Today’s post is by Richard Jurin who, before his retirement, ran the Environmental Studies programme at the University of Northern Colorado, launching a degree in Sustainability Studies. His academic interests are environmental worldviews and understanding barriers to sustainability. Today he writes about the idea of emergy. As ever, with our blogs, the views expressed are not necessarily shared by NAEE.
In my posts for this site, I have emphasized that any sustainable future cannot just be a ‘green’ version of the current one. We are living in a make-up world where our existential thoughts about value and each other are more often than not, determined by monetary value. Money is just a construct. It is nothing real. Just look at any paper money. We put our trust in what value is printed on a piece of paper. Then, despite the value listed, the actual value decreases as inflation occurs. Is there a real factor that does not change and would determine the specific value of any item or work done in manufacturing? Energy is a real factor that can be measured and applied to most situations where energy can be objectively measured. For human work it would not function as well since how would we value a teacher’s work, a ditch diggers work, company CEO, or even a stay-at-home mother in terms of value – all four are valuable in uniquely subjective ways.
When we look at the price of any ‘widget’ the full costing of that widget would be all the energy used from mining, shipping, manufacturing, and to point of sale/use, plus the energy needed to completely recycle and/or mitigate/remediate any ecological damage incurred. Ecologists Howard T. and Elisabeth Odum introduced the concept of ‘emergy (embedded energy)’ to provide a rational alternative to current economic irrationality of pricing physical assets, since emergy involves ecological service contributions ignored by current economic systems. Emergy is the amount of energy consumed in direct and indirect transformations to make a product or service and is a measure of quality differences between different forms of energy. It accounts for different forms of energy and resources (e.g., sunlight, water, fossil fuels, minerals, etc.) that can be used to determine the real value of a product or service.
Critics like to point out that macro level assessments offer too many flaws in such accounting. Many Engineers and physicists argue that exergy is too difficult to measure (Exergy is defined as the amount of work a system can perform when it is brought into thermodynamic equilibrium with its environment), while many also argue in favor of such an ecocentric valuation approach because it connects economic and ecological systems, the latter that are often ignored as externalities. Emergy applies the rigor of thermodynamics analyses directly to understanding energy transformations in ways that current economics dismisses.
Understanding the role of ecological goods and services requires information about the role of ecosystems and how human and ecological economic systems are directly linked. Our limited understanding of the behavior of such complex systems can be provided via emergy analysis. Does the inconvenience and difficulty of measuring emergy mean we should not do it? It’s not as though there is anything like maintaining a planet hospitable to life as we know it to keep us from doing so.
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Richard can be contacted at: richard.jurin@risebroadband.net