That debate does not change the clear correlation (at least in the 20th Century) between economies that tend to waste their surplus energy on “frivolous concerns” and economies that prospered.

You have the do a lot of work to convince me that the cause-effect relationship goes in this direction. IMO it is self-evident it is exactly the opposite - economies that "prosper" create enough surplus of energy and other resources made available for the people to "waste" the way they like.

I'll bring it even further - discretionary spending is one of the main reasons people are motivated to work harder, and to embrace the economic growth idea. If I earn $1000 per month, but I spend $990 on essentials and only $10 for myself I could hardly be satisfied with my life. I will try to find a way to earn more.

You mentioned the market vs command economy. The main difference between the two is that in a command economy (at least in the socialist version), the essentials - food, housing, education, healthcare etc. are either free or dirt cheap. What you earn is basically for non-essential consumption, and here is where the command economy failed. Because of its nature it did not follow and could not provide what people wanted... and the people simply wanted the freedom and conveniences of western lifestyle. The surplus energy was still there but it was routed inefficiently - to the military, to the government beurocracy or to the huge inefficient industrial complex.

The bottom line of all of this is that you are right - the surplus energy is essential on a societal level. With falling surpluses we would simply have to cut back on non-essentials and accept lower living standard... Personally I won't miss SUVs and RVs, but will hate to see things like air travel go.

Lindsay Lohan may be vapid, but she's brought joy to millions. I think, that is the point about market economies, as soon as there is a big enough surplus it will go into things that are not 'productive' -- ballet and arms manufacture rather than farming, digging coal, making steel-- but which generate money. And after people can earn enough to feed, clothe and shelter thier families, then there is time for creativity. I think this 'unproductive work' is more along the lines of your societal inputs. Perhaps it would be more realistic not to talk about impermeable boundaries which rules things (Lindsay, bless her) in or out but to look at the probablity that she affects the oil industry and factor that into your calculations along with all the other potential inputs.

Good post. Had some minor involvement in public health / medical costs / insurance issues. (Switzerland has ‘all private’ health care thru personal insurance.)

One of the endlessly vexing questions is that it is impossible to understand how much health care actually costs, and where the money comes from - this is something many want to know, in order to be able to cut them or propose new schemes. (Traditionally, it is considered that CH is second only to the US in per capita health care costs.)

This problem is small and circumscribed, in comparison to 'energy' (oil wells, etc. as in the post) as, 1) the measure used is money, nothing else, and that seems appropriate, or at least sensible for a first step; 2) it is possible, if dodgy, to list what contributes to ‘health’ in a rather Victorian model, that is, seeing it as ‘curing /alleviating ill health’ plus ‘preventing ill health’ (public health campaigns, hospices for cancer terminals, etc.), all of it actions performed for or on individuals who have or will have some ‘health’ malfunction.

The medical community and the Gvmt. can actually list all that stuff, that is, within a certain society at a certain point in time.

A rap group does not contribute but the expense of medical training and the emergency ramp to the hospital might. But how far do you go? Do you include the curry shrimp scoffed by the ambulance driver? The servicing of a helicopter that picks up avalanche victims? Etc. etc.

The answer given by professionals lies in a grey zone. Society itself wants, demands, or simply can afford in Switz., what is now considered ‘good’ or ‘modern’ or whatever health care. It is part of the social fabric. Only the costs of treating the patient (plus public health, vaccines, etc.), the direct actions of health professionals (including drugs, home nurses, family planners, bone crunchers, pharmacists, etc.) should be counted.

The infrastructure (road to the hospital, helicop mechanic) are to be lodged under ‘society’ as a whole. Of course it is clumsy, hazardous divide, and naturally the health community is interested in minimizing their costs on paper. The professional attitude, opinion, is to be understood in a stable situation, where the backdrop, the stage itself, is constant, and Doctor X, Nurse Z, admin. Y, acts within it. That is understandable, for sure.

Even this far simpler topic cannot be analyzed rigorously. The docs. themselves often say, *the decisions are political* - not ours - we are not to blame - and they are right.

Systemic change takes a greater will or power, possibly against one’s own interests.

As a social scientist (anthropology and psychology) I must confess I feel like I've been watching the local butcher perform brain surgery. Not surprising really, since most lay people believe that social science is not really a science at all, so it’s fine for them to go mucking about in it with out regard to the barrels of ink that have already been spilled on these very subjects. You had me right up until you waxed wildly into territory where you clearly have no training.

