The Remarkable Environmental Rebound Effect of Electric Cars: A Microeconomic Approach

Abstract

The main objective of the thesis is to seek insights into the theory, and provide empirical evidence of rebound effects. Rebound effects reduce the environmental benefits of environmental policies and household behaviour changes. In particular, win-win demand side measures, in the form of energy efficiency and household consumption pattern changes, are seen as ways for households and businesses to save money and the environment. However, these savings have environmental impacts when spent, which are known as rebound effects. This is an area that has been widely neglected by policy makers.This work extends the rebound effect literature in three important ways, (1) it incorporates the potential for variation of rebound effects with household income level, (2) it enables the isolation of direct and indirect effects for cases of energy efficient technology adoption, and examines the relationship between these two component effects, and (3) it expands the scope of rebound effect analysis to include government taxes and subsidies. MACROBUTTON HTMLDirectUsing a case study approach it is found that the rebound effect from household consumption pattern changes targeted at electricity is between 5 and 10%. For consumption pattern changes with reduced vehicle fuel use, the rebound effect is in the order of 20 to 30%. Higher income households in general are found to have a lower total rebound effect; however the indirect effect becomes relatively more significant at higher household income levels. In the win-lose case of domestic photovoltaic electricity generation, it is demonstrated that negative rebound effects can occur, which can potentially amplify the environmental benefits of this action.The rebound effect from a carbon tax, which occurs due to the re-spending of raised revenues, was found to be in the range of 11-32%. Taxes and transfers between households of different income levels also have environmental implications. For example, a more progressive tax structure, with increased low income welfare payments is likely to increase greenhouse gas emissions. Subsidies aimed at encouraging environmentally friendly consumption habits are also subject to rebound effects, as they constitute a substitution of government expenditure for household expenditure. For policy makers, these findings point to the need to incorporate rebound effects in the environmental policy evaluation process.' KeywordsRebound effect, demand side management, direct rebound effect, indirect rebound effect, greenhouse gas emissions, CO 2 , household consumption patterns, efficiency, energy, conservation, natural resources. The energy and emissions produced at other stages of the production chain outside of the household scope. vi List of Tables and +/-is efficiency net effect minus the conservation net effect with negative values in parentheses). 66 Table 5.5: Rebound effects at mean and median total expenditure levels for separated fuel efficiency case (indirect reduction is the efficiency indirect rebound minus the conservation indir...

When the Background Matters: Using Scenarios from Integrated Assessment Models in Prospective Life Cycle Assessment

“…The functional unit is 1 kilometer driven by each vehicle, and so differences in use and further spending patterns are not considered (Font Vivanco et al. , ). The effects of background changes on the LCIA results are studied separately for changes in technology and market parameters.…”

The environmental performance of current and future passenger vehicles: Life cycle assessment based on a novel scenario analysis framework

“…For such technologies which, due to lifetime and market size, do not yet have commercially available EoL services, the detailed analysis of potential future recycling options remains to be an area of particular uncertainty for LCA and needs to be analyzed in detail [80]. Also potential consequences of the implementation of a large-scale hydrogen production and distribution network as well as all kinds of rebound effects [81][82][83][84] need to be left for future work based on consequential LCA [85][86][87]. Finally, the issue of location-specific quantification of human health impacts due to pollutant emissions could not be dealt with due to limitations in the current LCIA methodology [88][89][90].…”

Prioritizing Consumption‐Based Carbon Policy Based on the Evaluation of Mitigation Potential Using Input‐Output Methods

“…Estimates of the marginal unit of consumption in I‐O models (Font Vivanco et al. ) provide a straightforward way to estimate the level of indirect rebound.…”