# Presentation: 718300

## EMERGY & ENERGY SYSTEMS

**Session 7 **
**Short Course for ECO Interns, EPA and Partners**

**Notes:**
In the last session, we introduced the evaluation of well documented energy and material flows.  The examples provided used components and paths that could be measured or calculated from the laws of physics and chemistry.

## Evaluating Information

**Evaluating Information**

- Learned
- Expert services
- Biodiversity
- Endangered species
- Antiquities
- Cultural icons and policy
- Aesthetics and other anthropocentric values

**Notes:**
In this session, we will talk about the more intangible systems – specifically information.  Many people say to me – “I get the concept of energy flow between animals and plants and the use of energy to drive an industrial process or a household.  I even get the energy quality concept about energy higher in the hierarchy being more concentrated and able to do more meaningful work.  What I don’t get is how you can calculate the energy in information or cultural values.  What is the energy of a story or religion or the information in a newspaper?” 
While the science of quantifying information emergy is still in the theoretical research stage, it is important to include these processes and storages in both the diagrams and the emergy tables.  All of the items on this list have been evaluated using methods that are open for discussion, enhancement or strengthening.  The systems you will be evaluating, at least initially, do not possess or trade in exceptionally rare antiquities (unlike Egypt, for example), and the evaluation of biodiversity and endangered species is usually completed during a sub-system evaluation of a region rather than the initial economic studies that this course is aimed at. 
Consequently, in this session we will concentrate on the details of including learned information and human services, while presenting some thoughts for discussion on the other kinds of information.

## Information and Education

**Notes:**
One way to evaluate the emergy of information is to assess how much emergy it takes to reach a particular level of education (Environmental Accounting, Odum 1996, pg. 230-232).  This assumes that education is equivalent to gain in information and that all resource use interacts to increase our knowledge base. Typically the total emergy in circulation in a region is divided by the total population to get a per capita emergy similar to the per capita income indice.  However, we all know that not every individual has the same money or emergy allocated to them.  Older individuals use more than toddlers and know more than toddlers.  Consequently, it is not inconceivable that emergy per individual increases with age or education.  While it is true that certain individuals are self-taught, and that many individuals with lower levels of education are more capable of disseminating information of use to a larger population than those with Ph.D.s, formal education is a norm in this culture and credibility is often associated with the degree obtained.
The ranking presented here attempts to quantify that increasing differential and assumes that emergy use is cumulative as education increases. This particular evaluation further assumes that all of the average annual emergy flow available to U.S. citizens was required for each class of education attainment.  This is not without substance if you consider that most information is cumulative and that we receive information inputs from multiple resources without loss to the transmitter of the information.  Using this reasoning, the population was divided into these education categories, and the total emergy in circulation that year was divided by the number of individuals to get an estimate of the emergy per person.  This in turn was divided by the average metabolic rate as the energy basis, providing a set of transformities that can be used to estimate the emergy of information in a region.
Even Odum admitted that this was a rough estimate, but in lieu of a more detailed evaluation, we will assume that these are good estimates and will use them to make all of our regional evaluations directly comparable.  

## Information Inputs

- Labor
- Transformity: level of education compared to US citizen if immigrant
- Energy: pers-hrs x calories
- Experts
- Transformity: level of education
- Energy: pers-hrs x calories

