Jevons paradox

The Jevons paradox is the economic phenomenon in which technological improvements that make a resource's use more efficient lead to higher total consumption of that resource rather than lower. William Stanley Jevons described it in his 1865 book The Coal Question, observing that more efficient coal use in England led to greater coal consumption across many industries. Economists in the 1980s and 1992 later examined the effect for energy use; Harry Saunders named the resulting hypothesis the Khazzoom–Brookes postulate. The article notes considerable debate over how large the rebound effect is, and some environmental economists argue that efficiency gains should be paired with policies that keep the cost of use the same or higher.