Sorry folks, social phenomenon cannot be reduced to quantifiable energy inputs. They are too nebulous. Social scientists of every stripe have been trying for over a century and there is no calculus for the social or cultural. It takes a less linear mind to conceive of it so economists and engineers might as well just stay away. Or here's an idea: How about actually asking an anthropologist to weigh in on the matter rather than calling the local butcher. As an example of the social’s nebulous nature, I bet it didn’t occur to you to count the millions of joules of energy that have been spent on developing social theory, much of it empirical, that would inform the capitalist, the command economist, or the author of this original post. Apparently all that effort was wasted since it is so easily swept under the pseudo intellectual rug of history.

And has anyone thought to mention that even if you could quantify every little drop of energy input, social or not, you would never find an energy source that had a positive EROEI? I’m inclined to shoot myself after reading a post like this but the EROEI on a gun and bullets is too much to bear. But seriously folks, this is what makes Odum’s theory of emergy too hard for me to swallow. He quantifies human intellectual power at such a high price, that the only thing suitable for humans to do is sit around and think otherwise we screw up his emergy equations. Never mind the fact that humans have to expend energy if we are to survive. Human energy consumption and use is not linear. We do not get to reduce our energy use like reptiles if we can’t find food. And once we have food we have to expend it to keep going. Working, physical labor, although Odum would tell us it is beneath us, is necessary for life!

I find the EROEI concept useful but not when it is abused as Pimentel does, counting the uncountable and thereby becoming unaccountable. I hope the future posts on this issue tip us back in the other direction.

Please forgive my naiveté, but I really don’t understand the practical relevance of attempting to calculate net energy return on an absolute basis.

Here is my thinking: Humanity IS going to attempt to replace at least some of fossil fuel energy with alternatives, no matter how much the power downers may scream about it. Therefore, the only practically important question is relative EROEI among candidate alternative sources. It would seem that relative EROEI calculations are much, much easier than absolute ones. The deep levels of energy cost that you discuss are, at some point down the line, going to be essentially equivalent for all alternative sources and so can be ignored in the relative EROEI calculations, no? The “infinite regress” problem is solved. It would seem a relatively simple matter for energy accounting experts to figure out just how many types of energy input need to be considered to do this relative merit accounting.

If you have not seen A Prairie Home Companion, Altman's last film, you should. Lohan with her suicide poetry is balanced against the angel of death (Virginia Madsen). Don't know the rest of Lohan's work but that bit was quality.

Chris

Your ultimate EROEI of 1:1 is brilliant. If it was any greater large amounts of unsold fuel would be accumulating somewhere. The producers would then cut production until the surplus is sold.
I contend that we need to stop using fossil fuels and the EROEI of alternatives be calculated on only the fossil fuel inputs. Good engineering could create a biofuel production system that replaces FF with solar thermal, PV, wind, stover, hydro, and organic farming.

I think we can approach the problem from two angles: source and end-use.

* The source EROEI simply indicates how much extra energy an activity generates. In order to make it comparable, however, we should limit ourselves to one type of energy: for example, how much energy from a nuclear plant does it take to make all the components and provide all the upkeep to build, run, and decommission a particular nuclear plant design? If you use only electricity from windmills, what does it take to make another?
Obviously we mix energy types and sources all the time, but this is necessary to make a meaningful comparison possible. Without that restriction, any EROEI number would require pages of caveats, provisions and qualification which defeats the purpose of having a metric. This also assures that we will not run into maintenance problems when future energy supplies are scarce and less diverse. Downside: it underestimates the amount of energy available. See below.

* The end-use EROEI indicates the amount and kind of energy necessary to perform a specific task. For example, how much electrical energy is needed to shave oneself? How much coal energy is needed to heat a house? How much nuclear energy is needed to blow thy enemies to tiny bits?
Here it becomes clear that the type of energy used makes a difference in the EROEI. So the EROEI can be better or worse for a certain task, depending on which kind of energy, or energy source is used. If we compare these numbers, we can make better choices between available means of generating energy depending on which tasks we need to accomplish.
For example, you want to transport yourself. Do you use muscle, electricity or coal? You have nuclear power. Is it better spent to produce fertilizer, to heat houses, to cultivate fields? Here you can compare the EROEI.

Short:
EROEI numbers change when different tasks are performed, and/or different energy sources or types are used.
So, when using the term EROEI, always define what kind of energy is invested, and what kind of energy is returned/what kind of task is performed.

