RE: [Fis] Sustainable use of resources

Dear all,
 
just an thought after Sergio's posting.
 
I think that government policies are critical to put a country on "sustainability path".
 
One possible mechanism to reduce misuse of natural resources is "shared responsibilities". Governments use this mechanism e.g. when financing private R&D activities. The funding is split 50/50, and it is delivered under government control. Some may argue there is still room for inefficiency - but evidently this boosts spending by firms, and countries with such policies maintain their technological leadership (USA, EC, South Asian).
I see no contradiction if shared financing of resource restoration is applied, as well as control procedures that may be similar to those in R&D support. Resource restoration should be an activity, not just a tax paid (the system which is used in the meantime in many countries).
 
The other focus could be to arrange a shift from non-renewable to renewable resources (which can also be achieved by financial incentives and structural policies). In the long perspective, all technologies based on non-renewables have a limited lifetime: basically limited by the deposit and rate of utilization for the given resource. Possible (if not the only) technologies that are different, can be based on self-reproduction of raw materials: that is, bio-technologies that integrate living matter or living-alike systems into all key technologies of the humanity.
 
I would be interested to know what is the eMergy vision of this aspect.
 
Pavel

-----Original Message-----
From: Sergio Ulgiati [mailto:ulgiati@unisi.it]
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 13:49
To: FIS Discussion List
Subject: [Fis] Sustainable use of resources

Dear Luis, and dear all:

I did not send any posting in the first week after subscribing, due to the need of better understanding the contents and the goals of the discussion. Hopefully, I am able now to say something without getting lost...However, first of all I would like to ask Luis how comes that some of you refer to messages that I did not receive (e.g. Pavel, Valero). Are there more than one discussion list crossing each other, or simply these messages have been sent in the previous weeks?

I would like to start with Valero and Naredo's "notary rule" referred to by Pedro [When buying an apartment, the 'labor' of the notary --just its signature-- is priced thousand of times higher than the labor of the construction workers doing the physical job. The closest we approach to the handling of natural resources, the toughest becomes this notary rule...]. This is because, whatever the considered process, the economic value only reflects the hierarchical convergence of labor, not the intrinsic value or the scarcity of resources, as also underlined by Luis in his introductory text. We pay for the labor invested for extracting, refining, manufacturing, transporting, trading the resources and never pay for the resource themselves, even because we do not know how to pay for these resources...nor we can issue a check to Nature.

We know that the formation and the activity of a notary is supported by the convergence of somebody else's labor and services (school, libraries, as well as the bureaucratic and juridical systems interacting with the notary's activity in order to protect the property rights). This convergence adds value (and economic cost) to a simple signature. The majority of the construction workers (a part from, maybe, the chief engineer) are not supported by a similar convergence of efforts. In eMergy analysis we say that the transformity (a measure of convergence) of the notary's contribution is higher than the transformity of the construction worker's contribution (which is an understandable consequence of how our societies are organized and has nothing to do with the value of the person as such, of course). The total cost of the apartment reflects the labor of the construction workers, the engineer's supervision as well as the notary's signature. The problem is that the cost does not reflect the primary work performed by Nature, i.e. a significant convergence of processes to actually concentrate or make the resources (a work which may not be available again) nor the services provided by Nature for waste uptake and disposal (source-side and sink-side services). EMergy analysis accounts for these services in terms of biosphere's activity time and space, i.e. how many solar equivalent joules (seJ) converged to make the minerals, the oil, the tree, that we extract and process by investing human labor. In so doing, it is recognized that the value of something does not only rely on the human labor invested (whatever its hierarchy is) but also on the convergence of the unpaid ecosystem work.

Sustainability can be better understood if this point of view is factored in. Since Nature works for free, no value is assigned to resources but the economic value of the invested labor. The intrinsic value of resources, based on the amount of Nature's work it takes to make them, is disregarded, so that misuse of resources is very often the rule (M.T. Brown and S. Ulgiati, Emergy Evaluation of the Biosphere and Natural Capital, Ambio, 28(6): 486-493, September 1999). We focus very often on a proper use of labor, not on a proper use of resources.

The intrinsic value of resources can be quantified in several upstream-side, thermodynamic and ecological ways (in eMergy terms [Odum, 1996], exergy terms [Valero et al., 2002; Szargut and Morris, 1987], or even by means of their "ecological rucksack" [Hinterberger and Schmidt-Bleek, 1999] and ecological footprint [Wackernagel and Rees,1996]), but a way to account for it in the system of prices of our economies is still far from being accepted. Yet this seems to me the only way to escape the trap of resource misuse and environmental pollution. I guess this is what Luis meant with his point (1) Evaluation of natural resources.

This raises the problem of who should take care for and who should be the recipient of the additional cost paid for natural resource use: since resources belong to the whole human kind (I would say to the whole set of living organisms), revenues from this additional cost should simply be reinvested into the reinforcement of the life support system at all levels. Governments should find a way to tax resource misuse (not resource use) according to their intrinsic value as above indicated (joint task for economists and natural scientists), and then reinvest the revenues into environmental protection (soil erosion, forest integrity, global warming, etc).

With best regards.

Sergio

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Sergio Ulgiati
Energy and Environment Research Unit
Department of Chemistry
University of Siena
Via Aldo Moro
53100 Siena (Italy)
 
Phone: +39-0577-234232
Fax: +39-0577-234254
E-mail: ulgiati@unisi.it
http://www.unisi.it/eventi/ades/portovenere.html
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Received on Wed Nov 19 19:55:01 2003