Statement of the principle:

The economy requires energy to deliver the goods and services we buy using diverse supporting services in your community and around the world.    Average spending is then going to be responsible for an average share of it (see details below).    That's the principle.    An average share of the total energy the world uses is  ~8000btu/$ (1995$) according to the US DOE.   Due to inflation and improved efficiency that’s ~6000btu/$ in 2008.   To help convey how much energy that is, think of the solar energy that could be made into electricity in an hour with a high performance PV panel measuring 100ft on a side.    That's around the same 6000btu.   This estimate is based on a 40deg north latitude location, averaged over a 24 hr, 360 day period, with normal weather, with 18% collection efficiency as if for expected future high performance solar cells (1)(4)(corr3)(corr4)

The ethical and moral choice is fascinating.   By paying for products we also choose to directly request and pay for the whole diverse web of things that went into them.   We consume the product of those contributions to what we buy, and see we’re physically responsible for it.   We have not traditionally thought of being ethically or morally responsible for it, though.   Usually we feel ethically and morally responsible only for our own personal acts, seeing other people's acts as their own responsibility.   Now it turns out that effects our choices and we want to have an effect on how our choices affect our world.  Unless we know the whole impact, though, we can’t make effective choices about it.    When we have better information we can not only make better choices, but have them be effective.   It's also an opportunity to extend our own ethical and moral responsibility much further into the whole system of the world, if we choose.

The critical question is whether treating all spending as having average energy content unless shown otherwise can be broken into several parts.

1.     Why is directly measuring the total contributing impacts difficult?

2.     Does the uses of money always distribute very widely through the normal uses people make of it?  

3.     Can you adjust the implied average for known measurable impacts?

4.     Are there hidden high or low impacts embodied in some choices that might introduce errors?

5.     Is there any other way to estimate the error in counting only the easily visible impacts?

6.     Will better statistics, less dependent on theory, become available as people use this approach?

Each of these could be an essay, but first I’ll try to answer each simply, and then treat the remainder of this attachment as further discussion.

1.     It is quite hard enough to find out what a project’s direct energy uses will be, especially during design when decisions are being made.   It is also not actually possible to add up the things no one keeps records of, and that includes the majority of the spending.   The majority of spending for things goes to the people who assist in delivering them, all the way down through the supply chain.

2.     Yes.  If you just think of all the very many ways you distribute the money you receive for the work you do, and then of the ways those people distribute the part they get from you begin to see.   The product you help make costs $100 and the business passes parts of that on to each of 1000 diverse kinds of contributions to delivering it, including yours.   If each of them does what you do, spend their share on 1000 diversely different kinds of things, the one product choice is responsible for enabling 1000 times as many other choices at each step.   In three steps that’s a billion choices, in four a trillion.  It’s likely to equally support all the different kinds of uses people do in proportion.   There are also some other issues that touch on, but do not alter, this conclusion.

3.     Yes. The normal accountable energy to be factored in is the electric and gas bill and the gallons of gas and things.  The simple rule of thumb I use to get the right scale of adjustment for these hard measures of fuels is to just add their btu equivalent to the total.   You’d think, perhaps, of factoring them in, adding their btu equivalent while subtracting their cost from total.   The odd thing is that the money you pay for gas doesn’t go to nature for the flammable liquid, it all goes to other people, who use it to consume things throughout the economy, and incur average impacts from that.   

4.     Not that I know of.

5.     What will happen is that businesses will see the need to reduce the energy content of their supply stream, and pass on their locally lowered impact intensity to the consumer, so they can sell things at a higher price for lower impacts.   They will need their suppliers to do that, and pass those savings on to them.   It will result in their whole supply chains passing detailed energy intensity information along, making the end user choices ever more effective.  

Discussion:

Those energy uses that are spread throughout the economies is what this measure captures.   In the end, most of the untraceable energy uses come from the money you give to people.  It causes the current energy impact models to miss 90% or more of the real energy costs of what we do (14,15).  This interpretation  was looked at by the life-cycle impact economist Wayne Trusty (author of the Athena life-cycle impact tool) and found to at least be theoretically correct.   Measuring your energy use as a share of the whole provides a true statistical measure that lets you see the difference between what is and is not accountable.  It gives you  a) the real scale of your energy choices and b) a guide to locating where they're hidden and why they're growing.   For most US home owners the $shadow height of a collector to support their lifestyle would be the width of the home and over a mile high (sim 11).   That's more than large!    It's also not in our control, and so a little home efficiency won't touch it.   There's one thing you can do.  Take the material small steps that lead to a new future.   The only feasible way to compensate for such large excesses is to contribute to our finding new ways to think and act in the future.  We need a different way to measure luxury than in terms of multiplying money and energy use.

[Double counting note: This way of calculating energy & CO2 impacts works because it counts the whole cascade of contributions that occur as a consequence of spending.   It measures the whole effect of choices.   That also means you should take care to not double count contributions.  If the cost of your salary is counted as part of the costs of your company's products, the two should not be added.  There's dual responsibility in that both you and the people why pay you are responsible for the energy consumed by the money you spend.   Economists are careful to not double count what they include in GDP.   You would use their same method to count whole environmental impacts using this tool so they can be added without overlap.]