Jevon’s Paradox: Case of Passenger Planes
Jevon’s Paradox is a concept that keenly observes the progress of our advancing world and its consequences. We see that when the efficiency of something improves its cost and amount decreases. While this may seem to be a good thing and help conserve, it ultimately increases the demand exponentially causing greater harm than if efficiency had not been achieved. This paradox can be applied to many of our latest technological advances as they are followed by huge setbacks to a better and sustainable future for our world.
Take the case of passenger planes. Between 1960 and 2016, the per-seat fuel efficiency of jet airliners tripled or quadrupled, as reported by the IPCC. This remarkable improvement in efficiency led to a significant reduction in flying costs, by over 60%.
This great feat however is offset by the growing demand for and accessibility to these commercial flights available. Lower airfares because of the efficient and less use of fuel created a 50-fold increase in annual air travel since 1960. The total distance flown by passengers escalated from a mere 0.14 trillion passenger-kilometers per year to nearly 7 trillion.
Although the airlines have become much more fuel-efficient, the net fuel consumption has increased tremendously. We now burn more that 17x more fuel than we did in the past.
Why may this be harmful to us? Aircraft CO₂ emissions are closely tied to fuel combustion. For every pound of fuel saved, approximately three pounds of CO₂ emissions are avoided. The aviation industry tells us they are trying to be more sustainable by making more efficient aircraft, but we see this being even more detrimental.
Modern aircraft achieve fuel efficiencies of 3 liters per 100 passenger-km (80 miles-passenger per gallon). This is more sustainable than a solo trip in a European compact car. The notion that an aircraft can contain less CO₂ than a European automobile is quite telling of European cars, but the fact that these aircraft have led to an increase in global CO₂ emissions in the aviation sector says even more.
Although the aviation industry tries to reduce CO₂ emissions by minimizing fuel use, their efficiency has led to more fuel use than ever imagined. I believe one way to mitigate these effects and tackle this challenge is limiting the number of flights or travel an airline is allowed to perform in a certain timeframe. For example, an average plane makes about 3000 flights per year, and if we were to even limit that to 2400, it would have great impacts as the thousands of planes would have to follow. If we were to reduce the amount of fuel or use per flight, industry would find ways to become more efficient and offset this policy. If we went directly to limiting the number of flights and in-air travel time per airline, we can find some sort of decrease in CO₂ emissions and hope to see a change. This will be distasteful to the businesses limiting the number of airfares that can be sold, decreasing revenue but will help the environment and set us up for a better future.
