The Future of Technology and Consumption

Sky News , the full story first . Hello, Ed here. Now before we get going with our very first episode, I wanted to tell you about our Subscribers Club. If you end up enjoying the podcast, I hope you will, you can also become a member and get access to what we're calling more stuff matters by becoming a sky news insider. With that subscription , you'll get each new episode a week ahead of everyone else. In fact, you could listen to our second episode straight away , but you'll also get exclusive bonus episodes. There's a community forum where the Stuff Matters team will be spending time and exclusive Q and A episodes in which I'll be answering your questions. To subscribe, go to skynews. com forward slash stuff matters. You can find the terms of the subscription in the show notes. Alright, let's get on with it . A while ago I was in Detroit and I went to an NFL game at Ford Field Stadium. We're this afternoon. It's the Detroit Lions and the Tampa Bay Bucketers. It was an indoor stadium about sixty five thousand people, lights everywhere and so much noise. Total Mazheem and it was brilliant. First down . But as I was there all this chaos around me I found this strange brainworm burrowing its way into my head, this big, unexpected , existential question . And it all started with, of all things , a little rubber wristband. I found it sitting there on my seat when I arrived . There was one on every seat and stadium and whenever something big happened in the game, a touchdown or a big play for the lions every single one of these wristbands lit up tens of thousands of them all across the arena The entire stadium was this flashing beacon of light , red, blue, turquoise, and pretty much every other color. It was a spectacle . There were sixty five thousand people wearing this rubber wristband , in each of them, multiple little bulbs so that's hundreds of thousands if not millions of tiny lights all going off at the same time . Flashing , changing colour, creating these wav es of light . I don't get out much these days, so maybe this isn't news to you, but I later learned there's similar wristbands given out of not just NFL games, Taylor Swift concerts, coldplay concerts all over the world. So add this all up and that's millions and millions of tiny light emitting diodes , LEDs Now, LEDs, even though they're basically ubiquitous these days, are actually a pretty new technology . And when they were invented, they were heralded as a world saving breakthrough , all because of how energy efficient they are. Less energy means less carbon emissions. But what I found myself wondering as I sat there in the stadium was have they really saved the world ? After all, what I was seeing there in front of me was something else , a sea of LEDs consuming energy making light where there was no light before . Maybe I thought , LEDs are something else not an environmental success story , but the perfect example of humankind's insatiable desire for stuff Stuff that is definitely cool , but also the risk of sounding like a kill joy, kind of fundamentally pointless . What if the things we think are going to save us from environmental disaster end up making everything worse . That's what I wanted to figure out as soon as I got home from the football game. The Lions won, by the way, twenty four nine , it was a great game . But that question's been bugging me ever since and I think I've got an answer and actually not the one I thought I'd end up with . But to get to it, we need to take a journey back in time and into the future. Along the way, we'll meet a stubborn Japanese inventor who defied everyone's expectations and changed the world , one lab explosion at a time . A brilliant but kind of commudgeonly victorian economist who foretold the downfall of Britain's empire . And the very end , you'll see how LEDs, like the ones in my wristband, or the ones surrounding you and your life , actually reveal something surprising, maybe even hopeful about us as a species . I'm Ed Conway and you're listening to Stuff Matters a podcast from Sky News where we take an object, crack it open like an atom or a walnut and reveal the world shaping forces hidden inside . In this episode , the humble tiny revolutionary , light emitting di ode The year is nineteen seventy nine. Shuji Nakamur a has just finished his electrical engineering degree at a local university in Tokushima, a small Japanese city he grew up in. So initially after graduation, I wanted to join a big company like Toshiba or Panasonic, Sony . That's my dream. Suji wanted to go to Tokyo or Osaka to be a young man in a big city, but his university advisor didn't think that was such a good idea. You cannot survive in a big city. Competition is so hard so you have to stay here in Tokushima. Suji is basically still just a kid fresh out of Uni, so he listens to his advisor who, sets him up with a job closer to home at a small chemicals company called Nichia. At first it seems like it's a total mistake. The chemicals factory which is outside the city in a pine forest is so pungent Shuji can barely stand it The smell is so bad . The place stinks like a volcano or rotten eggs. Yeah, it smells so bad. It gets worse. The scientists working at Nichia, all of their clothes, they're grimy, they're stained, dark, yellow and red because of a particular chemical they're working with. Possible. Yeah, I became so nervous because it's so bad, you know ? Oh my gosh, this is the chemical