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A new start for the article is proposed under Energy economics/new. See also Talk:Energy economics. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ...
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This is a new start for the Energy economics article For comments on the previous version see: Talk:Energy economics Energy economics is a broad scientific subject area which includes topics related to supply and use of energy in societies. ...
Energy economics is a subfield of economics that focuses on energy relationships as the foundation of all other relationships. It is a subfield of ecological economics in that it assumes that food chains in ecology are directly analogous to energy supply chains in human industries. Face-to-face trading interactions on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. ...
Ecological economics is a transdisciplinary field of academic research that addresses the dynamic and spatial interdependence between human economies and natural ecosystems. ...
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This article does not cite any references or sources. ...
A supply chain, logistics network, or supply network is a coordinated system of organizations, people, activities, information and resources involved in moving a product or service in physical or virtual manner from supplier to customer. ...
Some theories go much further in assuming that these relationships are decisive, much as Marxist economics assumes that capital (economics) ownership relationships are decisive, in determining human actions on the largest scales. Marxian economics refers to a body of economic thought stemming from the work of Karl Marx. ...
Capital has a number of related meanings in economics, finance and accounting. ...
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Buckminster Fuller, in his "Cosmic Costing", was an early advocate of energy economics. Modern theorists of energy economics are also often students of complexity theory, e.g. Joseph Tainter. Richard Buckminster “Bucky†Fuller (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983)[1] was an American visionary, designer, architect, poet, author, and inventor. ...
Complexity theory can refer to more than one thing: Computational complexity theory: a field in theoretical computer science and mathematics dealing with the resources required during computation to solve a given problem Systems theory (or systemics or general systems theory): an interdisciplinary field including engineering, biology and philosophy that incorporates...
Joseph Tainter is a U.S. anthropologist and historian whose best-known work is The Collapse of Complex Societies. ...
The earliest energy economics was considered by some an offshoot of deep ecology movements - sharing the view that human beings can suffer population dieoff when an energy supply is exhausted. This is considered inescapable. Accordingly, a prime motive of energy economics is energy conservation. Deep ecology is a recent branch of ecological philosophy (ecosophy) that considers humankind as an integral part of its environment. ...
For the physical concepts, see conservation of energy and energy efficiency. ...
Energy efficiency According to Brian Czech, "Most modern economics has defined 'efficiency' in terms of output per personhour instead of output per unit of energy input. Using the former calculation, the American farmer is the most productive in the world. Using the latter, he is the least. (Not only is he subsidized through the use of non-renewable fossil fuels, but he also receives financial subsidies from the government, which are paid for by economic activity that is also based on non-renewable fossil fuels.) Face-to-face trading interactions on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. ...
An agricultural subsidy is a governmental subsidy paid to farmers to supplement their income, help manage the supply of agricultural commodities, and bolster the supply of such commodities on international markets. ...
Fossil fuels are hydrocarbons, primarily coal and petroleum (fuel oil or natural gas), formed from the fossilized remains of dead plants and animals[1] by exposure to heat and pressure in the Earths crust over hundreds of millions of years[2]. The theory that hydrocarbons were formed from these...
"The 'invisible hand' of the modern marketplace has dramatically raised the output of primary and secondary producers to the point where a small percentage of the population involved in these activities are able to support the majority who work in the service sector." [1] For other use of Invisible Hand, please see Invisible hand (disambiguation) The invisible hand is a metaphor coined by the economist Adam Smith to illustrate how those who seek wealth by following their individual self-interest, stimulate the economy as a secondary effect and thus assist society as a whole. ...
One way to view this increase in productive capacity per person that supports others is as surplus value, of which modern technology has freed up enormous amounts, letting the service economy "balloon to levels far beyond the wildest dreams of the aristocrats of old." This wealth is quite unevenly distributed, but aside from that, it is only accumulated at great loss to everyone else. Those who take this view are at the convergence of Marxist economics and green economics. Surplus value, according to Marxism, is unpaid labour that is extracted from the worker by the capitalist, and serves as the basis for capitalist accumulation. ...
Service economy can refer to one or both of two recent economic developments. ...
For the business meaning, see Wealth (economics). ...
Marxian economics refers to a body of economic thought stemming from the work of Karl Marx. ...
Green economics is an approach to economics in which the economy is considered to be a component of, and dependent upon, the natural world within which it resides and of which is it considered a part. ...
