Customer Reviews

Why Energy Conservation Fails

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If one doesn't look too deeply, it is somehow obvious that if our machines are more efficient, we will use less energy overall. But what is superficially obvious isn't necessarily true. If nothing were to change *except* the efficiency, the result would indeed be lower overall consumption. But that is never the case.

For example, if an automobile engine required 500 gallons to get us a few miles to the grocery store, nobody would use automobiles for anything. The consumption of gasoline would be negligible. In truth, as automobile efficiency has improved, the overall usage of gasoline has increased.

In the matter of steel manufacture, superficial logic says that when we improve efficiency, we should reduce consumption of coal used to manufacture steel. But Bessemer's process, which greatly improved efficiency, led to greatly increased consumption of coal, along with an abundance of high-quality steel.

Inhaber presents an excellent case, piling example upon example, to show that improved conservation has consistently resulted in increased consumption. His book is a great antidote to the journalistic nonsense to which we are daily exposed.

Incidentally, Inhaber is not making a case that we should be wastrels. He is merely pointing out the unintended consequences of conservation.

A Page-turner on Economics (!?)

Book review by Jay Lehr
Published: in Environnment & Climate News, November 1, 2002

Why Energy Conservation Fails
by Herbert Inhaber, PhD
Quorum Books, paperback, 237 pages

Why Energy Conservation Fails is, in many ways, the most readable book on economics you will ever read. It is so innovative and fascinating in its approach that it is a page-turner.

Dr. Inhaber uses basic economic theory coupled with our well-known human nature to prove in dozens of ways that no artificial coercive strategy aimed at conserving anything can ever succeed. Through simple prose, supplemented with detailed illustrations and ample calculations, he makes his premise as certain as the law of gravity.

In making his case, Inhaber stands on the shoulders of giants of the past. These truths have been illustrated and handed down for centuries ... and yet the folly of coercive conservation runs rampant even today. Sadly, those who do not study the failures of the past are destined to repeat them, and that we do again and again.

Over the past two decades, Americans have been subjected to an unprecedented barrage of government edicts telling them to save energy, water, natural resources, and many other substances.

If we trade in a large car for a small one, surely we use less gasoline ... or do we? If cars are smaller and driving is cheaper, families may own two cars instead of one, and they will drive more miles with their cars. The counterproductive end result is that people will ultimately use more gasoline. Simple economic reasoning makes it clear: When the price of a commodity falls, more of it will be used than if its price had remained constant.

Conservation on a national scale does not and cannot exist. In the case of gasoline, its use has risen, not fallen, since the imposition of strict mileage standards in the late 1970s. According to those who advocated those laws, gasoline use should have declined.

In our homes, when we attempt to save electricity through improved insulation, our electric bill goes down ... so we tend to use more electricity in other ways, such as by raising our indoor temperature in the winter or lowering our indoor temperature in the summer.

Inhaber points out that Karl Marx made a similar mistake when he reasoned capitalism would fail when production efficiency increased, thereby making many employees redundant. He failed to see that with increased efficiency comes a decline in the effective price of a service or commodity and that in the face of a lower price, increasing demand will require more workers.

The statues of Karl Marx have come down all around the world, but the conservationists who say that saving a kilowatt hour here and there will reduce the total amount of energy we use still have a loyal following. Inhaber feels strongly that their efforts should be-and can be-thwarted by teaching simple economics to coercive conservationists.

Inhaber explains clearly how conservationists have always assumed that man would run out of this or that resource, though it never happens. Why? Because brain-power followed by improved technology leads to better ways to find and refine everything or to replace it with even better substitute materials in even greater abundance. Fiberglass, for instance, is formed from silica dioxide, the most abundant mineral in the Earth's crust.

While many of us try to save energy at home, we may imagine waste occurs frequently at the industrial level. At home we replace light bulbs when they burn out. In a factory, bulbs are replaced on a timed schedule to coincide with the average life of a bulb. Many perfectly good bulbs are discarded in this way ... but a tremendous amount of labor, and thus cost, is saved. Waste is in the eye of the beholder. For a manufacturing company, labor is too valuable to be wasted.