What is the aggregate societal EROEI where virtually every aspect of society is a prerequisite to that society’s energy production? Well, it’s right about 1:1. Which is exactly what we will see next time in our discussion of price-estimated EROEI.

This seems like pure tautology - a society on the whole pretty much consumes what it produces. I could hardly expect otherwise, as very little of what is produced stores well over long periods of time. Maybe the occasional pyramid in the desert, but no one builds that way any more. I'm having a lot of trouble seeing any way for this discussion to pass the "so what" test, as it is so over-broad that the only available conclusion seems to be "what is, is." So can it actually take us anywhere?

Came-on, people. Hasn't this discussion go for too long now? We can't measure with complete precision the EROEI of any energy producing method, I guess that is a consensus. We also need that number with some degree of precision to evaluate energy producing methods, what I also think is a consensus.

So, instead of arguing about what tiny changes including the entire world on our calculations could cause, shouldn't we be arguing about what is the precision we need that number to have, and how to abtain such precision?

I have such strange feeling that obtaining usefull figures for EROEI is quite easier than what you are reporting. It seems quite likely that when you accont energy used directly, energy used on directly needed structure, energy used support structure, energy used supporting the support, and so on, the importance of those values dalways decrease as you add indirections, and very fast. Is that right? If so, it would be easy to get your EROEI on any arbitrary precision just including enought factors.

And by the way, you can define EROEI as both (E_gross/(E_self + E_purchased)) or (E_net/E_purchased). You can also define energy surplus as (Egross - Eself - Epurchased) or (Enet - Epurchased), that are the same, by the way. But you can't use the definitions of the Figure 1. They simply don't measure EROEI.

Just as there are various levels of frivolity, there are varying levels of EROEI. "Energy" must include the politics that provide for the inputs to be applied. If it costs 100 dollars a barrel to maintain 'control' in the oil producing countries through economic hit men, covert operations, military operations, etc, then we need to consider that the costs of these inputs should be placed upon the demand point: the consumers. A consumption tax gives society the opportunity to voice their opinion of the equation at every purchase. While reducing demand for overall products, it does not require creation of the monochromatic command economy.
Information about the true nature of our economy is first and foremost the limiting factor in change. As long as we believe that we aren't doing any more harm that the next person in the economy, we continue to burn and waste as much as we can to keep our comfort level where it is. Facing the truth of our wastefulness is uncomfortable, it is not debilitating. It will be debilitating if we wait too long, or allow things to get so bad that a command economy is implemented 'for our own good'.
A carbon tax is simply command economics applied selectively. A general consumption tax leaves the selectivity up to the consumer. If it drives people to the underground economy to avoid taxes, it drives them to local markets, which reduces consumption and reduces command revenue; another choice which only looks bad to those with links to illicit power.

The reference to Lindsay Lohan is a good one, but you have to look at the difference between entertainment and recreation. Recreation is a requirement for healthy living. Entertainment is what we get when we can't live with reality. One increases efficiency of workers, the other decreases it. The most productive laborers are in countries where the focus is on maximizing time off, not on maximizing money paid and spent.
If we are to try and replace energy use with proactive human behaviors (car pooling, physical activity, etc), then we also have to consider improving the quality of the people who will conduct those activities. Depressed, confused, overworked, and underslept people don't do a very good job of improving the world's efficiency (especially if they require a trip to Starbucks before getting started).

If you think ... that you know better than the market how best to allocate capital through some enlightened command economy, then there is probably a Lenin fan-club out there just waiting for your leadership.

Translation: question the market and you're a Commie? I would have expected better of Jeff.

This is a false dichotomy that freezes thought. A study of intellectual history shows that almost no one really believes in the uncontrolled market. Whether it's environmentalists or oil company executives, the question is how to intervene in markets, not whether to.

Bringing up Lenin is particularly off-the-mark, since Marxist-Leninism has virtually disappeared as a political and intellectual force.

What's happening now with the financial crises is a gradual reappraisal of neo-liberalism. We will re-discover Keynes and Marx... take a few timid steps. If things get really bad, though - when people are hungry or feel threatened - then get ready for a command economy. Command economies come in all flavors - communist, fascist, conservative nationalist, or middle-of-the-road liberal. A prime example of a command economy is the UK and the US during World War II.

This is important stuff - let's use a little more intellectual rigor and not fall into outdated dualisms.

