We have a problem. Faced by the civilizational challenge of climate change, we have collectively responded by developing and purchasing ever more efficient phones, cars and homes. But, historically, our drive for efficiency in all things — from the wheel to the cotton gin to the iPhone — has just created new avenues for using our devices.

David Owen, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has been worrying about this problem for years. His newest book, The Conundrum, available on Feb. 7 from Riverhead Books, pierces the magical thinking that has repackaged high-end luxury goods, such as hybrid cars, as virtuous and the idea that we can consume our way out of trouble. The only way we can forestall, much less avert, disaster is to consume less. Txchnologist talked to Owen about his new book this week. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Txchnologist: The book reads as a manifesto of sorts for the virtues of less – less travel, less stuff, less energy. Was that your intent?

David Owen: It certainly isn’t reflected in my lifestyle or the lifestyle of anybody I know. I think what led to the book is that I don’t understand how we get to these noble goals without less. The idea that you can grow your way into lower energy use, I just don’t see how the arithmetic works.

Txch: You spend a lot of time in this book skewering liberal pieties about hybrid cars, locavorism and luxury consumption reframed as “gifts to humanity.” Has consumer society been bamboozled by green marketing?

DO: I think so. There’s a large number of people who don’t care about it at all. The Prius is still a very small part of the market and the best selling vehicle in the U.S., forever, is the Ford F-series pickup truck. It’s not even a majority of people who are self deluded in that particular way.

There’s a quote toward the end of the book from Dan Nocera, who’s a professor of chemistry at MIT, who has been working on renewable energy for 30-40 years. He says that despite all that, he hasn’t changed his lifestyle in any way. And that’s sort of the problem. We’re still Americans, voraciously consuming everything we can get our hands on.

Txch: But you say on a few occasions that you’ve been taken in by some of the marketing and you’re pretty hard on your own lifestyle. Is it a personal book in that sense?

DO: I think that I respond to things the way almost anybody does. The real forces of change are always economic. When gas is high, I drive less and when the price of gasoline goes down or I get used to the price of gas, I think about it less.

We all find ways to forgive ourselves for the most egregious things we do. I went to the Aspen environment forum last year and I’m going again this year to speak. It’s a lot of fun and you can feel good about doing it because it’s on the environment. But everybody’s there is having a mini vacation in Colorado and talking to people who basically agree with them already. You forgive yourself for the jet fuel because you’re doing something important.

Txch: I guess that awareness is the first step. You mention one fellow in particular who told you, don’t bore me with the details, just tell me what to buy [to make myself green].

DO: That was at a golf course outside Melbourne, Australia. It was another example of me flying around the world to give a talk on the environment and taking my golf clubs with me. I don’t think inaction is the product of ignorance. I think it’s often, you sort of think it through and decide, consciously or not, that you’re not going to do anything.

Txch: You talk in the book about Jevons Paradox – what is it?

DO: I was thinking the other day about the history of the wheel. Moving things around was extraordinarily inefficient before the wheel. The wheel was this tremendous breakthrough in efficiency. You’ve reduced the friction problem to a very manageable size and you can easily move things around. But that did not lead to a decline in human energy consumption it led to a huge increase. Now suddenly it’s easy to move things around, so you move more things. And that’s kind of the Jevons Paradox right there.

What Jevons said was, making things more efficient does not cause energy use to fall. On the contrary, it opens up this whole new avenues of energy consumption If you wind back the tape of civilization almost any distance, you’d see that every efficiency gain has been followed by increases in consumption rather than declines.

Txch: But not everyone agrees that this rebound exists. The late Lee Schipper believed that rebounds were relatively small.

DO: For Lee, energy is a very small part of the economy – 6 or 8 percent. But looking at it that way understates the role of energy in what we do. If we eliminated energy consumption from the economy our energy consumption wouldn’t fall 6 or 8 percent, it would completely disappear. Increasingly we are dependent on that primary energy to power almost everything. You see it directly in your personal life when you lose your power. There’s nothing you can do. You can turn on your car to charge your cellphone, as I did, but nothing else in my life worked.

Dan Nocera at MIT drew this chart on a blackboard and charted energy use and income. Basically, energy consumption is what wealth is – America is wealthy because we use more energy than everyone else. You don’t really break that relationship.

Txch: In the latter half of the book you shoot down a list of ideas – green natural gas, efficient lighting, revolutionary transformation – that others have held out as potential saviors. Did you start to despair while writing this book?

DO: The first thing I was thinking was, well I hope I’m wrong. But if you look back and say, okay more efficient lighting, that’ll cause our energy consumption go down. But the history of lighting is the history of more efficiency increases in lighting. We have not turned those increases in efficiency into reductions in consumption. Instead we’ve used them to leverage more consumption.

Txch: You end with a list of prescriptions for actually effecting change. Most them involve reducing consumption, but there’s little evidence we can do that. Do you have hope?

DO: The problem is so huge that it requires coordinated action by everybody. Say Americans decided we’re going to impose these really high taxes on fossil fuels. Unless the rest of the world does it too, we just make energy cheaper for somebody else. The Chinese or the French or the Germans. Somebody else will burn the stuff you decide not to burn.

How good would the human race being at leaving several centuries worth of coal in the ground while we shiver in our solar powered, very small houses. It’s hard to believe it would actually happen. There’s some point in the argument that I don’t know what the logical next step would be.