**Notes:**
Labor and expert services are two inputs that use these transformities based on education to determine the emergy of process inputs.  When adding the labor component to any emergy evaluation, it is important to know what sectors the labor is coming from.  This ensures use of the appropriate transformities.  If labor is predominantly illegal aliens, as in some area’s agriculture, they have not had the use of the same amount of emergy as laborers raised in the U.S, and consequently will not have the same transformity as a laborer from the U.S. even if they are the same age.  One way to determine an appropriate transformity for this kind of labor is presented in Folio #4.  If the labor is predominately domestic, then a transformity for a typical level of education can be taken from the table shown in the preceding slide.
On the other hand, someone with a higher level of education and work experience brings the value of that education into the management of a process.  A veterinarian, for example, with over 20 years of education uses the force of that information to improve or optimize production of eggs in a hen house.  This is a valuable input to the process that requires quantification.  It is not enough to use salaries to evaluate this component, because of the disparity between occupations and between the anthropocentric value of education in different sectors.
The information you need to collect for any unit emergy ratio evaluation is the kind of labor or expert service and the person-hours applied to a unit amount of the end product.  In agricultural studies, these data are often cited as person (or man) hours per acre per harvest or per year.  For some industries, the total labor force is counted as number of employees instead of actual hours required to produce a given quantity of production.  In this case you would need to estimate the amount of labor applied to the product you are evaluating.  One way might be to determine the percentage of total commodity quantities produced and use that same percentage to determine the number of hours applied to the specific product, assuming 2000 hours per year per employee. Accounting for human labor, whether manual or expert, also requires an understanding of an emergy concept involving the definition of different kinds of pathways, specifically splits and co-products.  We will talk more about these details in the next session. 

## Other Kinds of Information

- Policy
- Show as appropriate interaction
- Usually tracked as $$ (disaster payments, agricultural subsidies, etc.)
- Aesthetics
- Use tank in diagram
- Show components expected to influence
- Not an actual table entry at this point in time

**Notes:**
There is no state or region today that is not impacted by outside policy.  A lot of this policy is translated into purchase of goods and services in order to comply with regulations or into decreased consumption rates.  These effects of policy are measured in the normal course of completing the evaluations of specific commodities.  The other way that policy influences regional processes is through the collection of taxes and return of program payments.  Taxes take the form of social security, annual income and business taxes paid to the IRS and payments enter the region in the form of agricultural subsidies, disaster payments, highway and other federal building projects, and a number of other programs dispersing taxes back to the states for management of federal programs.  This data is usually available in state statistical abstracts or the U.S. statistical abstract.  Disaster payments can be found on the FEMA website.  In the past, agricultural subsidies were hard to track down, but inequities in payments created a grassroots revolt and there is now a website tracking actual payments to all states. In a regional evaluation, these taxes and payments are included in the appropriate section – import or export.
If aesthetics play an important role in the region’s economy or immigration patterns, include this entity as a storage in the diagram, indicating its connection to a process that is more tangible.  I believe that certain emergy values of natural processes measure this anthropocentric quantity, at least in terms of more popular aesthetic rankings ( beaches and mountains leading the list, for example).  Because these values are best determined spatially, a different kind of emergy analysis would be used to evaluate this information.  We present it here only for conceptual completeness.  One example would be to use the geopotential of a mountainous region as a measure of its aesthetic appeal – the Rocky mountains have a higher geopotential than the Appalachians and are generally regarded as having a higher aesthetic value.

## More Kinds of Information

- Genetics
- Global empower x evolutionary time / # species: 1.26E25 sej/species
- Biodiversity and endangered species
- Estimated from environmental process required to recreate
- One of a kind, Copies versus first
- Requires higher energy and emergy to create, low emergy to copy
- Shared information
- More resilient, slow turnover (paradigms, cultural mores)
- Comparison in Environmental Accounting, pg 224

**Notes:**
A good discussion of the emergy concepts involved in evaluating these forms of information can be found in Environmental Accounting (Odum 1996).  For the most part, these information forms constitute more important interior flows than in flows crossing state boundaries, and are therefore not typical entries in a regional evaluation.  This, of course, is not true for larger scale cultural mores or globally rare species.   These entries become important at a smaller scale as well when sub-system evaluations of environmental impacts from the human interface are evaluated.

## More Kinds of Information

- Cultural evaluations, archeology
- Open for discussion
- Area for future research

**Notes:**
Conversions of cultural information are still under development.  It is not so difficult to determine the emergy to create a pyramid or a temple, but the cultural or religious importance that it may attain as extensive time passes is outside the scope of these regional evaluations.  If your region has significant archeological sites, a sub-system evaluation would be appropriate.