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General Notes on Emergy and Review of 3 Papers” 1 “DE EMERGYARUM NATURA” (= about the nature of Emergies) or “ALL I WANTED TO SAY ABOUT EMERGY ANALYSIS IN THE LAST 20 YEARS AND I WAS NEVER ABLE TO SAY” or “GENERAL NOTES ON EMERGY AND REVIEW OF 3 PAPERS” By Mario Giampietro (March, 2000) This document is divided in two 2 parts. Part 1 deals with general issues related to the general approach proposed by HT Odum and the various applications of it, as performed by the Emergy school (as perceived by an outsider). Part 2 presents the review of 3 papers. They are used to discuss general points in relation to specific applications of this approach. ****************************************************************** The text needs a lot of editing, it is very redundant, and probably is affected by several misunderstandings about Emergy analysis, for sure it contains also incorrect statements, etc. etc. However, I am sending it to you the way it is for 3 reasons: (1) the more I read it over the more I am adding redundancy, misunderstandings and incorrect statements. (2) the idea of this memo is to open a debate and stimulate a discussion, so that the more weak spots and arguable statements are present in the text the more we can discuss. (3) it is important to save time (especially for the review of the papers). Therefore, I prefer not to wait for the feed-back of people that could help me in doing a better job (e.g. Kozo Mayumi). In any case the most important people that can help in getting the discussion on Emergy on the right track here are basically the three of you. 2 PART 1 – General Issues “All models are wrong, some are useful” – Anonymous 1. My relation with “Emergy studies” and my goals with this memo 1.1 The urgency of doing something Driven by the growing debate on sustainability there is a growing search for analytical tools, which can be used for accounting environmental services and/or defining biophysical constraints on the economic process. These methods are needed to complement economic analyses that, when used alone, tend to miss important aspects of sustainability. This skyrocketing demand for exploring new representative tools led to a certain collapse in the “quality control” on published paper also on very good scientific journals. See for example, the publication of the paper assessing the value of the planet in 33 trillions of US-1994-dollars on Nature, or the widespread publication of Ecological Footprint papers on reputable journals. Actually, the paper published on Nature would have not be accepted as a “term paper” of freshmen in any decent college of economics, as well as the vast majority of “ecological footprint assessments” are just a sloppy applications of the rationale proposed by HT for environmental accounting. In my view, this is a clear sign that there is an urgent need to supply something decent to such a demand. 1.2 My view on HT work I am convinced that the rationale proposed by HT Odum for environmental accounting is one of the most serious attempt – among the available ones - to deal with the task of generating indicators able to track changes and effects of human intervention within ecological systems. As a matter of fact, HT contribution is much more than that. His theoretical analysis of self- organization of energy and information can also be used for many other tasks. (1) Performing qualitative analysis of evolutionary trends for typologies (categories) of dissipative systems identified/characterized by a certain network structure. Even though nobody seems to like the adjective “qualitative” when used for models (many seem to be convinced that models must be totally quantitative and fully formalized to be valuable), I happen to believe exactly the contrary. In my view, in this moment, shortage of qualitative models for dealing with evolutionary trends of human development, is the most important bottleneck for human ability to build anticipatory systems in relation to the sustainability predicament. Probably, this is one of the applications of Emergy in which I see the largest potentiality. (2) Assessing the “ecological footprint” or various indices of “environmental loading” of the economic process (= generating families of “biophysical indicators of unsustainability” – following the suggestion of Martinez Alier as a general name for this class of indices). That is, it can compare the scale of human activity to the scale of ecological activity (= the quantitative and qualitative information totally missed by economic analyses). (3) Assessing the net effect of trade between countries operating at different levels of environmental loading and technological development. I do believe that the rationale proposed by HT Odum makes possible to generate several models able to do all these things. The problem I see with current applications is that all these different tasks cannot be achieved by using a single common model. That is, you cannot do different things using the same graph and using a single given set of fixed transformities. Probably the people of the Emergy school share this opinion with me. However, if this is the case, every time Emergy analysis is applied to do one of these different tasks, then, each one of these different applications should come with a discussion, in the material and methods section, on: (A) how and why the graph(s) used in the specific analysis is(are) “qualitative different” from other graphs used in other studies in which they were used to do other tasks (depending on what of these different jobs are performed in these different studies), and (B) when and if certain fixed transformities calculated for certain systems - by using certain graphs (and then 3 listed in a book) - can be applied to the specific system under investigation (and which is characterized using a specific graph, that could be similar or not similar to that used for calculating the standard transformity elsewhere). 1.3 The tactical aspect There is another important aspect to be considered in this discussion. After admitting that HT approach is very good and has huge potentialities, for sure its development would greatly benefit from a debate with the rest of the scientific community. This for two reasons: (1) because specific applications could contain a few bugs and the debate with other scientists will produce fixes for them at a much faster pace (if 10,000 people work on fixing a problem they do faster than 100). (2) because when dealing with complex systems, it is not possible to have the “best model” of them. The very step of problem structuring (which relevant qualities of the system have to be reflected in its analytical representation) requires always an input from the users (a “value” call from the humans). Therefore, if the Emergy school wants to be useful and wants that this methodology be used by other disciplines as a complementing representative tool (e.g. by economists), it must learn how to listen and talk to them. Remaining in a “ghetto” does not pay. According to the maximum power principle there are moments (e.g. when colonizing a very large empty niche) in which it is important to get there first. I started this memo by noticing that we are exactly in one of these moments, we are assisting to several attempts of “speciation” of biophysical analyses of sustainability. Therefore, we are in one of the cases in which the law (different version of the maximum power) of “the survival of the first” fully applies (remember the “qwert” lock-in for the lay out of keys in keyboards. This sequence that was optimal in mechanical typing machines, has been kept also in keyboards of computers, where is no longer optimal . .). 1.4 My goals Finally, we arrived to what are my goals in writing this long memo. I believe that it is time to start a serious and deep discussion on HT work. So that it will be possible to provide to the academic world: (1) clear explanations of the theoretical basis of the approach, and (2) practical examples of the advantages and potentiality of this approach compared with others. I am not saying that the approach now does not have theoretical basis, but simply that the message provided by the Emergy people to explain its foundations, until now, did not go through clear enough. Probably, it is also time to think how such a message could be send in a different way when interacting with the external world. The way experimented up to now did not work. The way I see it, it is not about specifying better the algorithm used to solve the graph (= what Sergio refers to as “better specify the algebra of the approach”). That is, the type of discussion that Mark Brown and Bob Herendeen had in the paper published on Ecological Economics. This debate can be useful for clarifying the ideas of those already “in”, but very unlikely to attract new people from the outside. Nor such a discussion on how to strength the method can be focused on finding the ultimate calculation of “the right” set of transformities. Actually a deep discussion on “transformities” could (or rather should) lead (hopefully) to the conclusion that such a thing (= “the right transformity to be listed in the book for future calculations”) simply does not exist. Depending on what “qualities” of the system we want to study and map with our encoding variables, we could have to use different numerical values for “fixed transformities” or work with “changing transformities”. As a matter of fact, if I understand well the feed-back received in previous interaction with HT, Mark and Sergio, this is already a point accepted by the Emergy school.
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