These examples are but a small illustration of the meticulous and comprehensive manner in which Dr. Inhaber dissembles the ill-fated do-gooders' desire to conserve a wide variety of resources that never were, are not now, and never will be in short supply. They overlook at every turn man's indomitable intellectual creativity, which allows him to expand or replace every imaginable resource.

Dr. Jay Lehr is Science Director for The Heartland Institute

An interesting book exposes the fallacies of "conserving" energy. It is a fundamental fact that energy unused is not "conserved." Why Energy Conservation Fails by Dr. Herbert Inhaber, Ph.D. (Quorum Books paperback), an economist, explains why in an interesting book that why artificial and coercive policies aimed at conserving anything simply do not work. Supplemented with detailed illustrations and calculations, he demonstrates this truth that is as certain as the law of gravity. The decades of government mandates, instituted by so-called "environmentalists", to require "saving" energy and other natural resources demonstrates that the failure to use energy is the failure to grow the economy and provide for our national needs to provide the electricity and heat for our expanding population and the creation of new jobs through industry and small businesses. The bottom line is that our improved technology provides ways to both find and use all forms of energy and natural resources. Just one example will suffice. The use of fiberglass, made from the most abundant mineral in the Earth's surface, has transformed communications and reduced the dependence on copper. Americans are beginning to reexamine the claims made by environmentalists, discovering they do not stand the test of scientific or economic facts.

Herbert Inhaber, long known as an apologist for the nuclear and fossil fuels crowd, has reappeared with this faulty and misleading analysis of energy conservation and efficiency. Inhaber demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of both the science and economics of energy efficiency and conservation, using incomplete, inadequate, and misleading data. He misreads the tremendous progress already made in improving energy efficiency nationwide -- which has led to a complete divergence of economic growth and energy use since the mid-1970s. And he misrepresents the tremendous, cost-effective potential that remains. Indeed, without the recent progress, thousands of more power plants would have been built to meet unnecessary and wasteful demands, with their associated environmental, human, and ecological impacts. Remember when the energy industry projected that we would need 1000 new nuclear plants nationwide by 2000? Well, we didn't because we became smarter, wiser, and more efficient in our energy use. Inhaber doesn't understand this -- living in the 19th century paradigm that states: more energy use must mean more well being -- a paradigm that we now know is false. Buy this book only if you want to add to your collection of books that represent false, misguided, or antiquated ideas. And it is expensive to boot!

I bought this book as I am concerned about our nation's and the world's energy future. What a disappointment.

At first I thought this was just a poorly written book, but as I read on it got quite humorous. Silly analogies and selective use of information abound. Not to mention a positively laughable example of conveniently forgetting the data used in an earlier argument when making yet another incredible leap in logic not 3 pages later.

Should become recommended reading for anyone interested in the study of false logic and fallacious argument. Or to simply discover for oneself the lengths some will go in an attempt to manipulate facts and clear argument to fit an ideological view.

Not worth buying for any other reason.

What is gonna be the next right wing book gonna be? "Exporting American Jobs Overseas is Good for America"? Apparently thats one of the lies that the Bush Administration beleives in as well. This sad excuse for an author provides the most poorly researched conclusions I've ever seen. He seems to sound like hes still in grade school judging by the laughable argument he presents. I guess traffic lights are a bad idea too since there will always be a person who runs a red light eh?

Dont buy this book. In fact, dont even read it in a library. It'll make you sick to your stomach the lengths that these oil corporations will go to denial global warming & the harmful effect of pollution & deforestation on this country.

Our children's future DEPENDS on conservation. Instead of buying this book, use the money to pay for a electric hybrid car instead. They only cost about 18,000- as much as a standard sedan. Plus it'll pay for itself w/ its 60 mpg mileage, especially with the $3 per gallon gas prices that Pres. Bush has created.