Jevon's Paradox

Rob Bell:
Hello, and welcome to Sketchplanations The Podcast, the fortnightly fanfare for curious people that delves into life's mysteries and fascinations, drawn from the plethora of sketches at sketchplanations.com.

I'm engineer and TV presenter Rob Bell, and with me as always is the creator of Sketchplanations, Jono Hey, and established entrepreneur and past winner of The Apprentice, it's Tom Pellereau.

Hello gents.

Tom Pellereau:
Hello, hello.

Jono Hey:
Hello, hello.

Rob Bell:
This time we're talking about Jevons' Paradox, the counterintuitive idea that improvements in fuel efficiency tend to increase rather than decrease overall fuel use.

You should be able to see Jono's fabulous sketch for this up on your screens now as the artwork for the episode.

But if not, you can head to sketchplanations.com and seek it out there where you can see it in all its high res glory.

You can read up all about it.

You can click through to other similar sketches.

And of course, you can order yourself a coffee of Jono's book, Big Ideas, Little Pictures.

Tell us a bit more about Jevons Paradox, Jono.

Jono Hey:
I can't remember where I came across because I did the sketch a long time ago.

But it's such an interesting one because the idea is from a very long time ago, but is still really relevant today and keeps coming up.

And so it comes from this guy, William Stanley Jevons, and he was a British economist.

And this is back in 1865, 170 years ago, thereabouts.

And it was during the growth of the Industrial Revolution, and steam engines were changing every year and getting more and more efficient.

And so the first ones would burn a load of coal, and you wouldn't get that much usable output out of it.

You had to throw loads in and they were making the boilers and everything much more efficient, as you probably know, Rob.

And then, but what he saw, so you might assume that as we made these things more efficient, then we'd actually not have to shovel in quite so much coal as we used to.

And what he saw was actually there was pretty much an exponential growth in the use of coal as we were making these things more efficient.

And so even though the machines themselves took a lot less coal to run and get the same output out of it, actually we were using more and more of this because we were making more and more use of steam engines because they were more efficient.

And I mean, I think probably the context that I heard about it at first was essentially just energy use in general, which is true to this day.

If you think about cars in particular, that cars keep getting more and more efficient.

And what happens instead of, you know, instead of actually us just using less fuel, we just drive more.

And so roads get busier and we do more journeys because it's cheaper and more efficient to do so.

So super relevant nowadays, but actually comes from these observations by, you know, British economists 170 years ago.

Rob Bell:
I think the fuel economy in vehicles is very apt, certainly for me.

You know, if I'm looking at how I might get somewhere, let's say from London to Bath, it's, I don't know how many miles that is, like, let's say 160 miles, something like that.

And so I'd look at the train price and then I'd consider how much it was going to cost me to drive.

And so cost on journeys like that is a massive factor.

There's obviously the practicality as well.

But if it was much cheaper to drive because of fuel economy, then I'd take the car.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, if your car was horrendously inefficient to do it, you wouldn't, you'd take the more efficient option because it would work out cheaper for you.

And I suppose a lot of this comes down to cost at the end of the day.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

But then also, if you go back to the Industrial Revolution, where Jevons first identified this pattern, isn't that really about capitalism, though?

So you're making savings on the amount it costs to run the machines you've got through fuel efficiencies.

So now you've got more money.

Capitalism kind of dictates that you're going to continue to grow that then.

And so you're going to expand.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

It's not just a capitalism thing though, I think, because I think it's something that we find we do in our everyday lives.

Yeah.

Just as much.

And it's also, I think, funnily enough, a mistake we keep on making.

There are so many predictions that things will get easier and we won't have to do any work and things like that in the future because of all these benefits that we're going to have.

And they keep turning out to be wrong and everybody keeps being busy or busier than before.

So yes, capitalism.

And actually, I was thinking about this when I was thinking about this earlier, Tom, I was thinking about your company and if you're running a company and you make an efficiency improvement, you don't necessarily just go home earlier, right?

Tom Pellereau:
No, no.

Capitalism may be also, I think, is a real aspect of human nature because also, I think this is very, very relevant at the moment when we talk about AI taking jobs and all that sort of stuff.

But let's rewind to a very personal example in the fact that during our lives, guys, cars have got a lot more reliable, right?

When we were young, cars would break down.

