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raises the question of whether societal overhead costs determine what kinds of businesses can prosper
in a given society. A variety of societal overhead costs in the US do seem to have been persistently
increasing, such as environmental mitigation costs, maintenance costs for increasingly complex urban
infrastructure, healthcare, retirement and education, etc.. This one benchmark, then, seems to raise a
wide variety of important questions. The accuracy of the measure itself is likely to be improved with
use. What’s interesting is seeing all those questions as connected by one number, perhaps indicating
this is as good way to look at the interaction of financial, energy and environmental variables.
Figure 11. Monetary Returns on Energy Invested (MREI), A possible comprehensive
energy performance benchmark. Comparing energy costs and benefits per kWh installed,
cases (a) Total operating cost (b) Average GDP for energy used, (c) Wholesale price of for
electricity generated (w/ 11% profit), (d) Wholesale value with a 50% mark-up4.2. Whole Environmental Assessment
Life cycle assessments, whether using LCA for technology impacts or SEA for business energy use
as whole systems, help people understand how we organize economic activity and interact with our
environment. Environments themselves are naturally moving targets, making whole system assessment
partly a matter of finding your place in a long story of change. Our historic two hundred year
economic experience of accelerating growth, as technology made resources ever cheaper, is now
reversing. Increasing resource costs are due to declines in the rate at which new resources are being
found, rising competition for them, and also the increasing physical costs and complexity of extraction.
Those kinds of reversals in the direction of change are often possible to clearly identify, even from
anecdotal information when consistent definitions and patterns of change are lacking. Simply a lag in