{"id":1848,"date":"2012-06-02T17:08:47","date_gmt":"2012-06-02T21:08:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=1848"},"modified":"2013-09-11T09:46:55","modified_gmt":"2013-09-11T14:46:55","slug":"our-curious-missmeasure-of-impacts-and-silver-linings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/our-curious-missmeasure-of-impacts-and-silver-linings\/","title":{"rendered":"Our curious missmeasure of impacts (and silver linings)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a companion article to the proposed commons based institutions:\u00a0A new economic paradigm: The next big challenge<\/a><\/span> and\u00a0Budgeting for \u201cthe commons\u201d needs business \u201cecobalance\u201d sheets<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

To transform the economy to become self-regulating will require our learning how to make accurate physical measurements of our environmental impacts, and associate them with the dollars spent that paid for them. \u00a0That’s not yet being done, far from it. <\/em><\/p>\n

Nature builds economies\u00a0with whole <\/em>working <\/em>parts: people, businesses, independent service providers, etc.,. \u00a0They <\/em>only deliver their products if all their parts work together,\u00a0like machines and operators making a working unit. <\/em><\/em><\/em> Our traditional measurement methods have just ignored that arrangement of the natural world. Understand our impacts we need our <\/em>units of measure to match <\/em><\/em><\/em>nature’s units of organization, otherwise our errors of measurement become extreme.<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

The following short article was submitted for the June 1 “Energy” issue of the\u00a0UNCSD Rio Outreach Forum, but too technical for those discussions.<\/em><\/p>\n

__________<\/em><\/p>\n

It would seem odd, wouldn\u2019t it,<\/strong>\u2026 to not count the charcoal used for a family barbeque in its energy use, because a neighbor brought the grilled burgers and vegetables over from their yard…? \u00a0That’s almost exactly what happens when businesses don’t count the energy used by their outsourced services.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re treated as having no demand on nature, according to the ISO 14000 and LCA rules. The real error is evident comparing estimates by the normal rules with the global average and finding nearly all of them far below average, a sign of missing data.<\/p>\n

The true totals show dramatically higher levels of real impacts for business
\ncompared with estimates using the standard method people are using<\/strong><\/p>\n

My recent scientifically recognized paper<\/strong>, Systems Energy Assessment (SEA) (1) shows a corrected method, but making sense of such a big error is still a problem.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s evidently exposing some enormous blind spot(s).\u00a0\u00a0 The new method used my work on how economies naturally work, with businesses and their services working as individual self- organized units.\u00a0 That\u2019s the critical insight that allowed making a closed account with the parts adding up to the total.<\/p>\n

The true scale of the totals<\/strong> are shown to be far larger than standard estimates, commonly a ~500% difference. \u00a0I concluede:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. We need to rethink our designs for sustainability, it changes everything to recognize the scale if direct impacts of using money, exceeding what efficiencies, innovation and consumer choices could alter.<\/li>\n
  2. It clarifies sustainability is not being a resource supply problem.\u00a0 With impacts more or less equally distributed to all uses of money and proportional to GDP, it\u2019s an economic demand problem instead.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    For the<\/strong> wind farm case study <\/strong>in the paper, separate estimates for the traceable and untraceable energy using services were then combined, for everything the business paid for to operate.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The services with unknown energy uses, now treated as \u201czero\u201d, clearly make up the very large majority.<\/p>\n

    A factor for each type, a bit above or below Average Energy\/$ , was studied and used for initial estimates.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If further study seems worth the trouble, there are steps to refine the initial estimate and separate the value-added part.<\/p>\n

    Reasons why \u201caverage\u201d is accurate<\/strong> as a first estimate of energy impact per dollar.<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. All the money to pay for anything eventually goes to paying for human consumption, distributed widely like a sampling of GDP of the highly varied types of things people everywhere use money for in a year.<\/li>\n
    2. World energy use is steadily proportional to GDP, changing by a slowly changing factor each year(2)<\/li>\n
    3. Average is more accurate than zero, absolutely, and for larger samples likely to be more than less accurate.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Two technical \u00a0\u201csilver linings\u201d are.<\/strong><\/p>\n

        \n
      1. It saves enormous amounts of effort to have an easy way to get the scale right for impact assessments and just devote efforts where it\u2019ll be valuable later.<\/li>\n
      2. It redefines and simplifies our environmental problem too, to know \u00a0Money = Energy*k<\/strong> as a consistent physical measure the world over<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        The silver lining in why the economists didn\u2019t solve it <\/strong>is the riddle of why of why the environment was hiding the data.\u00a0\u00a0 The economists didn\u2019t see why they couldn\u2019t find the data, just accepted they had none and treated those energy demands as \u201czero\u201d instead.<\/p>\n

        The silver lining is in why both businesses and their service providers are self-managing.\u00a0 They also build themselves and work by themselves.\u00a0 They interact with others independently, through the economic environment.\u00a0 They don\u2019t need to be told how to do their jobs, just what service to deliver, and don\u2019t report how they work.<\/p>\n

        They operate as living organisms really, what the whole economy is mainly made of.\u00a0\u00a0 There are small ones inside bigger ones and big ones inside bigger ones, like organisms in ecology.\u00a0 They\u2019re the living parts that animate our world and what we\u2019re trying to steer, but our measurements, theories and policies overlooked they were alive.<\/p>\n

        1) Henshaw, P.F., 2011 \u00a0System Energy Assessment (SEA)<\/a><\/p>\n

        2) Henshaw, P.F., 2009 \u00a0Inside Efficiency \u2013 BioPhysical Economics talk<\/a><\/p>\n

        3) Henshaw, J.L., 2012\u00a0bio blurb & links<\/a><\/p>\n

        JLH<\/p>\n

         <\/p>\n

         <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        This is a companion article to the proposed commons based institutions:\u00a0A new economic paradigm: The next big challenge and\u00a0Budgeting for \u201cthe commons\u201d needs business \u201cecobalance\u201d sheets. To transform the economy to become self-regulating will require our learning how to make accurate physical measurements of our environmental impacts, and associate them with the dollars spent that … Continue reading Our curious missmeasure of impacts (and silver linings)<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8,11,12,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-econn","category-theory","category-research","category-scitheory","category-whattodo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1848"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2446,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1848\/revisions\/2446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}