Certainly, when our parents have cars, they break down that the whole time.

But as cars are getting more reliable, personally, certainly, I just find we just push them harder, and we just ignore that warning light.

That has really come back to haunt me this weekend, driving back from France where-

Rob Bell:
I love how Tom's example is always really topical.

Tom Pellereau:
The fact that our Pemper van is currently in the garage, and I got sent the potential bill for an enormous amount of work that needs doing, because we've been ignoring that warning light for just a little bit too long, because it's a pretty modern camp version of the VW.

Rob, it's not like the one you took with the BBC.

It's very reliable.

It can usually just keep on going at 85 and it'll all be fine.

Unfortunately, I'm now paying the consequences in some respects.

Rob Bell:
So Jevons Paradox is not exclusive to energy efficiency, right, or fuel.

Jono Hey:
I mean, the observation was about fuel efficiency, but I think there are so many parallels in different areas of machines and life itself.

Rob Bell:
The car is very funny, Tom, because yes, that warning light comes on.

And for the first five, six times you go, I really must do something about that when I get back from holiday.

But then it just becomes part of your routine of getting in the car and driving off.

Yes, okay, thank you.

Jono Hey:
Seems fine.

Tom Pellereau:
I've got a question, and I'm not sure if this is the paradox or not.

And you probably have this a lot.

When you go to your kids, when we get to that cafe, you can have a hot chocolate, right?

But they will always push that further and be like, oh yeah, with cream, right?

And with sprinkles and with marshmallows and all that sort of stuff.

And so you get to the till and you've been all like, yeah, I'm being generous to the kids.

I've offered them a hot chocolate.

I don't know how you find it, Jono, but sometimes I sort of just get really irritable.

I'm like, I said you can have a hot chocolate.

I didn't say you can have the whole fricking world.

Do you know what I mean?

And I think this is an example of that.

And if it is, it potentially shows that this is just so human nature that we are always destined to try and push and push and push.

Jono Hey:
I love your thinking, Tony.

Rob Bell:
So do I.

I'm trying to work out.

Jono Hey:
I can have an ice cream, so I'm going to get more.

You want the three scoops with the waffle cone and the dipped in chocolate and a flake and marshmallows, sprinkles and cream on top, please.

Rob Bell:
Are we saying this is an example of Jevons Paradox?

Because I'm trying to think, let's run it parallel to the original observation.

What is the fuel efficiency gain of the ice cream slash hot chocolate example?

Is it that dad's opened his wallet?

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah, maybe that's it.

Dad's opened his wallet.

Dad's being generous, so therefore we'll just push it until he cracked.

Jono Hey:
We might be stretching it a little bit.

Tom, your example reminded me of what we have talked about before around, do you remember the Generalised Peter Principle?

Rob Bell:
Yes.

Jono Hey:
Which was anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging situations and brilliant fails.

Rob Bell:
Yes.

Jono Hey:
And it is a little bit like that, isn't it?

Oh yeah, the machine is more efficient.

Now let's work it 24 hours until we run out of coal again or whatever.

Rob Bell:
That's very good.

I'll link to the Generalised Peter Principle and the Peter Principle in the show notes below, because yes, Jono, I see exactly where you're going with that now.

And hopefully listeners will see the parallels with that and the example of your kids, Tommy.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah.

Rob Bell:
A simple example for me, I have a garage at the back of my house.

I use it partly as a workshop, so I like to keep it relatively clear so I can be in there without having to move stuff around the whole time.

And recently the garage next door became available.

And so I'm renting that now.

Tom Pellereau:
That's a dangerous game.

Rob Bell:
Exactly.

So now I have more space, but I have filled that space with stuff that I didn't really need.

It hasn't even originally come from the original garage.

A lot of it, I couldn't really tell you where it's come or where I was storing that stuff before.

But now that garage is full.

Tom Pellereau:
You need a third.

Rob Bell:
Yes, I now need a third.

I feel like that is an example of Jevons Paradox.

Tom Pellereau:
The more space you have.

In a small house, you just have to be really disciplined about tidying stuff away.

And similarly for Europe, you had one garage, you had to be disciplined, you had to put the effort in.

Now you've got two, you're just like, I forget about it, I just dump it out there.

Rob Bell:
It was, I luxuriated in it, as people do with their cars, because they're more efficient.

