Efficiency and Sufficiency

Economists like to say there is no such thing as a free lunch - - engineers like to prove them wrong.  Improved efficiency is a good example of engineering and economists running into each other.  History is full of examples where the unit cost of something, such as energy, will fall - - yet total consumption will actually increase.  The story is not just energy, it is also water - - water experts tell similar stories about irrigation.  When better efficiency lowers the cost of irrigation, farmers expand the amount of land irrigated and end up using more water than previously.

Efficiency improvements cannot be an excuse for increasing production and consumption.  If efficiency were to increase by 50% the next 20  to 30 years, but GDP rose by 2.5% a year, within 25 years we'd be back where we started at.

Engineering needs to be the heart and soul of an engineering revolution.  But we also need to be the leading voice for a sufficiency revolution.  The sufficiency revolution brings us to the two great unmentionables - - the need to curb both human appetites and human numbers.  On a finite planet - - both cannot expect to increase indefinitely.  Of the two, reducing consumption levels is by far the more important.  The average child born in the U.S. today will emit 20 gigatons of carbon a year - - roughly 20 times the child born in Burkna Faso.

Efficiency is clearly a key to our collective future - - but efficiency without sufficiency is a non-winning ticket.