The Technology Skeptic: When Less is More

But there is no paradox to York’s position. His work is motivated by deep environmental concerns, it’s just that he doesn’t believe advancements in technology are going to solve our problems—and he has the numbers to prove it.

 

York’s primary area of research involves compiling large quantities of data and running statistical queries. He studies national trends to explore the connection between energy intensity (the amount of energy required to produce a dollar of product) and energy consumption. For instance, he has examined the relationship between automobile fuel efficiency and total fuel consumption.

 

Certainly, engines today now run further on less gas, thanks to decades of slow progress. Unfortunately, says York, this hasn’t reduced our use of fossil fuels for personal transportation.

 

“In the case of the automobile, there are basically three culprits. First, we use technological improvements in engine efficiency to make cars bigger, not get better mileage; second we have more cars; and third we drive those cars more. The combination makes our total fuel consumption higher today than in the past.”

 

York sees the efficient car as one way of avoiding the bigger problem: our vehicle dependent society. He says improved fuel economy is a good example of how efficiency often works to make consumption more attractive because it makes it less expensive.

 

To the dismay of technological optimists, this phenomenon applies across the spectrum of energy technologies York studies. The more energy we create, the more we use.

 

York’s research builds on a proposition called the Jevons paradox, named after an English economist of the mid–nineteenth century who observed that an increase in the efficiency of coal use led to an increase of coal consumption.

 

Aside from the energy efficiency paradox, York has also compiled evidence that technological advances heralded as solutions to problems, from deforestation to water pollution, simply end up substituting a new problem for the old, sometimes never resolving the old problem along the way.

 

Take paper consumption. With the advent of electronic media for storing data, many proclaimed it was the dawn of a paperless society. Not true, says York, who points to studies that show paper consumption has increased, especially with the introduction of e-mail.

 

“With e-mail, you get vastly more written messages a day than you did before,” he says. “Even if you don’t print all of your messages, you may print some. In this way we’re producing paper junk we never before even had the ability to create. And not only are we consuming more paper, we’re also consuming more energy. Mass storage doesn’t run on nothing; it takes a lot of power to keep servers going.”

 

The same is true of our energy history overall. From biomass to fossil fuels to nuclear power, each advance in energy production has come with its own environmental and social troubles. Of course, there are contrary examples. Airborne lead and particulate matter have decreased significantly in affluent nations with improved emissions technology. Arguably, their reduction hasn’t meant an increase in any other kind of atmospheric pollution.

 

But York stresses these are exceptions and he focuses instead on the structure of our economy as the key to real progress.

 

“Mainstream economics is obsessed with the endless growth of GDP. This creates a condition where everyone wants to believe that the way out of our environmental mess is through inventing some new way to consume more but do less harm.”

 

The solution, he says, is a societal reorientation in our thinking about what we are trying to get out of life—including what constitutes happiness and wealth.

 

“We have come to expect that the world is about expanding production and consumption, but a lot of work in sociology shows this doesn’t make our lives a lot better,” says York. “We don’t need major shifts in what kinds of material goods we consume, or how we consume them. We need to decrease consumption of stuff, period.”

 

York is a core faculty member of the UO Environmental Studies Program. He is coeditor of the journal Organization and Environment and has published more than fifty articles, essays and reviews. He has twice (2004 and 2007) received the Outstanding Publication Award from the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association.