Great, well, I'll drive faster and I'll drive further.

Jono Hey:
I have a sketch about the laws of expansion.

Stuff expands to fill the available space with exactly that, a big house and a little house.

But there's Parkinson's Law as well, which is work expands to fill the available time.

Tom Pellereau:
Yes, that's a really good one.

Jono Hey:
I put another one, I don't think it's a law, but cost expands to fill the available budget.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, that is definitely the third one, isn't it?

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Tom Pellereau:
So, I'd like to bring in something I think is very, very relevant to people at the moment, which is this whole idea of will AI take all the jobs?

I was talking to a lawyer friend of mine last night.

He was like, AI is just going to be so much better than any paralegal potentially in the next couple of years, and there could be these specialist AIs who will so easily write that document you need to buy a house or do this and that.

I was talking to him going, yeah, but I wonder if it actually will, or all it will do is create thousands more legal cases every day, because currently the constraint on the number of legal cases relates to the number of lawyers available to process them.

Right.

If one lawyer with AI can then do a thousand cases a day, then probably actually what will happen is there will be millions more legal cases a day.

Jono Hey:
So my little Jevons Paradox sketch, instead of people on a balcony looking at cars, and it's a really busy road, it'd be like all these legal cases coming in every day and stacking up, and some AI robot just flying through.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah, and also the outside will be processing them.

So it's not like there's less work to do for the humans.

We probably need more lawyers or something like that.

Jono Hey:
I mentioned it in the article from quite a long time ago, this book More Work for Mother and the author Ruth Cowan.

There are some great adverts, I think, about early washing machines, dishwashers, and vacuum cleaners, and how basically you'll be able to just put your feet up and not have to do anything.

In particular, washing machines for clothes.

There was some stat where we read an article from Ruth Cowan, and she talked about it used to be that you would wear clothes for a week before you would wash that shirt or something.

So obviously, now it sounds ridiculous.

And now we just wash them every use or every two uses or something like that, instead of waiting seven days.

And so it's exactly that thing where instead of us sitting back, we've just improved our standards and we've just done so much more.

Rob Bell:
I don't know about that.

I'm going to throw you a little spanner in here.

Because I feel like I...

Tom Pellereau:
Rob doesn't wash his clothes.

Rob Bell:
Well, right.

Well, I mean, that's that is what's spurred my thought on this.

I feel like I constantly live on the edge of embracing modern technology, but at the same time, trying to desperately hold on to the past, but the past when we didn't use as much energy and that we weren't as wasteful.

And I'm basically constantly in my mind thinking about the energy that I use and trying to reduce it as much as I can.

So I will very happily wear clothes for many days in a row.

If I'm not going out and about, if I'm just at home, I can, I mean, my wife might think otherwise, but I'm quite happy to put up with a little bit of a smell on a t-shirt because I've worn it for three days.

Jono Hey:
But you're still probably not holding them on to them as long as if you had to, you know, go take them down to the stream.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, and you're right.

Jono Hey:
Dip them in the stream and then put them through a mangle and hang them up and then, right.

Tom Pellereau:
Also Rob, I think something interesting in the fact that it is very likely that in our lifetime, the cost and both the money cost and the kind of environmental cost of generating electricity is going to go down enormously.

Like potentially to zero because we'll be harvesting.

Now, it will take some time and it could potentially be a million pounds at certain times a day and completely free for the rest of it sort of scenario.

But it is very possible.

I think we might well be viewed as kind of Luddites in the future.

Rob Bell:
I grasp that thought and I wrestle with it a lot because I know that I don't do certain things that I know that I would enjoy because of the energy or the energy implication, environmental implication of it.

I just don't.

And I'm not talking about big things, but there are certain things that I don't do or I decide not to do because of that.

And so I really wonder how I will react, as you say, in the future, when energy is really, really cheap and in abundance, but it's not at the moment and there's a real cost to it, but environmental and financial.

I really, really wonder how I will react to that, or if I'll still be stuck in my ways.

Tom Pellereau:
I can't do that.

Jono Hey:
It's interesting, Rob, or Tom, your thought about energy being so low, because it reminds me that when nuclear was essentially invented, shortly after the Second World War, there were some wildly optimistic predictions about nuclear.

Like there was one which was, it was not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.

You know, like energy just disappears as a problem.

