Energy and “The Tragedy of the Commons”

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Posted on 23rd June 2011 by Richard Jones in Energy Management

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The past couple of weeks I’ve focused on some key themes about global energy demand, and also how energy efficiency efforts are most effective when focused on the final end user.  I’d like to introduce another often quoted concept that today is applied to sustainability of our planet’s resources.

In 1968 Garrett Hardin published an article in the journal Science titled “The Tragedy of the Commons”.  Although Hardin’s work was focused on human overpopulation of planet earth, his article and its concepts have been widely applied to the issue of global warming.   Here is a summary of the concepts put forward by Hardin as summarized in Wikipedia:

The tragedy of the commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen. This dilemma was first described in an influential article titled “The Tragedy of the Commons,” written by Garrett Hardin and first published in the journal Science in 1968. Here is a PDF version of the original article.

Hardin’s Commons Theory is frequently cited to support the notion of sustainable development, meshing economic growth and environmental protection, and has had an effect on numerous current issues, including the debate over global warming. An asserted impending “tragedy of the commons” is frequently warned of as a consequence for adopting policies which restrict private property.

Central to Hardin’s article is an example (first sketched in an 1833 pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd) of a hypothetical and simplified situation based on medieval land tenure in Europe, of herders sharing a common parcel of land, on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin’s example, it is in each herder’s interest to put the next (and succeeding) cows he acquires onto the land, even if the quality of the common is damaged for all as a result, through overgrazing.. The herder receives all of the benefits from an additional cow, while the damage to the common is shared by the entire group. If all herders make this individually rational economic decision, the common will be depleted or even destroyed, to the detriment of all.

You can read more about the arguments both for and against Hardin’s article in this Wikipedia link. Also below is a video of Hardin talking about “Human Nature and the Tragedy of the Commons” in an interview with Nancy Pearlman.

I want to make a link between “The Tragedy of the Commons” and my recent blogs using the excellent book by Peter Tertzakian ”The End of Energy Obesity”.  Mr. Tertzakian makes the point that if the 6 billion or so people not currently living in the richest economies of the world continue their aspirations to live a lifestyle that the 1 billion people in the richest economies enjoy, our global energy use will grow enormously.  The increase in CO2 emissions will follow the same trajectory, and with it the detrimental effects of climate change.  Each of us as individuals, though, does not directly pay for the effects of climate change – it takes the effects of billions of individuals using more energy and producing CO2 to create the consequences of global warming.  Our own self-interest in not doing anything about saving energy as an end-user because it costs us something , yet which in the end could cost all of us the depletion of the earth’s resources, is our modern day “Tragedy of the Commons”.

The Asymmetry Principle of Energy Consumption

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Posted on 14th June 2011 by Richard Jones in Energy Management

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In my last blog I referenced a book by Peter Tertzakian titled “The End of Energy Obesity”.  Here is a video where he talks about the Asymmetry Principle of Energy.

He writes that there are basically three paths forward for us in terms of satisfying our global energy demand.  The path he recommended was to make significant changes to the way we use energy through the implementation of better energy efficiency technology, especially by targeting wasteful consumption by end-users, and by focusing on energy supplies that are less harmful in terms of their greenhouse gas emission output.

Energy waste

Focusing on the end-user is key.  In my opinion not enough people understand that the power of saving energy at the end-user level instead of focusing on technologies further up the “energy supply chain”.  Drawing from Mr. Tertzakian’s work again, here’s why the end-user focus is so important:  a unit of energy saved at the end consumer level cascades into multiple units of energy saved at the source.  This is especially true of the electricity industry.  Mr. Tertzakian calls this the Asymmetry Principle of Energy Consumption.

Here is an example for electricity.

  • If we start with 100 units of natural gas at the point where it comes out of the ground, by the time we have shipped it to a generating station fueled by natural gas and then burned it to create electricity, we have only 40 units of energy remaining.  The generation process of burning fossil fuel to create electricity is not very efficient.
  • After we transport the electricity to a home we have 35 units left due to transmission and distribution losses.
  • If we use that electricity to power something inefficient like an incandescent light bulb, we may have used only 2 units of that energy to actually create light in the visible spectrum where we can see it.  An incandescent light bulb is really a heater that gives off only 20% of its energy as light, and then only a fraction of that as light that is in a wavelength we can actually see.

What this means is that we should be highly focused on reducing the amount of energy we use at the end consumer level because there is a huge amount of leverage back up the supply chain when we make that happen.  In this example, there is a 50 times leverage factor – for every unit of energy we save at the end use, we could save 50 times that many units at the initial supply point.  While this may be an extreme example, this Asymmetry Principle is still very powerful and leverage ratios of 20:1 are not uncommon for many end-user devices that consume electricity.