company . This is a million miles away from the career Shuji was dreaming of , but he doesn't have any decent alternatives, so he learns to breathe through his mouth and joins Niti's tiny research and development team . Soon, a guy from the sales department tasks them with developing a new product , a gallium phosphate crystal used to make green and red LEDs . Shuji thinks it's doable , but he needs a special kind of furnace to make the crystal , an expensive furnace. Suji's boss thinks he must be joking asking for so much cash. My boss says, Oh, you're crazy. My company no money. You're crazy. So what Shudi gonna do? Build his own furnace so I have to make our furnace myself. Oh, homemade reactor Suji walks out to the back of the building, where Nichya scientists dump old spare parts of their lab equipment. He picks through the scraps and literally welds them together to make his own reactor . Obviously it's not perfect. There are cracks in the pipes. At one point, as he experiments to make the crystal, the reactor explodes Smoke engulfs the lab and Shuji with it. Who like the biggest smoker in a brave? His colleagues rush over to his lab. They open the door. They can't see anything, just Shu ji trying to put out the explosion. They yell to check if he's okay. Nakamara, you are surviving. You are okay, nobody came to me and okay, I'm okay, okay These explosions become a sort of routine, a couple of big bangs every month, and in the end, after three years of tinkering with the reactor and firefighting , Suji finally finishes the crystal and lo and behold , it makes the company no money. No profit at all . Still, Suji has at the very least invented a brand new LED cryst al, even if no one wants to buy it. Now, over these three years, he spent a lot of his time doing research, reading academic papers about LEDs and crystals , and he notices something something Everyone is going on about this intractable problem, which no one has been able to crack, almost as if it was this mythical, uncatchable creature , the blue LED . Now, if we want to see why the blue LED is such a big deal, we're going to have to rewind to the very beginning of human civilization . Bear with me. For most of our existence, humanity had only very little control over light , and it improved only very slowly. four hundred thousand years ago Neanderthals first got some dry wooden stalks to catch and we discovered fire. And for the first time ever , we generated our own light . A few hundred thousand years went by and we invented lamps . At first just hollowed out rocks or skulls with anim al fat , and then candles . And then another four thousand years later, oil lamps, burning tallow, animal fat, and whale oil , taking us into the seventeen hundreds. But most of those early lights were really dim , that is until electricity , Edison, Tesla, and light bulbs. All of a sudden lights became bright . We put them in cars , on theater marquees in the back of fridges when you need a late night snack. I mean, we lit up the entire world with them . And thanks to all this light , humanity transformed . We could all do more for longer, way after the sunset . But there's always been a catch with incandescent light bulbs, which is what we call traditional bulbs, a limit , and it is that they are very, very inefficient . Only five to ten percent of the power you run through them actually turns into light. The rest is just wasted on creating heat, which you'll know if you've tried to change a light bulb that's been on for a while . That heat wastes an extraordinary amount of money and energy. A massive chunk of the power generated in power stations basically goes into heating light bulbs, not lighting them up . But in the nineteen sixties, scientists developed LED lights. These are tiny diodes, essentially a relative of the silicon chip, run a current through an LED and almost all of the energy is turned into light, not heat. The problem was for a long time we could only make them red and green . But if anyone developed a blue LED, well you'd have the full light spectrum . You could make any color, you can make displays or pretty important ly, white lights just a fraction of the energy of an incandescent bulb . But inventing a blue LED was easier said than done . In fact , it was a massive longstanding scientific challenge . Whoever could figure that out would revolutionize humanity's relationship with light again and make a lot of money . At the time, you jump by like a sony Tolshipa Pass they're spending one hundred two hundred million every three or five years. In the seventies and eighties , the quest for a blue LED becomes a global technological arms race . But year after year, none of these armies of scientists were any closer to success , giving Shuji a crazy idea . Crazier even than building his own furnace , could he make a blue LED ? He starts to pester his boss . More is a joke than anything else. But the answer is the same as always. We're broke. No money . And also, how could a little Japanese chemicals company do this if the world's smartest scientists can't. No brain. So for years, Shudi is told to work on something else. Anything but blue LEDs . Eventually , he cracks. I became so angry. I can quit the company anytime also. So before quitting, I want to do what I want to do. He's going to quit , but before he does, he's going to ask one last time . He marches into Nichea's founder's office and makes his plea Will you let me do blue LED research ? The