Maybe there is still that potential, but it certainly hasn't materialised yet.

And here we are like 70 years later.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Tom Pellereau:
Well, in terms of the nuclear, I think that hasn't happened because of certain social decisions and regulatory decisions, as it were.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, all sorts of reasons.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah.

Whereas they could have made nuclear insanely efficient if it had been allowed to be developed more in some respects.

Rob Bell:
It's on its way.

It's happening.

The move towards nuclear fusion is happening.

And there are ambitions for it to be up and running, I think, in the States by 2035.

And that's an absolute game changer.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah.

And they're building them ironically for the AI.

Rob Bell:
Right.

Tom Pellereau:
They could have built them right next to the AI places because they're just so energy intense.

Like Microsoft and others are basically buying the nuclear facilities.

Rob Bell:
I feel we digress slightly, but yeah.

Tom Pellereau:
Sorry.

Rob Bell:
No, no, don't.

Jono Hey:
Another work is spreadsheets, another sort of famous one.

And there was this quote by the founder of VisiCalc, which was like the first spreadsheet, like pre-Microsoft Excel.

And he was like, we thought accountants and finance teams would finish their work in hours instead of days.

I think it's very like that, right?

Well, now we're going to wash our clothes, they're always going to have to be clean and perfect as they come out whenever I put them on.

So now, instead of doing one report a week, you have daily reports and live reports, complex analysis, real time updates, any decisions got to have data behind it, whereas previously you just couldn't do that.

So it's not like the accountants and the finance teams are twiddling their thumbs these days, is it?

I don't think so.

But in terms of business, any time you make something more efficient, you can just do more of something else or you can do more of that.

Look, we managed to make it so you can fit another 20 on the palette.

Brilliant.

Let's make some more.

Tom Pellereau:
Let's put 40 on.

Jono Hey:
Oh, now I need my Amazon order tomorrow, not three days, not next week.

I guess there's a natural sort of expectations that goes up, isn't there?

Like we're always expecting more and more once you've experienced something faster or better.

Rob Bell:
Yes.

Is there a danger with Jevons Paradox?

Environmentally, I guess there's a danger, right?

If we're looking at the original observation around our use of fuel, especially as fuel is delivered to us at the moment where it has a carbon and environmental impact.

Jono Hey:
And there are so many of those.

So it's not just like fuel in your car.

So I think some of the examples were like battery technology.

So batteries keep getting better.

And now everything you own has a little battery in it.

We just have way more battery powered devices than we ever used.

Yes.

But batteries have got loads better, loads, loads better.

Water saving devices was another one.

Like if you're using less water, then I can not worry about how much water I'm using.

Rob Bell:
I'll have a longer shower.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Tom Pellereau:
I'm not sure it always happens, though.

So virtually all washing machines are now like 20 or 30 degrees temperature because the soaps have got better rather than 50 or 60.

And yes, the washing machines are probably on more often in some respects, but I'm not sure it always happens that the efficiency increases.

And so therefore we actually end up using more.

I can see why it often happens, but I think it is negative thinking to think that we are just heading towards hell sort of scenario and the fact that nothing is improving.

Because I think there are a huge number of drivers that are suggesting that we are significantly getting better at many, many things.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I agree.

And I'm not totally sure which ones it does apply and which ones it doesn't and why that is.

But I do know that there are so many places where it does.

I was thinking of another one with like computers where you buy a computer these days, if you get a laptop or something, it's so much more powerful than anything that we used to buy 20 years ago.

Tom Pellereau:
But it still takes ages to turn on.

Jono Hey:
And it can still take ages to turn on and it can still like struggle to run your programmes.

And yet, we just made programmes that use loads more.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah, which really irritates me.

Outlook these days is such an enormous programme.

It takes like the entire, and Frome and all these things that...

Jono Hey:
And your hard drive still gets full, right?

Or, you know, you've run out of space, you know, like the hard drive is a thousand times bigger than it ever used to be.

And, and still space is an issue and you get an external hard drive if you're working on music things or whatever, you know, like, because now you're working on video.

I had a housemate in, in the States at UC Berkeley and he was in computer science and his PhD was about video compression algorithms, which was so important.

And this was like the really early days of, of YouTube.

Rob Bell:
Why is that important video compression algorithms?

Do you mean making files smaller to upload?

