You’ve seen the movie; trawled the web sites; shopped around for that green lifestyle. Like me, do you wonder if we can build enough of this green technology to keep up with economic growth and reduce our voracious appetite for fossil fuels? Alternatively, how can our society can get off the growth tread mill without wholesale collapse of our economy?
Through simple drawings, I explain how its possible to "count up" all our stuff (physical assets) using embodied energy. This is the first step to building a physically based model of an economy. I go onto apply such a model to a scenario for the UK to 2025. Finally I test my scenario against objectives for jobs, national energy security, balance of payments, consumer welfare and CO2 reductions. The scenario scores well! Have you got a scenario you would like tested in this way?