{"id":2639,"date":"2013-11-19T21:22:57","date_gmt":"2013-11-20T02:22:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=2639"},"modified":"2013-11-28T16:14:01","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T21:14:01","slug":"mismatch-of-impacts-n-responsibilities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/mismatch-of-impacts-n-responsibilities\/","title":{"rendered":"Local views of global systems – mismatch of impacts & responsibilities"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post was for the UN’s<\/strong> OWG 5 <\/strong>meetings\u00a0on Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) <\/strong>from 11\/23 to 11\/27, submitted as an NGO contribution to\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0Post2015 energy development positions<\/a>. \u00a0 The issue here is that there’s a big\u00a0mismatch\u00a0between local and global measures<\/strong> for current accounting methods used to estimate the energy uses\u00a0<\/em>businesses are responsible for. \u00a0 \u00a0It’s an accounting discrepancy commonly on the order of five or tenfold, i.e. so large and undefined that local measures become not\u00a0<\/span><\/span>scientifically\u00a0comparable. \u00a0 It comes from the way the local measures are defined not including a way to account for the energy uses incurred as\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/em>businesses pay for the services they use <\/em>to operate. \u00a0The global accounting includes them by being the total of all economic energy uses combined. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

They have “consumption for production” just like technology, but just not yet being counted!\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

_____________________<\/p>\n

The global data is very clear, increasing GDP always requires proportionally related increases in energy use. Our local sustainable business plans for all sorts of projects seem to suggest the reverse, though, increasing revenue (fractions of GDP) with decreasing energy use!<\/p>\n

What’s up?? \u00a0Our math and the world’s seem to disagree!<\/em><\/strong>
\n Could some projects be outsourcing energy services and not knowing it??<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n
\"The<\/a>
The world economy grows as a whole<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There are two possibilities.\u00a0Either there are hidden energy uses that our SD proposals are a)not responsible for, or that they b) are responsible for. \u00a0It’s hard to chase down puzzling discrepancies like this, but this one had an answer, published in Sustainability (MDPI) \u00a0in 2011, as Systems Energy Assessment (SEA).<\/p>\n

What seems to be happening, all over the world, is the amount of **untraceable energy use** is growing… and so making SD figures unreliable and overly optimistic.<\/strong><\/em><\/h4>\n

The real problem I found with our metrics is they rely on just counting **traceable energy use**! It happens naturally if our sustainability metrics were designed with no way to estimate the quantity of untraceable energy uses left uncounted. That\u2019s what\u2019s needed to close the global accounting, and that’s what the method in SEA does, solving the problem.<\/p>\n

\"Figure2-Pie\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Who am I?? I guess you’d say I’m “Sherlock Holmes” for the serious sleuthing it took to find and propose how to fix the problem. Being a great sleuth doesn’t make me a great enough saleswoman, though, to persuade people to study why their numbers are much too optimistic. The clear evidence is that our overly optimistic numbers are **showing us the wrong path to sustainability** though.<\/p>\n

So… SD may have long lists of wonderful things about it, but it doesn\u2019t use less energy, really. Just like growing GDP, growing SD => growing energy demand, and in a constrained market\u2026 raising the price higher and higher. So, without limiting energy demand (and development) for someone\u2026, the price of energy just goes up and up and cuts out the poor.<\/p>\n

One way or another it’s not “energy for all”.<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n

The research is found at:
\nGlobal Energy Budget – http:\/\/synapse9.com\/pub\/EffMultiplies.htm<\/a>
\nCorrected Accounting of Embodied Energy – http:\/\/synapse9.com\/SEA<\/a>
\nWorld resource prices rising – http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/pub\/ASustInvestMoment-PH.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post was for the UN’s OWG 5 meetings\u00a0on Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) from 11\/23 to 11\/27, submitted as an NGO contribution to\u00a0\u00a0Post2015 energy development positions. \u00a0 The issue here is that there’s a big\u00a0mismatch\u00a0between local and global measures for current accounting methods used to estimate the energy uses\u00a0businesses are responsible for. \u00a0 \u00a0It’s an … Continue reading Local views of global systems – mismatch of impacts & responsibilities<\/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":[7,9,12,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-econn","category-policy","category-scitheory","category-whattodo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2639","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=2639"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2676,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2639\/revisions\/2676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}