{"id":2728,"date":"2019-10-07T11:30:37","date_gmt":"2019-10-07T18:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c21-wp.phas.ubc.ca\/?post_type=article&p=2728"},"modified":"2019-11-05T11:36:42","modified_gmt":"2019-11-05T19:36:42","slug":"the-jevons-paradox","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/c21.phas.ubc.ca\/article\/the-jevons-paradox\/","title":{"rendered":"The Jevons Paradox"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Jevons Paradox (W. Stanley Jevons, 1862)[note] Jevons Paradox, https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jevons_paradox<\/a> [2019-10-07].[\/note] notes that increases in efficiency with which a resource is used tend to increase the rate of consumption of that resource, due to increasing demand. Jevons was considering British coal consumption in the 19th<\/sup> century, but in our own time, commercial aviation provides one of the starkest examples of the paradox.<\/p>\n

The achievements of the early pioneers of powered flight \u2013 the Wrights, Alberto Santos-Dumont, Louis Bleriot etc. \u2013 were truly remarkable. Whether their work counts as physics or engineering is debatable. The Wrights in particular were great pragmatists, much more interested in measuring than theorising. In fact, the field of fluid dynamics didn\u2019t really catch up until late in World War I, when Ludwig Prandtl developed, on purely theoretical grounds, a far superior airfoil to those used on aircraft up to that point.<\/p>\n

However, it is doubtful that any of the pioneers could have envisaged that aircraft would be used to drop nuclear weapons (although Orville Wright lived long enough to see that happen) and that by the early 21st<\/sup> century, places like Barcelona and Venice would be drowning in a sea of selfie-sticks, and aviation would have be a major influence on the Earth\u2019s climate.<\/p>\n

The proximate reasons for the extraordinary rise in air transport since civil aviation got started after World War I are as follows:<\/p>\n