Industrial ecology Regardless of political stripe, energy economists are often involved in redefining political economy along the lines of ecology and thermodynamics and usually seek monetary reform to reflect the realities of energy inefficiency and waste in industrialized activities. The idea of industrial ecology has emerged in part from these efforts. See Natural Capitalism for a popular framework incorporating these principles. The Politics series Politics Portal This box: Political economy was the original term for the study of production, the acts of buying and selling, and their relationships to laws, customs and government. ...
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Thermodynamics (from the Greek θεÏμη, therme, meaning heat and δυναμις, dunamis, meaning power) is a branch of physics that studies the effects of changes in temperature, pressure, and volume on physical systems at the macroscopic scale by analyzing the collective motion of their particles using statistics. ...
Monetary Reform is accounting reform that reaches more deeply into banking central bank, money supply and monetary policy. ...
Industrial ecology is the shifting of industrial process from open loop systems, in which resource and capital investments move through the system to become waste, to a closed loop system where wastes become inputs for new processes. ...
Natural capitalism is a set of trends and economic reforms to reward energy and material efficiency - and remove professional standards and accounting conventions that prevent such efficiencies. ...
Environment vs. Economy Accepting the surplus value framework challenges some long-held views in green economics about labour, which the greens inherited from neoclassical economics: Surplus value, according to Marxism, is unpaid labour that is extracted from the worker by the capitalist, and serves as the basis for capitalist accumulation. ...
Green economics is an approach to economics in which the economy is considered to be a component of, and dependent upon, the natural world within which it resides and of which is it considered a part. ...
In classical economics and all micro-economics labour is a measure of the work done by human beings and is one of three factors of production, the others being land and capital. ...
Neoclassical economics refers to a general approach (a metatheory) to economics based on supply and demand which depends on individuals (or any economic agent) operating rationally, each seeking to maximize their individual utility or profit by making choices based on available information. ...
"The problem with environmentally friendly alternatives to existing practices is that they invariably reduce the output/person-hour, which means that less 'surplus value' is being created to support the service sector. To a large degree this is simply because environmental sustainability simply involves redefining 'efficiency' to emphasize sustainability instead of output per person-hour. If you set out to do one particular thing, it is a lot easier to do it than if you set out to do another thing first and hope to have something else come about 'on the side'. And the fact of the matter is that it really does take more people to raise organic carrots than if you use pesticides. This is why organic food costs more. It is simply because we are substituting human labour for environmentally-destructive inputs like pesticides, long-haul trucking, chemical fertilizers and so forth." [1] The tertiary sector of industry, also called the service sector or the service industry, is one of the three main industrial categories of a developed economy, the others being the secondary industry (manufacturing and primary goods production such as agriculture), and primary industry (extraction such as mining and fishing). ...
Sustainability is an attempt to provide the best outcomes for the human and natural environments both now and into the indefinite future. ...
While green economics may hold that the economy has "grown even if the new job comes from hoeing carrots instead of teaching the violin," there is a "multiplier effect" to the decline of surplus value: "Every time you add a new producer to a lower trophic level you are also adding a new consumer to the lower level. (This is where the analogy with wildlife biology breaks down---contrary to Swift's A Modest Proposal, people on upper trophic levels do not directly eat the people beneath them.) The thwarted violin teacher who ends up hoeing carrots has to eat carrots herself, which means there will be one less unit of surplus value to support the creation of a new violin-teaching job for someone else. So, in effect, she not only doesn't create a new job teaching violin, she is going to take away the food that was needed to support another violin teacher! It is this "multiplier effect" that shrinks the economy." In ecology, the trophic level (Greek trophē, food) is the position that an organism occupies in a food chain - what it eats, and what eats it. ...
Jonathan Swift Jonathan Swift (November 30, 1667 – October 19, 1745) was an Irish cleric, satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for Whigs then for Tories), and poet, famous for works like Gullivers Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, The Drapiers Letters, The Battle of the Books, and...
A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick [sic], commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a satirical pamphlet written by Jonathan Swift in 1729. ...
A unit of account is a standard numerical unit of measurement for the market value of goods, services, and other transactions. ...
Some economists have taken issue with this idea of a "multiplyer effect" because they forget that there are absolute limits both to the maximum work an individual can do manually and because there is an absolute minimum amount of food that that person has to consume. This inability to understand these limits probably comes from the paradigm of infinite expansion of productivity that has dominated Western society for the past 200 years; and is itself an artifact of the almost limitless energy supplies that we have gotten used to. It will probably take many years and many debates until the concept of energy scarcity becomes enmeshed in academic economic discourse. Until then, the language will suffer from a clash of paradigms.