Jono Hey:
So you will remember when you would open websites.

Like, you know, now you don't think twice about just, oh, I'm just going to press record on my camera and record two or three minute video.

Maybe I'll use it.

Maybe I won't.

I'll just forget about it.

Tom Pellereau:
Whereas when we started using the internet 25 years ago, dial up the maximum speed was 56k or something, wasn't it?

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Tom Pellereau:
And now we're all sitting on an internet which has got 90 megabits live streaming videos to each other.

Jono Hey:
And you know, and our expectations meant you don't expect us playing a video and it to start instantly and the quality to be perfect.

And I was thinking not just video, it's more like, well, what is the video giving me?

I was thinking, like, if I if I'm like doing a DIY thing around the house or something, and I'm like, oh, I wonder how I should prepare this wall for whatever.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah.

Jono Hey:
I should just type it in and I expect to see somebody who's basically done a video of my exact problem.

Rob Bell:
Yes.

Yeah.

Jono Hey:
And it's a bit frustrating if I have to search for a bit.

Tom Pellereau:
Irritating if it's an American.

Like, I want an English person talking.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

And you know, there's like 10 seconds of intro at the beginning.

Skip that.

Let's get straight to it, you know.

And so, yeah.

And anyway, video is such an enormous driver of that.

But what do we do?

We use more and more and more video.

So you're probably absolutely right, Tom.

Maybe I can now wash clothes at 30 instead of 50, and we never wash at 50 again, and that's great.

But in so many cases, we seem to just use more.

Tom Pellereau:
Do you think there's quite an S curve though, where, for example, LED lights in the house, we have a lot more lights in the house than probably we ever did before.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Tom Pellereau:
But we're most of us now using LED lights instead of the older, and they are about 80% efficient versus about 10% efficient of the other ones.

So probably household lighting, electricity usage, whilst it went up quite significantly when we all installed loads more lights, is probably now way less than it used to be.

Jono Hey:
I would presume that is the case because LEDs are so much more efficient.

But I did read something saying that the number of lights we use, you know, you think about the amounts of like string lights people put on their houses and around their bushes and stuff now that you never used to do.

And you don't think twice about just having, you know, a hundred lights draped around some.

Rob Bell:
No, I do.

I won't do it.

I won't have it.

Tom Pellereau:
That's the role it does.

Jono Hey:
People don't think twice about it except Rob.

Rob Bell:
Killjoy over here.

Jono Hey:
The number of lights has gone massively up.

Whether that matches the savings you get with LED, I don't know.

Probably the savings are still bigger.

But yeah, good question.

Rob Bell:
So what are we saying about Jevons Paradox, then?

We got a summary about it.

It's something I feel is important to be, no, not necessarily important, but it's something, as with all sketches, I find very interesting to be aware of.

Jono Hey:
I mean, it was an observation based on data.

So what you do with it is up to us, I suppose.

Rob Bell:
Is it human nature that drives Jevons Paradox, that we are just inclined to use what we have available to us?

Tom Pellereau:
Well, that's always been the greatest paradox of human beings, right?

We're just so adventurous, so looking to push the boundaries.

But we do push the boundaries too far quite regularly as well.

And I think this example is good to be aware of.

I think we could certainly think of about a thousand different examples of where it's probably true.

We probably could fact check some of these things and find out that actually it's our perception rather than reality.

And certainly there's a very positive way to look at this in the fact that quality of life has hugely improved, reduction in poverty has enormously improved along with health and well-being and entertainment and sociability.

But also there's probably some quite significant negative sides that, for example, if you keep pushing that car that you think is highly reliable, you will eventually get a very big bill from the garage.

Jono Hey:
That's a nice self-policing one, right?

You've learned that lesson perhaps.

I think if you're a government or you're in a business and you're trying to get change, so you take advantage of these inefficiencies and don't just always exhaust yourself, then I think that you can pair it with smart policies to help reduce usage of whatever it is as well.

It's not inevitable, but perhaps it is in many cases when left to its own devices, like where people want more of good stuff, so I'll have more of good stuff.

Car driving again, but not in terms of fuel efficiency.

For example, you said, Rob, if it was cheap for you to drive to Bath, you would be cheaper.

You might drive instead of get the train, right?

