The ghost of William Jevons has haunted energy researchers in recent months, provoking debates on whether our best efforts to use less energy will merely lead us farther down the road of consumption. Jevons, a British economist, suggested in 1865 that increasing energy efficiency could backfire because it would allow further resource exploitation. He was thinking about coal at the time. And, indeed, as people got better at converting this black rock's energy into useful work, the work itself expanded.
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