The Coal Question¶
Jevons, W. S. (1865). The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines.
Cited by¶
4 citations across 4 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Jevons Paradox
- The pattern sits at the intersection of three structural facts: any efficiency gain that lowers the per-unit cost of using a resource is price-equivalent to a fall in that resource's price; price drops expand demand both by substitution toward the now-cheaper output and by opening new demand niches previously priced out; and when the demand expansion is more than proportional to the efficiency gain, total input use rises, the opposite of the naive prediction.
This sourceOriginal statement that improved fuel efficiency lowers the cost of use and raises total coal consumption rather than economizing it.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
Jevons states that fuel economy raises total coal consumption, with a furnace example of falling price and rising demand, but not as a formal three-part price-equivalence argument.
“new capital will be attracted, the price of pig-iron will fall, but the demand for it increase”
- The pattern sits at the intersection of three structural facts: any efficiency gain that lowers the per-unit cost of using a resource is price-equivalent to a fall in that resource's price; price drops expand demand both by substitution toward the now-cheaper output and by opening new demand niches previously priced out; and when the demand expansion is more than proportional to the efficiency gain, total input use rises, the opposite of the naive prediction.
Domain-specific¶
- Rebound Emissions
- The magnitude of the offset is measured as the rebound percentage: a 100% rebound means aggregate emissions are unchanged; a rebound above 100% — sometimes called backfire, the strong form identified by William Stanley Jevons in 1865 in his observation that improvements in steam-engine coal efficiency were followed by increased total coal consumption in Britain
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
“Nor can the economical use of coal reduce ... its consumption. On tbe contrary, by rendering its employment more profitable, the present demand for coal is increased”
- The magnitude of the offset is measured as the rebound percentage: a 100% rebound means aggregate emissions are unchanged; a rebound above 100% — sometimes called backfire, the strong form identified by William Stanley Jevons in 1865 in his observation that improvements in steam-engine coal efficiency were followed by increased total coal consumption in Britain
Mechanisms¶
- Absolute Resource-Budget Protocol
- Cap-and-Trade
- Under a pure efficiency mandate that extra demand would quietly erase the intended savings — the Jevons pattern.
This sourceExplains that greater resource-use efficiency can induce enough extra demand to erase the expected consumption savings.
- Under a pure efficiency mandate that extra demand would quietly erase the intended savings — the Jevons pattern.
Verification¶
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Links previously used in the corpus¶
Before the registry existed this work was also linked 2 other ways.
- https://archive.org/details/coalquestionani00jevogoog ×1
- https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/jevons-the-coal-question ×1
Registry ID ref:a8252879147a · see in the full table