crackpot who has managed to capture the ear of some very rich and powerful people, and whose ideas win far to ready acceptance in the current energy debate.

In a famous speech which Lovins delivered in 1989, Lovins argued:

I think we have even better methods now, which don't just market negawatts, but create a market in negawatts. . . .

I think the only real choice that electric utilities face is between participation in the efficiency revolution, or obsolescence. A minority of U.S. utilities now understand this. They're trying to sell less electricity and more efficiency. . . .

There are three main things we need to do to abate global warming. One of them -- and this will handle over half the problem -- is energy efficiency. But it costs less to save fuel than to burn it, so the cost of this abatement measure is strongly negative.

Lovins does sound very reasonable, doesn't he?  And in the case of a household economy he is.  During the Mid 1990's I noticed that the incandescent bulbs in my Dallas home, put out far more heat than light. In the summer, we were using electrical power to run the air conditioner in order to remove the heat caused by incandescent lighting. I began experimenting with compact fluorescent bulbs, and eventually switched the entire house to fluorescent lighting. These measures did save on our electrical bill, thus my experience would seem to confirm Lovins' account at least on a household level.

We did other things to save electricity, installing a more efficient air conditioner compressor, and purchasing over time more energy efficient appliances.

This would have been the end of the story except other things started happening. My wife and I began to notice how dark the house was, This was not the fault of the Fluorescent lighting. We had the same light output. But the house had been poorly lit all along. All of the money we were saving on electricity, now went into home improvement, and of course one of the things we improved was our lighting. Lighting improvement meant that were were using more electricity although not as much as we did before. But we began to use electricity in other ways. We each had computers, and computers are power hungry. Finally my wife switched from using the solar clothes dryer - called a clothes line - to our electrical dryer. We had always had the electrical dryer, but the electrical savings from the lighting and air conditioner meant that my wife felt she could afford to use the electrical clothes dryer. As a consequence we had a rebound in our electrical bill. This is what happens on a micro economic level.

William Stanley Jevons, a 195y century English Economist, made the first serious study of the effects of energy efficiency on energy consumption. Jevons had historical records of English coal consumption going back to the dawn of the Industrial revolution. Jevons was also well informed on the history of British technological efficiency. Jevons noted a startling fact when he compared the two histories. As coal use efficiency improved, demand for coal increased on a macro-economic level.

Now Jevons findings directly contradicted Lovins contentions. Jevons stated, "It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuels is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth." Jevons and Lovins cannot both be right, and Jevon's conclusions are backed up by research, while Lovins is not. Furthermore, Jevons conclusions have been supported by other researchers.

Robert Bryce reports the following:

John M. Polimeni, Kozo Mayumi, Mario Giampetro, and Blake Alcott, state "increased energy efficiency leads to increased demand and consumption of energy."

Horace Herring states, "by lowering the implicit price, result in increased, not decreased, energy use."

Vaclav Smil states that history is "replete with examples demonstrating that substantial gains in conversion (or material use) efficiencies stimulated increases of fuel and electricity (or additional material) use that were far higher than the savings brought by these innovations."

Peter Huber and Mark Mills state, "Efficiency fails to curb demand because it lets more people do more, and do it faster and more/more/faster invariably swamps all the efficiency gains."

John M. Polimeni, who reviewed numerous studies on energy efficiency, reported that a 20 percent increase in efficiency would "increase carbon dioxide emissions by 5 percent."

Lovins simply committed intellectual murder against Jevons by ignoring Jevons' findings, as well as the finding of numerous other scholars. As far as Lovins was concerned, Jovons book on energy efficiency, "The Coal Question," and every other piece of economic research that contradicts Lovins beliefs, has to be made yp disappear. They simply do not exist in Lovins universe. How could this happen, how could a genius like Lovins not know about Jevons? Could it be that Lovins, the great prophet of energy efficiency, did not know about Jevons, the greatest researcher on energy efficiency. Could it be that Lovins, confident in his own genius, spoke out of ignorance, and said the sorts of stupid things an ignorant person is likely to say when he shoots off his mouth about energy efficiency?

It is most unfortunate that Lovins has forced William Stanley Jevons to sleep with the fish. Jevons should be into the energy debate, if not given the last word. Jevon's view was that energy efficiency was not the solution, and indeed that resources will be consumed until consumption will bring them to an end. This is a view often encountered on The Oil Drum. And while this view is certainly true of some resources, including coal and other fossil fuels, it is not true of the resources civilization truly needs in order to survive. It is well beyond human capacity to consume all of the Uranium and Thorium that could be extracted for energy purposes. Alvin Weinberg envisioned 50 years ago that civilization could survive by burning the rocks, and that vision still holds the same promise today as it did 50 years ago.

In a comment on H.G. Wells' 1914 book, "The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind". Weinberg stated:

The world would become a much more stable place if energy, ubiquitous and cheap, could replace other raw materials: if, say, natural hydrocarbons were replaced by hydrocarbons derived from limestone, water and energy; or if unfertile deserts were rendered fertile by huge desalting complexes driven with the new energy source. Nuclear energy was, to use the current phrase, the ultimate "technological fix": by its exploitation, man could satisfy all of his material wants. And if man's material wants were satisfied, then it seemed to Wells that the world would become a more stable place, especially if the big bomb were there to enforce the peace.

To present-day "realists" all this is merely the dream of a mystic. Yet it is my contention that in the long run H. G. Wells-not the cynical realists- will be proved the better prophet. Despite skepticism with which one now views nuclear energy as an instrument of international understanding, or as a promoter of world stability, the final returns are far from in. The promise is there, and it will eventually be turned into reality.

Weinberg's belief in the technological fix ought to be part of the energy discussion, but it is completely ignored by the Google energy plan.

What can we say of the Google Energy Plan? The Google plan assumes that by 2030 American energy use can be reduced by 33% through energy efficiency, The only authority which Google has to back this assumption is Amory Lovins. At the very least the authors of the Google plan should have looked at Jevons and the numerous other economists who have demonstrated that Lovins assumptions about efficiency are false. Lovins theory of energy efficiency is in fact counterknowledge, which the Google.org people would have discovered, had they Googled the topic. What is wrong with Google then? Don't they know how to google?