(Also to be a stickler, it is a mistake to identify Lenin with a command economy. He was much more pragmatic, switching from War Communism to the semi-capitalist New Economic Policy (NEP) when circumstances demanded it.)

BTW - Nice exchange between Nate and the social scientist.

Bart
Energy Bulletin

While I routinely follow TOD, I haven't posted any comments since about February, because I found myself getting too hostile and snarky, particularly with certain individuals. Well, I'm sort of back, and I promise to play nice.

This whole subject of EROEI has been of great interest to me, from several standpoints. While EROEI can be a very useful indicator of whether one is really doing much good with a particular energy production scheme, it hardly tells the whole story, and I think we are asking it to do things that it inherently can not do. (I've also noticed that in this whole discussion, very little mention is made of what is supposed to be done with the number once you have calculated an EROEI).

I view EROEI as nothing more than one of many factors that go into an overall technical/economic evaluation of competing courses of action. I am also strongly of the opinion that if it is made to include all sorts of secondary, tertiary, and 'n-ary' energy inputs, receding into infinity, it becomes less, rather than more, useful. This is because once one starts including such increasingly indirect energy inputs, one unavoidably gets into an increasingly confusing and uncertain allocation game, the details of which one can argue about ad nauseum. Also, it becomes impossible to set these indirect inputs on an equivalent basis for different scenarios.

If I were to set down the rules for doing an EROEI, I would only include a) the direct energy inputs to the energy production process, and b) the energy content of the first tier of construction and material inputs. That's it. No mas.

Furthermore, I think that in this whole EROEI game a distinction must be made between one-time energy inputs (such as in the construction of solar power systems or wind turbines) and those energy inputs which are continuous and largely proportional to energy output (such as the fuel used to produce ethanol). To use a financial analogy, the former is like capital investment, while the latter is like direct operating costs. The distinction is necessary, because how one treats capital investment over time is determined largely by value judgements which express themselves as discount rates.

EROEI can be a useful albeit imperfect tool for comparing the relative meritsof energy alternatives, but if we load it up with all sorts of social science (an oxymoron if there ever was one) complications, it becomes a largely useless academic plaything.

It seems to me this procedure would be solved by using Wikipedia.

I've followed the comments up thread and all I really see is an attempt to maintain some sort of business as usual soceity, what I call Business As Usual Lite in this post of some time ago. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2598#comment-198259

I would suggest that people read Richard Duncan's spring 2007 article at: http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1703/17_3_duncan_pri...

Yes, EROEI is important and I'm all for going back as far as possible and discarding the outliers. But in the end, i rather doubt that it is going to matter.

Todd

Jeff, this is somewhat valuable in getting to the bottom of a nebulous term.

But the analysis (as with all EROEI discussions) is missing two key points.

The first missing point is the question of time. Any process that has an EROEI > 1 will, if repeated, have a second-level EROEI that is the square of the first. Repeat it again and you get the cube, etc. Exponential growth with time; what you are really looking at with EROEI is not a dimensionless number, but a number that is essentially a growth rate.

For example, if the full cycle for which you are determining EROEI takes 1 year, and EROEI is 2, then the associated rate is 100%/year. In reality there's both a mix of energy inputs and time-scales involved: capital investment may be 5 to 50-year time scales, while the cycle from oil in the ground to refinery to diesel fuel for the equipment is just a few months, and the cycle for energy (via Lindsey Lohans and everything else) in labor may be days to decades depending on the mix of inputs. I'm not sure the best way to get the appropriate rate out of such a mix of inputs, but I'm pretty sure just looking at energy without including the time aspect gives the wrong result.

The second thing missing is considering an economy of multiple outputs, not just energy. Of course if you have a 1-product economy then the ratio of outputs to inputs averaged over a given period is just the net growth rate. If your economy is growing at 5%/year, the EROEI corresponding to a 1-year cycle would be 1.05 precisely. But include capital investment, say, as an output (and input) and you now have separate variables for which you can quantify dependencies: what's the energy production rate dependence on capital, what's the energy production rate dependence on energy input, what's the capital growth rate dependence on capital and energy. That allows meaningful separation of dependencies beyond the growth-rate tautology.

Of course both of those are complications that can't be captured in a single number like EROEI. But they're where you need to go if you actually want to talk about meaningful numbers.

I think you've jumped over a step here completely. Namely, why do we care about calculating EROEI? My simple answer to this is "I care about it only so much as it allows me to judge quantitavely between the value of pursuing 2 different kinds of energy." So, from this perspective, the functioning of society is irrelevant, as long as I apply the same function to each energy source I examine. Example, you claim the "command economy" doesn't work, but this is irrelevant if my reason for wanting to calculate EROEI is simply for an apples to apples comparison.