This shrinkage is inevitable even if the number of jobs is steady:
"Employment will open up in the primary and secondary sectors of the economy as people develop more environmentally- sustainable and labour-intensive technology. There will be jobs for people raising organic carrots and building straw-bale homes. But the economy will decline because there will be less 'surplus wealth' to purchase goods and services. People will live in strawbale homes and eat organic carrots but they will not be able to hire people to teach them violin---they'll have to teach themselves in their spare time." [1] For the album by the Kaiser Chiefs see Employment (album) Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. ...
So the acceptance of the combination of surplus value and energy-centric views, requires one also to accept the decline of the service economy and a role at a lower trophic level (as a low-tech gardener, farmer, fisher) for at least some of the time, for all people. Service economy can refer to one or both of two recent economic developments. ...
In ecology, the trophic level (Greek trophē, food) is the position that an organism occupies in a food chain - what it eats, and what eats it. ...
Appropriate technology is technology that is appropriate to the environmental, cultural and economic situation it is intended for. ...
A gardener Gardening is the practice of growing flowering plants, vegetables, and fruits. ...
Organic farming is a way of farming that avoids the use of synthetic chemicals and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and usually subscribes to the principles of sustainable agriculture. ...
However this is not necessarily a bad thing because for many people the economy has produced too many consumer goods and services and they can easily accept a small drop in living standards.
Energy collapse This is of course the opposite of current trends to urbanization. In China alone 900 million people are expected to move to the cities in the coming generation. Joseph Tainter has studied about two dozen collapsed civilizations, and in no case was any able to avoid the collapse due to the increasingly top-heavy pyramid of value that stressed the environmental carrying capacity to the point where it could not sustain population - ecology calls this a dieoff. Humans would see it as increasing chaos, conflict, and warfare. Joseph Tainter is a U.S. anthropologist and historian whose best-known work is The Collapse of Complex Societies. ...
Central New York City. ...
Monetary reform is accounting reform that reaches more deeply into banking central bank, money supply and monetary policy. ...
Carrying capacity usually refers to the biological carrying capacity of a population level that can be supported for an organism, given the quantity of food, habitat, water and other life infrastructure present. ...
This article does not cite any references or sources. ...
"The fact that problem-solving systems seem to evolve to greater complexity, higher costs, and diminishing returns has significant implications for sustainability. In time, systems that develop in this way are either cut off from further finances, fail to solve problems, collapse, or come to require large energy subsidies. This has been the pattern historically in such cases as the Roman Empire, the Lowland Classic Maya, Chacoan Society of the American Southwest, warfare in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and some aspects of contemporary problem solving (that is, in every case that I have investigated in detail) (Tainter 1988, 1992, 1994b, 1995a)." In economics, diminishing returns is the short form of diminishing marginal returns. ...
For other uses, see Roman Empire (disambiguation). ...
The Middle Ages formed the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history into three ages: the classical civilization of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times, beginning with the Renaissance. ...
In Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies, 1996, Tainter held that "Systems of problem solving develop greater complexity and higher costs over long periods. In time such systems either require increasing energy subsidies or they collapse. Diminishing returns to complexity in problem solving limited the abilities of earlier societies to respond sustainably to challenges, and will shape contemporary responses to global change. To confront this dilemma we must understand both the role of energy in sustaining problem solving, and our historical position in systems of increasing complexity." [2] Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies is an extremely influential 1996 paper in energy economics by Joseph Tainter. ...
Year 1996 (MCMXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display full 1996 Gregorian calendar). ...
Problem solving forms part of thinking. ...
"One often-discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy costs. This could come about through the 'crash' that many fear - a genuine collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the 'soft landing' that many people hope for - a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels, energy-conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This. ..will come about only if severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology." Renewable energy flows involve natural phenomena such as sunlight, wind, tides and geothermal heat. ...
Voluntary simplicity (or simple living) is a lifestyle considered by its adherents to be a sustainable, ecologically sensitive alternative to the typical, western consumerist lifestyle. ...
World GDP/capita changed very little for most of human history before the industrial revolution. ...
“Consumerist†redirects here. ...
Political Ideologies Part of the Politics series Politics Portal This box: An ideology is an organized collection of ideas. ...
"The more likely option is a future of greater investment in problem solving, increasing overall complexity, and greater use of energy. This option is driven by the material comforts it provides, by vested interests, by lack of alternatives, and by our conviction that it is good. If the trajectory of problem solving that humanity has followed for much of the last 12,000 years should continue, it is the path that we are likely to take in the near future." [2] This current default path leads to human extinction via what ecologists call Easter Island Syndrome. Human extinction would be the extinction of the human species, Homo sapiens. ...
