Jevons's Paradox

The concept of the "rebound effect" originated in economist W. Stanley Jevons's The Coal Question. Although this was published in 1865 and was in reference to steam engines, the idea that technological improvements in efficiency will not necessarily lead to decreased consumption of resources rings truer than ever in today's age. Many people (the vast majority, really) continue to consume energy resources without so much as flinching at the fact that these resources are being depleted. It has been easy for them to do so, given that there has been nothing other than slight fluctuations in prices to make it tangible. The government (in the U.S. as well as in the rest of the world) has avoided addressing the necessity of pervasive, regulated efforts to decrease society's dependence on, and obscene consumption of, depleting resources. Obviously, as with most of our governments' follies, this negligence is largely due to their desire not to upset constituencies with inconvenient truths. A politician that runs on a platform of limiting citizens' petroleum consumption in unlikely to win, plain and simple. However, the ignorance among citizens that has resulted from this sort of culture has led them toward the convenient mentality that a sort of "silver bullet" is inevitably going to save us from our absolute dependence on resources that we are absolutely going to run out of some day.
In the short term, the sort of advances that have been made in improving the efficiency of petroleum consumption have ultimately led consumers to save money. Improvements in housing insulation and car engines, for example, should theoretically conserve petroleum. This, however, is when the rebound effect rears its ugly head. The improvements in heating homes only led to monetary saving for people, and so people in turn built more, larger houses that required more energy to heat, and adopted other behaviors that required more energy overall. Engines as well. As engines improved, people began driving further and more often. They didn't simply save money by using less gas for the same activities: they used the money saved to buy Hummers and be active consumers in an economy that is inherently inefficient as far as the nonrenewable resources. The rebound effect is ubiquitous in our economy. Even something like word processing, which was initially lauded as something that would save trees and create a "paperless office," ultimately led to an increase in paper usage, as it became easier to type and print words.
What this effect ultimately means to us, as inhabitants of this planet, is that we cannot simply hope for technological improvements to better our pattern of consumption of nonrenewable resources (that pattern being "consume without mercy or foresight"). It is up to us to establish a way of living which, in direct contradiction to the past few hundred years of cultural conditioning, doesn't require, or even allow, the massive, non-stop consumption of these resources that has been taking place. It is possible, but will be difficult given humans' general tendency to stick with what's comfortable. And the illusion of unlimited nonrenewable resources is indeed comfortable.