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> Or maybe you're saying that if we trace back costs into the economy, from the workers, to the grocery stores where they buy their food, to the farmers, etc. e
by seppel 7y ago
> Or maybe you're saying that if we trace back costs into the economy, from the workers, to the grocery stores where they buy their food, to the farmers, etc. etc., it all eventually comes back to energy.
Yes. Of course, this is greatly simplified and I'm not entirely sure where to put capital costs in my theory. But I think I'm not too far off. And of course I'm purely talking about energy, not whether it is environmentally friendly or not.
> In that case the energy return on investment is going to be 1:1 in steady state, which indicates that's not a useful metric either.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. If I pump up a barrel of oil from the ground, I end up with more energy than I started with. Otherwise I would not do this in this first place, because I could not make money.
- pfdietz 7y agoIt means that if you trace economic activity back to the point that it involves energy, ALL economic energy eventually traces back to energy. The EROEI becomes 1, by definition. Of course this is ludicrous. If you double the energy efficiency of all activities, and cut the energy used in the economy by half, these long chains get longer, but they still end at the energy production, so that '1' doesn't change. What this kind of evaluation misses is the massive multiple counting going on: that displaced energy use is producing value all along the chains, and the longer the chains, the more value each unit of energy produces.