As originally coined and first defined by Robert Freitas, the term ecophagy means, literally, the consuming of an ecosystem. ...
Energy costs of problem solving A central argument in energy economics is its relation to complexity. In nature, life is negentropic, meaning, it not only reverses the entropy which over time disorders any given system, but that it sheds disordering heat energy. Its internal organization must become ever more efficient, via evolution, to survive in more environments, on less food, and be less attractive to predators who are not seeking a lean bony meal but a plump one. Evolution can be seen as seeking more energy-efficient forms - as the increased complexity of problem-solving requires greater energy input. "To discover such innovations requires energy, which underscores the constraints in the energy-complexity relation." [2] Negentropy import is entropy export. ...
Ice melting - classic example of entropy increasing[1] described in 1862 by Rudolf Clausius as an increase in the disgregation of the molecules of the body of ice. ...
This article is about evolution in biology. ...
The energy loss of this trial-and-error problem solving in nature is extreme - species emerge, blunder around, destroy entire ecosystems, die off, and are replaced - millions of years of this may lead to few or no improvements in the energy efficiency of a life form. Also, even very efficient forms may be evolved for a particular environment that itself changes, letting those forms that invest less in defense, say, push forward as predatory threats ease.
Tainter notes, however, that even the energy costs of finding and extracting energy itself, are not known at present.
Issues This section will review some of economic ideas and techniques that relate directly to energy economics.
Peak Load Pricing Main article: Peak load pricing Time-based pricing refers to a type offer or contract by a provider of a service or supplier of a commodity, in which the price depends on the time when the service is provided or the commodity is delivered. ...
Peak load pricing refers to changing the price of a good or service with respect to changes in demand over time. Since demand varies with time, and an increase in quantity demanded is usually associated with an increase in cost (for any marginal cost > 0 ) price must also vary with demand for efficient outcome. Time-based pricing refers to a type offer or contract by a provider of a service or supplier of a commodity, in which the price depends on the time when the service is provided or the commodity is delivered. ...
For the energy sector, a peak in demand usually results in additional power plants coming online as well as running at full capacity during the peak period. The peak is characterized as a local highpoint on a demand vs. time graph. Two major peak periods for energy are usually in the morning when people are using appliances in the bathroom or in the kitchen and in the evening during supper.
See also It has been suggested that future energy development be merged into this article or section. ...
Energy consumption is a measure of the rate of energy use such as fuels or electricity. ...
Natural gas prices are now strongly influenced by worldwide markets, since the development of large pipeline networks in North America, Europe and Asia and of long distance ocean shipment of liquified natural gas beginning in the 1960s. ...
This aims to be a complete list of the articles on economics. ...
Energy portal This is a list of energy topics which identifies articles and categories that relate to energy in general. ...
This is a list of topics related (in whole or in part) to (a) phenomena in the natural environment which have a definite or significantly possible connection with human activity or (b) features of human activity which have a definite or significantly possible connection with the natural environment, even if...
A low-carbon economy is an economy in which carbon dioxide emissions from the use of carbon based fuels (coal, oil and gas) are significantly reduced. ...
External links - [1] Shovelling Fuel for a Runaway Train - A book review written by Bill Hulet discussing Brian Czech's views
- [2] Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies, Joseph Tainter, published in Getting Down to Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics, Island Press, 1996 ISBN 1-55963-503-7
- [3] Dematerialism and Energy - A website with many links to important articles on energy and political economy
- Tainter, J. A. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-34092-6 (hardback) ISBN 0-521-38673-X (paperback)
- Tainter, J. A. 1992. Evolutionary consequences of war. In Effects of War on Society, ed. G. Ausenda, pp. 103-130. San Marino: Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Stress.
- Tainter, J. A. 1994a. Southwestern contributions to the understanding of core-periphery relations. In Understanding Complexity in the Prehistoric Southwest, eds. G. J. Gumerman, and M. Gell-Mann, pp. 25-36. Santa Fe Institute, Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proceedings Volume XVI. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
- Tainter, Joseph A. 1994b. La fine dell'amministrazione centrale: il collaso dell'Impero romano in Occidente. In Storia d'Europa, Volume Secondo: Preistoria e Antichita, eds. Jean Guilaine and Salvatore Settis, pp. 1207-1255. Turin: Einaudi.
- Tainter, J. A. 1995a. Sustainability of complex societies. Futures 27: 397-407.
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