I think cities have that sort of thing where you're like, okay, it's really easy to drive to the centre and park to go do something, so I'm going to drive to the centre park to do something, but then the centre gets really congested, so what do I do as a city where you put some policies in place, like you remove parking, which I think is the most effective way of doing that, or you raise prices or you put congestion charges and things like that.

There are ways that you can encourage the right behaviours, if there is a right in the case that you're looking at, I think, with policies or incentives for people.

Rob Bell:
Which, as you say, works better or could be more effective as a community, whether that's a business community or a nation or a city or whatever it might be.

Perhaps it's easier to implement something like that than it is as an individual, because it's too easy to break the rules as an individual.

Is there anything else anyone would like to add about Jevons Paradox before we close out?

Tom Pellereau:
I think you've got to say that marketeers and businesses are very, very good at exploiting this reality, and in many respects, that's what most adverts are about.

Or maybe that's how the world goes around.

And finally, for me, what I love about being an engineer is we have the ability through creative skills to make things better and cheaper.

In most walks of life, it's either to be better, you've got to make it more expensive, but in engineering, we can save costs and improve your reliability.

Rob Bell:
Through better design.

Tom Pellereau:
Through better design.

That's the thing I love most about being an engineer, the fact that you don't have to be like, oh, if you want your mask to be really powerful, that it's going to be very expensive.

It's like, no, we can find a way of making it better and better value for the customer.

Rob Bell:
Do you know what I love about you, Tommy?

Tom Pellereau:
Yes.

Rob Bell:
You wholeheartedly believe that is the case in every scenario.

Yeah.

I've seen it in action every time I'm with you.

Tom Pellereau:
It's always a way to be more efficient.

It's always a way to improve performance and reduce costs.

I just love it.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

That's the way you see the world, isn't it?

Tom Pellereau:
Not entirely, but I think that's very important.

Jono Hey:
There was a really interesting quote, which I think is relevant again about it's about work.

But this was John Maynard Keynes, who's famous economist in the 1930s, where he was like, for the first time since his creation, man will be faced with his real, lots of men in these days, man will be faced with his real permanent problem.

How to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him.

That was the view of the future from 1930s.

Genuinely would be a problem is what the heck we'll be doing with our time.

Tom Pellereau:
I think there are a small proportion of the population who do have that problem.

Jono Hey:
Maybe more so than they used to be.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Well, they've got so much free time, they don't know what to do with it.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah, too much compound inflation.

Grandpa made a huge amount of money 100 years ago.

I think there are a lot of people who don't have to work.

Jono Hey:
I don't know, any.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah, I don't know.

You're very good at hiding it, Rob, anyway.

Jono Hey:
Maybe we're on the way to it.

I was just going to say about William Stanley Jevon, because he's famous for this Jevons Paradox.

But he was quite insightful overall, I thought, like the bits that I've read about him.

Again, in 1865, he was the first person to predict that you'd reach a saturation of fuel, peak oil.

He looked at the growth and use of coal and the dominance of the world industry, and looked at how much coal we've got and the present rate of increase of consumption.

And he said, the check to our progress must become perceptible within a century from the present.

Our present happy progressive condition is a thing of limited duration.

He also talked about the irregularity of sustainable power sources.

So he had observations about they used to use windmills to drain mines.

And so, you know, windmills, when they're running, they're really powerful when they get all the water out of the mines and you can work in the mines.

But of course, you run out of wind and then the mines floods and people just sit around and say like, you know, those early challenges of sustainable power and how do you mitigate that?

So lots of things that he was thinking about 170 years ago, which are still relevant today.

It's quite impressive.

Rob Bell:
I'm absolutely fascinated to learn about Jevon because my assumption in the Industrial Revolution is just go, go, go, go, go and progress, development, more, more, more.

Feed the beast with more and more coal.

It doesn't surprise me that as an economist, looking at this from a different perspective and looking at it through the eyes that we would probably look at something like this now.

That's really interesting.

I'm going to read more about Jevon and his work, his observations back then in the Industrial Revolution.

Well, listen, chaps, I'm going to round us off there.

And I'm quite pleased to say we've been very efficient with time recording this podcast, so much so, I'm going to suggest we actually record another one.

For now, I will beg you farewell, boys go well, stay well, thanks for listening, goodbye.

All music on this podcast series is provided by the very talented Franc Cinelli.

And you can find many more tracks at franccinelli.com.