So, in my head, I assume the command economy does work, and all devices will be operated by slaves at top efficiency living in marginal conditions on site with no luxuries. This may sound unrealistic to someone from the west, but my experiences in 3rd world countries have shown me it is quite possible to get equivalent performance from someone that lives on $2 per day in Cambodia vs. the same worker making $20 per hour in the west. Surely, the western worker will expend more energy on useless luxuries, and if EROEI changes based on the wealth of the participants, we can say that there are elements in the calculation not associated with energy production.

In essence, your cultural limitations are influencing your ability to distinguish between the necessary and unnecessary portions of the economy. As the industrialized world moves to 3rd world status, there will be no more "Lindsay Lohans" to worry about. EROEI needs to be independent of culture to be meaningful, and therefore requires assuming a functional "command economy" as the basis of comparison.

I will continue to discount peripheral elements of society in my EROEI calculations. I think a very clear line can be made in this way, and a very poor community will approach this limit asymptotically.

Tom In Thailand

So what if your average pretty media girl contributes to oil extraction? If she does, then she also contributes to a lot of other things - so many things, in fact, that however much energy she uses, it probably is a net gain for us.

I don't know about Lindsay, but Scott Adams (Dilbert's author) made a half-joking bolg entry about Paris Hilton impact on the economy:

"I was also wondering how much economic value Paris has contributed to the world. If you put a price on the advertising budgets that support the media coverage she generates, plus her TV show, her movie roles, her magazine covers, I’ll bet the dollar value of her contribution to the world is in the billions. Those billions generate taxes that go to important social services such as feeding the poor and protecting our soldiers. And don’t get me started about the tens of millions of masturbators who appreciate her. You can’t put a price on that."

Link to the full post :

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/06/irony-storm.html

Cheers,
AK

EROEI on Transportation Infrastructure ?

I have wondered how to calculate the EREOI on long lived transportation infrastructure.

Some examples

1) USA Interstate Highway system - Made trucking the largest transportation mode (rail was #1 before), made today's urban sprawl possible (interstate type highways in many cases were added beyond the original system) About 50 years lifespan

2) Chunnel between England & France. So far failed to spark the transfer to rail freight expected, about 50% of pax travel mode - Multiple centuries for bore, about 75 years for rails, signals, etc.

3) TransAlp tunnels in Switzerland - Two major tunnels, the larger of the two will provide a flat, straight path between Zurich and Milan (the other one does a less straight, not as flat path between Bern & Milan with a French option). #1 goal is to move freight off trucks driving over Alps (poor fuel mileage) and #2 is to provide 240 kph pax service (replacing air travel and old rail travel over Alps). Multiple centuries for bore, 100 years for rails & signals.

All three use energy, not produce it. #1 vastly expanded energy use, #2 and #3 will reduce energy use.

Any thoughts ?

Best Hopes for Long Lived, Energy Efficient Infrastructure,

Alan

I suggested in post to the first installment that boundry conditions be set over the whole period of time that an energy technology is used. Your question now, of how deep into society to look for E_self and E_purchase gets to some very technical issues surrounding EROEI calculations. In looking at nuclear power, some who claim low (5:1) EROEI attempt to use essentially a fraction of societal energy use to account for energy used in generating nuclear power while others who claim a high EROEI shuffle energy used to enrich fuel into a total fuel use which ultimately gets counted as E_net. The first approach suffers from non-linearity in that energy used by society is scaled in part to energy produced (the issue you raise) while the latter approch is just a shell game. Some people seem to get very worked up about it but maybe that is understandable since bragging rights are involved.

I'd like though to get back to the period of time issue. There is yet another James Hansen blog storm getting going, this time over a paper he a co-workers published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Newton's old journal. The storm is over a newspaper article that misreads the paper. You can read about it here. A very important result of the paper (not what the storm is about) is that climate models that have assumed that ice sheets linger are not well justified in that assumption so that warming can lay bare darker colored rock (or water) sooner than anticipated and boost warming. This leads them to conclude that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that leads to dangerous climate change is lower than previously assumed. They now think that emssions reductions are likely not sufficienct to avoid dangerous climate change (e.g. 25 meter sea level rise over a few centuries; part of the storm) and so sequestering carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere will be needed. This is going to result in some cost in energy at least as an opportunity cost. Thus, part of the equation for EROEI for fossil fuels should include the energy used to sequester the carbon dioxide from the fuel we've already used. So, we can not know what the EROEI for fossil fuels is until we know how much energy that clean up is going to require. The EROEI of the oil on the Exxon Valdez was about zero, but we would generally at least think more in terms of the EROEI of the oil from the field where it came from. Expanding our time frame into the environmental clean up of the atmosphere could take a chunk out of the EROEI of that field and all others.