founder sizes him up and says OK, not problem . Wow . Shuji expected to get fired on the spot he was not expecting a yes. Why the boss's ch hisange of heart? Shuji thinks it was mostly because of just how doggedly he'd worked for years. The founder thought he might be worth a shot . So in the mid eighties, he gets to work on blue LEDs. There are millions of dollars riding on his research and he starts to feel the pressure. I became so nervous and now I have a big disposal . Now there are two chemical compounds that could make a blue LED z,inc selenide and gallium nitride . Without going into the science of it all, the key thing you need to know is that almost every other scientist is working only with the first compound, zinc selenite, because the other one, gallium nitride, was just really hard to form into the crystalline structure you need if you want it to behave like a diode. Essentially anyone working with gallium nitride is considered crazy. I never expected I could invent Blue Reality , but I could write a paper using light red . Now this is important because in Japan, if you write five research papers, you can get a PhD. So even if his blue LED project fails, Shuji thinks to himself, well, I might at least get a doctorate out of this. So that's the path he takes . But it's hard , even harder than Shuji expected. For any hope of success , he needs to produce a perfect translucent gallium nitride crystal. Every day, for six months he fires up the reactor, but the crystal that comes out is black black , which is not good. Yeah, ever. Months pass a year goes by . Still, day after day, the crystals coming out looking like chunks of dark goo . He rebuilds and adjusts the reactor as he's done before , and then eventually one afternoon to Shuji's total astonishment. Wow, fast a beautiful transparent color. He's finally made a translucent gallium nitride crystal , but he's still nowhere near a workable LED. No, no, no, no, no, staying on . That doesn't matter to Shuji though. What he's thinking is I can write a paper about my incredible progress. Paper. Yes, I'm so excited. I can publish a paper fast time, you know? I never published any pap er, so yeah. One paper down. Four more to go . After two months, he improves the properties of his crystal better than anyone else has been able to. Listen to words, but still , not good enough. At this stage, Suji still wasn't expecting he could actually do it, because even after making the perfect crystal, there's still one more challenge, adding another element, Indium , which will allow the LED to emit that blue light . And guess what? Abrid would have failed. Nobody could make Indium lighter . But now, tucked in a pine tree forest unbeknownst to nearly anyone else in the scientific community, Shuji is within touching distance of one of the greatest achievements in science and technology. It's nineteen ninety two, years since Shuji started working on this . After another adjustment of his reactor , finally , he gets it A translucent gallium nitride crystal . In theory , he now has all the parts needed for a blue LED . But But he doesn't let himself get too excited. This is still not a big moment . Shuji's fear is that because of how unreliable gallium nitride is, the blue LED might struggle to glow for longer than an hour or so, making it totally useless . So he does something called a lifetime test. He lines up ten of his prototype blue LEDs in the lab, he switches them on and goes home . He wants to see if the diodes can last through the night The next morning gets to work bright and early as always . Seven AM came to the company and I went to my office and immediately got to the lab Shuji opens the door and wow All ten LEDs lined up in a row are still on bathing the dark lab in an icy blue blow . Shuji Nakamura has just invented the world's first viable blue LED Coming up How his little diode changed the world Roll on to twenty fourteen, more than twenty years after he invented the blue LED. Suji Nakamura is now a professor at the University of S anta Barbara in California . Over a few days in September , phones start ringing around Shuji's department. Several professors got a strange phone call. Please tell me the 's cell phone number. Now if you're a science professor and people with European accents start making mysterious phone calls to get your number off colleagues around about September , you might twig what that means. Shuji does , and in the coming weeks he keeps his phone by him at all times . Then one night two or three AM I was sleeping , but they called me . A number with a Swedish prefix . They says congratulations . The voice tells Suji , you have won the Nobel Prize for physics . I'm happy I'm happy yeah . This year's prize is about light. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided. He wins the Nobel alongside two other Japanese scientists who are working on gallium nitrite crystals separately to him. Professor Isamo, Akasaki, Professor Hiroshi, Amano , and Professor Shudi Nakamuran. He wins the priz e, not just because making a blue LED was such an enormous scientific achievement , it's because it has major consequences for the world . More light is available at much lower costs to people around the globe . And the committee says, quote , as about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes , the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's res ources . What they're basically saying is LEDs could help save the planet from climate change . They've also transformed the fate of that obscure company, the one he worked for in the pine forest in Japan, Nichea. Over the first decade of selling blue LEDs , he made a profit of over one billion dollars . Hardly any of that went to Suji though. He claims he only received twenty thousand yen for the patent, which is about one hundred and eighty dollars , which helps explain why he made a be line to work for a university in the US. Suji did successfully sue for compensation, but Nichia maintained that the blue LED was created as part of his job and that he was already fairly compensated. Nichia also disputed that the invention was worth as much as Sujih was ultimately awarded by the courts . But when I say blue LEDs changed the world after nineteen ninety two, that's not an exaggeration . LED lights started replacing regular light bulbs, headlights on cars , street lights, LED screens, smart phones, and smart watches and, yes, light up wristbands at NFL stadiums . What about the most extraordinary LED display in the world , that huge glowing orb structure in Las Vegas, the sphere covered literally entirely in LEDs. Some calling it eye catching. To others, it's out of this world. But this three hundred and sixty six foot shimmering exosphere is just the beginning. In fact , there's so many LEDs all around the world right now that some have complained that they're actually creating much higher levels of light pollution . Either way , think back to that history of light from fires to oil lamps to incandescent bulbs . LEDs are truly the next big step in human ity's relationship with light . Thanks to LEDs , the planet is it's literally glowing . But this brings me back to that thing, the thing I found myself wandering at the football g ame. LEDs they were supposed to save the planet because they consume a tiny fraction of power to produce the same light as an incandescent bulb . But we're not just replacing old bulbs with them . We're plastering them everywhere. Our demand for light just exploded . Raising the question . What happened ? He had lots of quirks . He was super driven. I mean, he just from a very early age , he knew he would change economics. For the answer, we need to turn not to the present day, but to the distant past and a very interesting man . Sandra Piert is Dan of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies . I'm an economist a historian of economic ideas. The guy she's talking about, William Stanley Evans , you could say Sandra has had a lifelong relationship with him. Yes, sort of, you know, sometimes it would wax and wane. Decades ago, Sandra wrote her dissertation on Jevins. She's been fascinated by his work and his life ever since. Jevins lived back in the eighteen hundreds, Victorian times. And the reason I'm digging into his ide as now is because he might just help me make sense of what's happening with LEDs. Jevans is a hugely consequential thinker. He's your favorite economist's favourite economist. He's a big deal. A game changer in many different ways. He's one of three economists who late in the nineteenth century , start what is called the marginal revolution. Now I, realize the phrase marginal economics is probably a massive turnoff, but actually this is pretty important stuff. You know how economists always bang on about supply and demand? Well, that's basically because of marginal economics. The very thing Je vins pioneered . It was a total departure from how classical economists used to approach the subject . He also came up with the idea that might just unravel the enigma of LEDs , an idea he came up with way before marginal economics back in his twenties . A little like Shuji Nakamura, Jevans was obsessed with his work . He was known to have worked extremely hard , even to the point of overworking himself, to the point of exhaustion, with possibly some delusions of grandeur . He writes in his diaries, he writes to his sister that he wants to be a force for good in the world and he wants to not only be a force , but to be known to be a force for good. Even as an economic student, Jevins thinks his b rilliance is being overlooked , that his professors can't cope with just how radical and subversive his ideas are. He wrote a paper that took issue with classical economics. He's upset when he gets his marks back. Well, he doesn't get a first, and he writes about, he calls it his sad reverse. I had a sad reverse in economics. And the reason he calls it that is he didn't get the very highest prize. So then after graduating, Jevin starts to think, what can he write that will make a splash that will prove his brilliance? What would be a topic that would be of broad interest to the British public . Then he hits on something , something provocative . British growth, British supremacy, the fact that it's the leading economic innovator and producer of his time , but he's convinced that that's not going to continue. And so that's when he starts to think about the coal question The Coal question, his big blockbuster idea . This conviction that the British hegemony in the world was not going to last forever , and he could explain why , clearly, to the British public and to economists. At the time, this seemed genuinely ludicrous, especially coming from someone who's literally fresh out of university. This is the eighteen sixties . Britain is in the midst of the industrial revolutions, we have the steam engine, we have the cotton gin, we have power looms and so on driving