ABSTRACT
The question of whether or not an increase in energy efficiency leads to the promotion of energy saving has been debated since the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. Many environmentalists suggest that improving the efficiency of energy use is an effective policy instrument to reduce global CO emissions. On the other hand, the opposite view (the so-called ‘Khazzoom–Brookes postulate’) maintains that an increase in energy efficiency, as characterized at the microeconomic level, can ‘backfire’, leading to an increase in energy use, at the macroeconomic level, rather than to a reduction (Brookes, 1979; Khazzoom, 1980; Herring, 1999; Saunders, 2000) – a detailed discussion of this issue has been given by Alcott in Chapter 2 of this book.
