On Sat, Jun 25, 2016 at 12:08 AM, Stuart Staniford <[email protected]> wrote:
> I investigated these issues quantitatively for a simple model house some > years back. In general, embodied energy will be very small compared to the > lifetime energy usage of a building (they typically last at least decades > and often centuries). Stuart, Why do the numbers for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) that you and so many use differ so sharply from those few who pioneered a bigger view of embodied energy and LCA, like Hall, Prieto, Bardi, Murphy, etc. who are building on the work of H.T. Odum, who set the standard for understanding energy use in complex systems. How do you explain the difference? Granted that extended assessment is not easy and there are boundary issues, but can it be simply ignored, as most LCA does? For example, can one ignore entropy costs - the costs of maintenance and replacement? In sum, can one ignore the ultimate costs to society that I referred to in my original post? Most of the apparent cheapness of energy in recent years that also distorts most LCA is reliant on temporary props whose costs will have to be paid in the future. Props include failure to maintain infrastructure like electric grid, water and sanitation utilities, and which in the US includes education and health care. The deterioration of all of these is well documented. Props also include a system of unequal trade and offshoring of environmental and labor costs to cheap labor parts of the world (imperialism) that delivers abnormally cheap raw materials and energy, but must be backed by resource wars that themselves are an increasing drain on energy available to US society. Most everything we do in industrial society, including attempts at low energy residential housing, is reliant currently on an industrial economy that was built to need cheap energy, and is therefore unsustainable as cheap energy disappears. I think we agree about the enormous amount of waste and discretionary consumption in mature industrial economies. If we could jettison a big chunk of that, yes, it would liberate energy to use to convert the way we produce basic needs like food, shelter and transportation to lower energy systems. However, as Tom pointed out, it is hard to imagine the US public accepting such a decline in energy use for unnecessary consumption , when even most environmentalists assume we can have our cake (such as green housing) and eat it too (keep most of the modern way of life). -- Karl North - http://karlnorth.com/ "Pueblo que canta no morira" - Cuban saying "They only call it class warfare when we fight back" - Anon. "My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel." —Saudi saying For more information about sustainability in the Tompkins County area, please visit: http://www.sustainabletompkins.org/ If you have questions about this list please contact the list manager, Tom Shelley, at [email protected].
