Comments on: Embodied energy, Professor McLuhan?

By: Crooked Timber » » Always Historicize

Crooked Timber » » Always Historicize — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 23:43:05 +0000

[...] be a burden—one that, in this case, the Movable Snipesters have clearly shed. In response to a recent CT item on embodied energy, for example, we read [...]

By: Diary of a Mad Natural Historian » Various and sundry links

Diary of a Mad Natural Historian » Various and sundry links — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 14:56:50 +0000

[...] brief trip down memory lane courtesy of Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber. The linked post on ‘embodied energy’ (and the subsequent link at the Yorkshire Ranter) [...]

By: gmoke

gmoke — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 00:41:27 +0000

Energy – exergy – essergy – emergy

These are terms from thermodynamics applied to energy economics. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen is probably one very good place to start if you want to understand them from the ground up.

I had the privilege of hearing him lecture once. Not that I remember any of it now.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 11:26:17 +0000

ahhhh I see. Although the most vicious battles fought in any really homicidal fully-allocated-costs war are almost always over allocations of depreciation and charges for capital employed, so there is a bit of aggregation in there too.

By: Scott Martens

Scott Martens — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 08:48:42 +0000

One might read the labour theory of value not as a rigorous economic doctrine but as a political one – placing human labor at the centre of economic activity not because it has unique formal properties that make it different from a corn theory of value, but because no one gives a crap about how corn feels when it’s exploited or whether corn can afford medical insurance for its kids. One could offer up a similar interpretation of “embodied energy” – seeing it as a kind of techno-centric political doctrine that measures social activity on the basis of the energy production and availability of an industrial society.

But that lacks the kind of liberatory potential that made a labor theory of value so popular. Even as an environmental doctrine, it’s not as if the production of energy is even necessarily central to protecting the environment. Other kinds of production can be far more polluting.

No – I imagine it’s not a very good policy idea.

By: albert

albert — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 08:19:03 +0000

Daniel, Alex, John, Anyone…

While there are plenty of problems in attempting to derive and account for “fundamental, objective” values in a product or production process, I’m curious to know what is thought about the actual existence of fundamental, objective values regardless of our ability to know/measure them. For example, the LabourToV seems mistaken in a number of ways. Perhaps the EnergyToV is too, I don’t know.

Additionally, do attempts to work with fundamental, objective values fail because the values they try represent are flawed, because they’re just too unwieldly, or because of social or academic power dynamics?

Cheers!
AB

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:50:37 +0000

The classic index number problem is that of aggregating different commodities. In the context of energy, it arises in that different fuels are of different value even if their energy content (measured in joules) is the same.

But the point you were getting at, I thought, is that whenever marginal and average cost differ, there is a problem in imputing costs to marginal units of output. This is true even for a single homogenous commodity.

By: will u.

will u. — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 04:53:51 +0000

I’m not an economist, but I was just looking over the Wikipedia transformation problem article the other day, having been reading the naively plausible account of commodity exchange in the first chapters of Capital. I think stat mech is aces, and was intrigued by the blurb on Emmanuel Farjoun and Moshe Machover. Anyone know if their book is worth reading? Note the suggestive page in Capital where Marx mentions “blinding operating averages between constant irregularities,” etc.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:29:48 +0000

John: is the cost accounting problem not a special case of the index number problem? Have I been completely misled?

By: tom s.

tom s. — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:23:44 +0000

Smart man, that Alex.

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 23:34:48 +0000

JQ, if you’re still here, your post on hair shirts reminded me of Bruce Sterling and his viridian-green design thinking. There’s several premises, but one of the key ones is that any outlook in which my dead grandfather is a better green than I am is not an outlook that is likely to draw much support. Have a look at viridiandesign.org, I think you’d like it.

By: JWP

JWP — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:56:38 +0000

I’m still holding out for the Corn Theory of ValueThe physiocrats have you covered.

By: radek

radek — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:53:26 +0000

I’m still holding out for the Corn Theory of Value.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:46:31 +0000

Spot-on timing, DD. I just finished my second short black (espresso) of the morning, and am ready to go.

Alex the Ranter is right to say that it’s far better to tax energy at the point of consumption. The reason we might want to look at embodied energy (more precisely at embodied CO2 emissions) is to tax imports from countries that subsidise their exporters by allowing them to emit CO2 free of charge.

The technical problem here is not so much an index number problem (since we are only concerned with a single input) as a cost accounting problem that arises whenever average costs are not constant.

The embodied energy idea had an earlier vogue in the 1970s. This really was based on an energy theory of value, and went nowhere.

By: Alex R

Alex R — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 21:45:01 +0000

As you suggest in your last paragraph, it is pretty much exactly as difficult to calculate the energy input into a product as it is to calculate the cost of a product. But trying to calculate the cost of a product is not useless, nor is calculating the energy input into a product useless.

Indeed, one could usefully define the number of joules “embodied” in a product as number of cents by which the cost of that product would increase, if the cost of every joule of energy consumed anywhere at any time were increased by one cent per joule. You’d be back with the morass of trying to calculate the cost of the product, but at least that’s an old and familiar morass.