productivity in the production of clothing and manufactured goods , there are the colonies as well. So the North American colonies, the East India Company in India . So this immense hegemony . And it's not just economic. Yes, absolutely, absolutely in terms of theater and music and art and so on. It's the leader in everything . And in his view, that leadership role is largely dependent on having lots of cool . Coal, powering the steam engines, powering Britain's economy. Jevins looks at the numbers and he starts to wonder what if Britain starts running out of the stuff ? As Britain's coal becomes more expensive because they have to dig deeper basically in order to bring it up to the surface as these mines become overworked , his view is that Britain's moment will be eclipsed and he predicts it will be eclipsed by North America . Jevans makes the monumental prediction that Britain is basically doomed. It's somewhat pessimistic really. I do think he was a bit of a pessimistic person. But buried in the book is something very , very interesting. He just kind of slips it into the cool question. Jeffens describes a paradox . He doesn't make a huge statement about it. This idea, the Jevins paradox , might just be the best explanation for what's going on with these light bulbs . It's actually pretty profound. So the Jevins Paradox is a way of thinking about what happens when a good goes down in price. When we become more efficient , so when we become better users of coal, then one result might be, okay, so we don't need as much coal to produce in a steam engine, for instance . So the demand for coal will go down . But the paradox is that , well, actually it may be that other ways of using it then become viable . So not only in the steam engine, but it might be that there's some other mechanized form of production that demands coal, uses coal suddenly becomes viable because coal is now cheaper and actually we end up using more coal in the end. The demand for coal will go up . Even though the steam engines were getting more and more efficient , it wasn't as if Britain just carried on making the same amount of stuff with those machines and consuming less coal. It ended up making more and more stuff and burning more and more coal , all the efficiency gains basically just got swallowed up . You can probably see how this ties into my question about LEDs . They've made lights more efficient and more affordable, but despite that, we just end up using more of them . Now, as I say, it was almost a throwaway line in the cold question. The main message was that Britain's time as an undisputed economic superpower was over. He says we have a momentous choice for the future, brief, but true greatness and longer continued mediocrity . Jevins publishes the Cold Question in eighteen sixty five and it's an instant hit. Oh , yes, absolutely. Or about as much of a hit as an economic book can be. John Stewart Mill makes a speech in eighteen sixty six in Parliament. That's one of the classical economists Jevin Caesar's arrival who also happens to be an MP. He says, you know, this is a really great book as soon as you get mentioned in parliament by someone of John Stewart Mill's stature, that starts to make your reputation . The coal question even informs actual policy. Other politicians, including Prime Minister Gladstone , use it as part of the rationale for reducing the national debt. And as I mentioned, that was just the start. Jevans would go on to transform economics forever. Yes, he gets the recognition in his lifetime. But then , in eighteen eighty two , less than twenty years after publishing the Cole Question, Jevans died at the age of just forty seven. He was swimming in an area that is known for very severe currents He was in one of his exhausted times , so he went to recover . He went swimming to take his mind off work . There's no hard evidence that he wanted to have a swimming accident , but it is a puzzle that he would have in his exhausted state gone into the waters . He died at a young age and even in his very short career, you know, wrote just an enormous number of important works . As Sandra researched Jevin's life over a century later , she went to see his archive in Manchester. You'll find manuscripts handwritten of his works and revisions on them and so on, and his correspondence. Among all this paper covered in his handwriting , Sandra sees something strange . Many years ago , I thought it was an oddity, but now it makes a lot more sense to me. You know, it fits with my thinking about his personality . Kind of ties to the coal question. Jevin's hoarded paper. Bits and pieces of paper. They say that when he died, he had enough paper left to last another couple of decades of writing. For example, he didn't just keep the letters he received, but the envelopes themselves he would use as paper. So you can find an envelope that's addressed to him from someone . And on the back of it, you'll see some notes that he made when he was reading some text or what he was working on , I think he was someone who was a saver, you know, who worried about the future, who thought it was important to save resources. Jevin's main worry in the eighteen sixties was, will Britain run out of coal ? But today I think the question's flipped . People are asking whether fossil fuels like coal and oil and gas will eventually destroy the climate. And Jeffin's paradox is a worrying cl ue about why addressing that might just be far harder than anyone currently realises . Does it mean that all those net zero plans are nearly impossible to achieve . That's coming up I appreciate that you're wearing a tie and I apologize that I don't have a tie on. Look, we're both wearing collared shirts, which, you know, is that enough? Yeah, I think that's enough these days back when the Nobel Committee awarded Suji Nakamura and his fellow scientists the prize, they said it was partly because LEDs would conserve the planet's resources by lighting our world as before but using just a fraction of the energy . But instead , we're generating more light than ever . It's exactly as Jevins described with coal over one hundred and fifty years ago . The thing I was wondering when I looked out on the stadium in Detroit and saw all those LEDs was instead of banking the energy savings on LEDs , are we just doomed to innovate our way into more consumption forever? That's a pretty big question . And that's where Alex comes in. I'm Alex Trembath. I'm the executive director at the Breakthrough Institute. We're an eco modernist think tank. What does eco modernist mean? Eco modernism is a different way of thinking about sustainability basically. Old school environmentalism imagines technology as a threat to nature, and eco modernism understands that technology cannot just destroy nature, it can also save it. But what does that mean in practice ? It means nearly everything hangs on clever gadgets, electric cars , solar power, carbon capture technology, stuff like that. Alex also thinks we can keep on having more and more and more stuff and save the planet at the same time. Material abundance possible for humanity and is a virtue, not a vice. It's worth saying, this approach is controversial in the climate sector. Oh, very much so. In fact, breakthrough has been running counter to the more mainstream climate thinking since the very beginning. My organization was founded around two thousand eight , which was really around the time that global warming, climate change started to become a really central focus . But there was a huge portion of advocacy and commentariat community who argued that we could reduce emissions largely by just consuming less, by using more efficient appliances, more efficient vehicles, and just using less energy. There was this very famous analysis produced by the consulting from McKinsey, which showed how you would actually decarbonize American energy demand. And about half of the decarbonization of McKinsey modeled came from energy efficiency, came from more efficient appliances, more efficient machines. Half of the total. Half of the total . Take a moment to ponder that . The idea that we could cut fifty percent of all emissions just by improving our technolog y . It's only really possible if you assume that there's no increase in demand once this tech becomes way more efficient. We bank all the savings. And that seemed fishy to Alex . Because well, you know why Jevin's paradox. The idea that humans don't just bank the savings, we go on to do more stuff , to come up with new applications for steam engines, to plaster LEDs all over buildings in a way we never did with conventional lights . Those early plans basically assumed Jevin's paradox didn't apply. And that's when we started to look into the rebound effects the rebound effect . It's kind of just a new word for an old idea. When you think rebound effect, you can just think the Jevins paradox. Imagine you buy a new car which consumes half the amount of petrol and costs half as much to drive as your last one. Now say that because it's cheaper , you use it a little more than your old car. You drive to the shop to get a packet of crisps every time you get a craving whereas before you maybe just leave it. The emissions won't be cut by half, they're cut by a bit less than half because of the extra driving . That's the rebound effect. The world still has less pollution, but it rebounds a bit. Sort of a light version of the Jevans paradox. But now imagine you get so excited by your new efficient, cheap car that you drive it more than twice as much as your old one, like you might start going on all these long road trips because suddenly driving that far has become possible, affordable. In the end, you haven't just eaten up some of the pollution savings . You're actually polluting more now in your cleaner car than you were in the old one Economists call this the backfire effect, though it's basically just the same as the Jevins paradox. Now, the thing is , if none of this was accounted for in those predictions for Net Zero, the ones Alex and Breakthrough were looking at, the world would miss pollution targets by a huge margin, not giving us any chance of eliminating our carbon emissions. So, Alex and Breakthrough set out to get evidence . Data of Jevin's paradox across history beyond just coal . Did innovations from the past save as much energy as everyone had hoped, or did they actually prompt us to use more energy ? They combed through data across three industries steel manufacturing, electricity production , and lighting . Lighting is a really fascinating one because that's where you see the largest improvements in energy efficiency. So roughly over the last two hundred years as we moved from like whale oil and tallow candles to now we have LEDs. You're talking about like a million times more efficient . But did that huge increase in efficiency lead humanity to use less energy or more? Energy consumption goes up substantially as Edison lights the