But if clean up energy comes from solar PV, a technology that was developed because we had a fossil fuel powered economy, and we continue to use PV after the clean up for a few thousand years, then the total system (fossil fuel use to get to quantum harvesting of sunlight) tends to the EROEI the PV technology with fossil fuels as an insignificant blip in the equation. Since PV, with an energy payback time of 2 years and likely extended use out to 100 year and with recycling requiring a third of the energy of initial fabrication, has an EROEI tending to 100, this, at a minimum, is what the whole system tends to.

But then, because this is so intergenerational, we need to consider EROEI for whom. Those folks who got Standard Oil for their model T's are not going to be paying for the clean up except that some of them learned the power of industrial scale R&D in WWII and perfected it enough so that a relatively small research program in PV systems seemed like an obvious thing to spend some GI Bill induced prosperity on. It takes centuries to realize the full EROEI of solar so we don't get to benefit fully but we do get to pay for clean up of fossil fuel use. Only those off in the future get to say they are getting the full benefit. Yet, in using EROEI to make energy decisions, we certainly want to consider future benefits and not just our own.

Chris

Errr...not sure I'm in the right place. Is it just me, or am I seeing Vlad in Lindsey or vice versa.

One it's in the eyebrows, two it's in the mouth/lips, three its in the width and spacing of the eyes, four its in the nose.

No comments on ears seems appropriate.

"I’ll admit, this is an extreme example. In the end, we need to address what society does with its “surplus” energy. After all, we could all live in homogenized concrete apartment blocs, wear one brand of clothing, watch one news channel, and read one newspaper. That would be a vastly more efficient form of energy usage than our current consumer economy. Through a well-run command economy, we could greatly increase the level of “surplus” energy available to invest in wind or rail infrastructure. "

I disagree with this premise completely. I think it reflects a certain assumption that reducing energy use involves hardship and government coercion, which sounds like the Soviet Union, or that the capitalist economy (represented by frivolous consumerist junk) requires "surplus energy."

Not so. There is no effective resource cost difference between homogenized concrete apartment blocks and some sort of architectural/designer apartment blocks. (Most capitalist apartment blocks are also rather heavily homogenized alas.) Nor is there any real resource difference between one brand of clothing and many brands of clothing, or one newspaper and many newspapers.

The difference between these is the human input of creativity and variety, ie the non-resource, non-energy input. This may cause these products to cost more money, but not necessarily more resources. People endlessly confuse monetary cost and resource cost. Manhattanites are among the lowest resource-users, with a very expensive lifestyle, while the guy in the Maine woods with a pickup and a snowmachine, who burns wood and has a drafty house and a couple of outbuildings, who is sitting on ten or twenty acres (but no farming), who has attics, closets and basements full of crap may have a monetarily cheap lifestyle but one that consumes lots of resources.

When we think of "economizing" we normally tend towards things that are monetarily cheaper. It is certainly cheaper to use generic mass-produced goods (clothing from WalMart and Target) than goods with a higher human/design/conceptual input (clothing from Marc Jacobs and Chloe). However, we can see that if we spend $10,000 on clothes at WalMart compared to $10,000 on clothes at Marc Jacobs, we consume much, much more resources at WalMart.

So, I propose that, in the interests of Saving the Earth, we all shop at Marc Jacobs and have small and relatively empty closets. And, we can live in superinsulated high-rise condos and ride the subway to our jobs in which we create goods and services with a high degree of non-resource value for each other. Instead of STUFF STUFF STUFF, we can enjoy (or provide) a good restaurant meal, a massage, some theater or live music, or even just more free time, and a small amount of creative craft/custom made products to fit in our small apartments.

As resources become more scarce, one would expect the cost of resources to rise more than the cost of non-resource inputs, thus favoring products with relatively low resource inputs and relatively high non-resource inputs. Thus, if gasoline is $8 a gallon and a music CD is $10, people would tend to buy fewer gas-guzzlers and more music.