streets . I think the energy efficiency of those lights in terms of lumens per watt, it improves by a factor of like ten thousand between eighteen fifty and nineteen , but the energy demand for lighting actually goes up by a factor of one hundred . And then we start to build skyscrapers and light those . And we all get personal vehicles that have light bulbs in them, and then we have light bulbs in every room of the house. And we start putting lights on our computers. But is that a backfire effect or is that just a rebound effect? That's a backfire effect in that the absolute consumption of energy for lighting increases even as the efficiency improves. A backfire effect . Meaning across the centuries, we made lighting so much better that we only ever wanted to use more and more of it . And humanity's energy consumption to power our lights across centuries just skyrocketed way beyond any efficiency savings that those new types of light was supposed to make . It's the Jevins paradox and it's there in the data . But then , over just the last ten years or so , the data also show something interesting happening. Something we haven't seen before. So if you look at high income countries let's take the UK or the US as examples , the amount of electricity we use for lightning as a whole has dropped by around fifty five per cent in the last decade or so, largely through the adoption of LEDs. That's less than half of the energy we used to consume . All right, Hannah, introduce yourself, your name, what you do, all of that stuff. Yeah, I'm Hannah Richie. I'm deputy editor of our world and data, and I'm a senior researcher at the University of Oxford. A lot of the work I do is based around data but focus kind of on this intersection of environmental impacts and human development. So I often frame this as like can we all live good lives without wrecking the planet? Alex's research with breakth confirmed what they suspected, technological efficiencies across humanity's history led to increased energy demand in every one of the industries they looked at , classic Jevins . But Hannah is saying that when it comes to light specifically , that trend has stopped . Well, depending on where in the world you are. Yeah, they're slightly divergent stories. It all comes back to how many LED light bulbs there are being used around the world , but also who's actually using them. So the story of the global picture is that despite we have this new fantastic, more efficient technology that's grown very quickly, still half of light bulbs sold in the world today are not LED, right? Is that right? Still? Yeah . So the market for LEDs has grown from around three percent of bulbs a decade or fifteen years ago to about fifty percent today. So it's grown quickly , but there are still many people in the world that are buying these very, very inefficient bulbs . Hannah says those are generally people in poorer countries . Now what you've seen across the rich world is much faster adoption of LED bulbs . And the impact that that has had on lighting use like electricity for lighting in those countries is that generally electricity for lighting has gone down . it And was going up and up before them, was it? It was going up, yeah. So this is a straightforward success story, is it? To me, it's a straightforward success story in the sense that for rich countries we are able to get access to more lighting. So I think it's also true that I think people are just using more lighting, but we've still managed to cut the amount of energy we're using at the same time . So in rich countries LEDs have reduced energy consumption by fifty percent , despite us sticking millions of them anywhere we can possibly think of. And the story in other economies, so low to middle income countries has been not that they have cut the amount of energy used for lighting , but that basically LEDs have curbed the increase that would have happened if they had purely been using incandescent light bulbs, right? So what you've seen over the last decade or so is actually hundreds of millions, if not billions of people rising incomes, moving out of energy poverty, maybe getting their first artificial lights for the first time, right? So they are consuming more electricity for lighting , which is why you generally saw an increase, but that has been curbed by the adoption of LEDs. So you haven't had as much of a rise as you otherwise would have .. Right So if they were lighting their homes with incandescent bulbs, then it would have been far, far bigger in terms of the energy consumption. Yeah, so if you look at global electricity use for lighting, it's basically stalled over the last decade . Stalled globally . This is a massive deal. Despite all of those new LEDs everywhere , the technology really is so good that we've been able to light up much more of the world without consuming more power . LEDs are defeating Jevins paradox . We've finally kind of reached what may be the final improvement of lighting in the form of the LED . The ultimate, the ultimate light bulb and And the impact of LEDs in some parts of the world goes way beyond just the environment . If people in poorer countries are able to use LEDs rather than kind of more expensive forms of lighting . What are the knock on consequences of that? So if you look at the data on for those that actually have access to electricity in low income countries, you know, how much electricity they're using per day at home fifty to one hundred watt hours. That's this measure of power, right? Now to put that into context , that's like running an incandescent light bulb for one or two hours . That's their entire daily budget, right? And this is like very normal, right? This is the kind of general right now. Yeah, right now, this is a general level of electricity consumption in these countries . So they can run in a bulb for one or two hours . If they were to swap that out for an LED light bulb , they could run that for four hours, so the entire evening . They have electricity to charge a mobile phone, they can maybe run a fan for an hour because it's really, really hot. They might be able to run a microwave with the same with the same amount of power with the same and that's just because there's a five fold difference in the amount of electricity that's used between those two different types of light bulbs . Just because those LEDs are kind of so amazing at doing what they're doing. Yeah, so the again it's something we probably take for granted in high income countries but, when you have very low levels of electricity consumption , it makes a huge difference to your standard of living, whether you have an incandescent label or whether you have an LED For some people who think about the environment, Jeffin's paradox is a warning. It's a prognosis about the human condition. We always consume more . But now I find myself thinking maybe there's something else to it too . Something more hopeful , about human progress . His Sandra Piert, the economist who studied Jevin's work. I think the paradox itself is really about how inventive we are and how willing we are to innovate. Which earlier I said he's a bit of a pessimist. Now I'm going to say he's an optimist in this respect because the paradox is about how we will find other ways to use something . We're people with ideas and we make them happen . Even today, decades on from Suji Nakamura's discovery, scientists are still coming up with ways of making LEDs even more efficient, even cheaper, improving the light quality so it's richer , quietly inv,is ibly behind the scenes , these advances promise to make our lives that little bit better . And because of the genius of Shuji's invention, even despite the tens of thousands of rubber wristbands at NFL gam es, LEDs are so good, so efficient that we can light up the world without raising our emissions . We really can have our cake and eat it . Well, in this case at, least , because here's the problem . What LEDs have achieved is actually pretty unique . Other technologies have also seen efficiency gains , but I don't think to the extreme extent as lighting, right? So fridges and air conditioners and other electronic appliances have got more efficient , but not to the extent where they're five to ten times more efficient like you've seen with LED . If you look at the increase in Latin consumption for other sectors, they've actually been still being growing very, very strongly, partly because you have people moving out of energy poverty. So I suppose it all depends on how you look at it . Through one prism, the Jevins paradox is a statement of doom . Our insatiable appetite for stuff means eventually all our good intentions and good inventions will backfire. That, I suppose, was what I was thinking at the stadium. Consider something that we are all thinking about quite a lot at the moment, artificial intelligence . So we're right in the middle of this massive building boom of AI data centers. And for the first time in decades, America's power consumption is actually going up . We actually have a whole bonus episode about it, including more of my conversation with Alex Trembath, another reason to sign up and become part of our Stuff Matters Subscriber Club. But now, I think LEDs offer a glimmer of hope, a different way of looking at it . Because they're one of the rare examples of a technology that has, after thousands of years, actually evolved to have less of an environmental footprint, now , in our lifetimes The Jeffer's paradox well, it's both things, isn't it? It's hope and doom at the same time . And the more you look at the world around you , the more examples you see of it, more fuel efficient cars, people drive more, more efficient planes, people fly more, cheaper, more advanced computers, people create AI data centers that suck up unprecedented amounts of power . Often human progress fires . But sometimes , as with LEDs , technology really does save the day . Paradoxical as that might sound On the next episode of Stuff Matters, we're tackling AirPods and the story behind the obscure elements they're made of, and what they tell us about the future of the global economy. It's something you don't pay attention to because it seems so boring until suddenly you realize you can't take it for granted anymore. It is too late and all hell has already broken out. If you become a member of More Stuff Matters , you can listen to it right away. We've put the link to the sign up page in the show notes. Stuff Matters is presented by me, Ed Conway, and the series producer is Jake Atiovich. The production team includes assistant producer Valeria Rocker, specialist producer Efa Urrell, and video producer Charlie Bell. Our bonus episodes are produced by Sauiler Appariscio. Our editor is Philly Beaumont, and the Sky News commissioning editor is Paul Stanworth, sound design and mixing by Luke Hatton, original music composed by Klong and Ed Conway. 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