The goods-movement nature-human nature Any system --- a house, a factory, a city --- is a living organism that "works", like any other living thing, thanks to a stream of matter and energy: matter is represented by "things" obtained from the biosphere --- from the air, waters, soil, plants and animals living from the world --- mostly free, and many other things from by technosphere universe of objects made by humans for the processing of goods from nature: plants, animals, energy sources, stones, water, minerals, and so on.
I will call, so to speak, "goods" items "manufactured" in technosphere: strictly speaking, as we shall see, we have to reckon with "goods" exchanged, without paying anything between humans and their activities and the surrounding world of nature: oxygen "purchased" for free from the air, necessary for human respiration and the burning, the carbon dioxide "sold" free atmosphere as a result of respiration, combustion, the decomposition of the stones, and so on.
You can not have clear ideas on the functioning of an ecosystem and how human artificial crosses an area if you are not a step forward in understanding these complex trade and "trade" of materials and energy, where money può entrare o no.
Cominciamo con l'osservare che i processi di produzione e di "consumo" delle merci presentano alcune interessanti analogie con i processi viventi: entrambi traggono dalla natura risorse (aria, acqua, minerali, prodotti vegetali e animali) e le trasformano in cose utili. Nel processo di trasformazione e nel processo di "uso" delle "cose", i materiali usati e i loro sottoprodotti ritornano nell'ambiente naturale circostante sotto forma di gas, liquidi e solidi, nella stessa quantità in peso in cui sono entrati nel processo. Per questo motivo d'ora innanzi non userò più il termine "consumo" delle cose fabbricate, delle merci, perché in realtà ciascun "consumatore" non consuma niente, but is limited to use for a longer or shorter period, the goods themselves.
also processes the economy, like life, are therefore characterized by a goods-movement nature-nature, or NMN (if we resort to an analogy with the Marxist symbology); a difference, however, what is happening in life processes, in which all wastes are part of the cycle, working with "closed" at the end of the cycle of the goods produced by human activities, is the impoverished nature of some of its resources and the quality of some of its resources is worse for release of waste and waste management.
until, in the process "cheap" production and use of commodities, the extraction of natural resources and the return of nuclear waste have been diluted over time and slow enough space, nature has had time to get back in balance, in modern industrial societies, however, the extraction of resources from nature, the mass of waste produced and placing waste in natural bodies receivers are very fast and concentrated in space.
And 'This is one of the causes of environmental damage occurring as a worsening of air quality and water pollution or depletion of reserves of natural resources, soil fertility, stability of the valleys, which seem obvious when you are already occurred.
the real basis of these failures is the fact that human beings in their economic activities are unable to properly assess the phenomena of material extraction from nature and the nature of contamination. The efficiency of a process that produces goods and uses only with monetary indicators is described in which the concept of scarcity and quality of natural resources does not appear, except for the part that touches the "owner" of some of these resources: the owner of the mines or cultivated field, or sources of water, which sees reduced his chances of earning the depletion or contamination of his property.
Where, as in most cases, natural resources does not have an owner, ie the cone of public goods - who owns the air, or sea or river water, or the flora and fauna not sold? - Their changes are difficult to predict because they are not measurable with the unit "money" and none had so far willing to take up any other instrument or indicator different from the traditional "market".
Hence the need to seek some other indicator of flows of matter and energy involved in the processes of production and use of goods: research, in other words, an account of physical or "natural" processes transformation of nature that allows us to identify some new units Measuring the "value" than the money.
The idea is not new. The first accounts of trade between agriculture, industry and consumption, beginning with the famous "fork" of F. Quesnay, established in 1758, have been thought in physical terms. The problem is treated by Marx in his analysis of the circulation of wealth and the economist Marshall, in his "Principles" of 1890, wrote that "the Mecca of the economist" would be the biological economy.
And the first Soviet planners in the twenties, they tried to get rid of the waste of previous capital, also free of the limitations imposed by its main measure, money, and tried to prepare an accounting national physical drives.
Unfortunately, for the sake of national economic accounting, it is difficult to add the weight of the potatoes with that of wool or iron rod, so much so that the first cross-tables of the Soviet economy also had to describe the exchange of goods in monetary units.
would have to wait to see the current times reborn a new application for analysis of material flows associated with economic activity, the analysis of the "metabolism" of the factories and the processes of production and consumption. Finally, it is recognized that it is not possible to assess the flows of greenhouse gases, or waste, and apply correct taxes, unless you know exactly the physical quantities of materials involved in economic processes, the movement that I called first-kind goods and nature.
energy and matter are more important than money
In this area, unlike what happens with money prices, we have some solid points of reference: by definition, matter and energy entering each process production and use of goods can be found at the end in the same amount, even if modified, a part of that matter and energy in the form of goods sold for cash, while part --- indeed most - - is in the form of chemicals and energy that end up as "Waste" that are "rejected" and placed "somewhere" in the biosphere.
As an example think of the gasoline burned in a car: The item is gasoline and we pay and the service rendered is the displacement of a person on board for a number of kilometers. We can therefore say that the service will cost many pounds per person-kilometer.
This monetary value does not tell us anything about the natural history of the gasoline before it enters the engine, nor tell us anything about that since the gas release into the atmosphere during combustion, it 'asbestos dust or rubber are released into the air during the motion of the vehicle kilometer considered.
Accounting shows that a kilogram of natural gas burns only when it interacts with oxygen content about 20 kg of air, the "service", ie the shift of the vehicle is accompanied by the entry into the same 21 kg of materials placed in cycle. Substances that come from the tailpipe, they have the same initial mass of matter, chemical composition are very different: we find the same atoms that were present in hydrocarbons of petrol in oxygen in nitrogen and air, but now I'm combined in some cases still like oxygen and nitrogen, but also as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons other than gasoline, and countless other substances of waste whose measurement and characterization is not easy, because so far nobody cares.
The same applies to the energy that was originally "contained" in petrol, as potential energy with low entropy, and that during combustion is released as heat at high temperature and entropy still low (heat that moves the cylinders engine and the wheels) and eventually also found in exhaust fumes and the heat caused by friction, such as low temperature heat and high entropy. The amount of energy is always the same, but its quality merchandise, "its ability to be still used for some useful purpose, is much diminished, a loss of utility you may indicate as an increase in entropy.
The few previous considerations provide the basis for the detection of some physical indicator of the value that will free us from arbitrariness of money and gives us some compelling information. For example, we may distinguish a good or service (remembering that each service, also apparently immaterial) requires physical objects and materials), based on the amount of matter that requires in its process of production and use, in its "life cycle" .
You can say that it is all the more useful or valuable or ecologically --- "virtuous" --- a process or service that delivers the same goods and the same service with a lower consumption of raw materials, or with less energy consumption, or with less environmental pollution.
could thus speak of "energy cost", "cost in natural resources" and "environmental cost" of each commodity or service, each being just like you use to consider in the case of monetary value, the more valuable a commodity or service that have a lower "cost of nature." Each of these three may be measured in kilocalories per kilogram or in which the comparison can be considered universal (or almost).
The energy cost of goods
Before clarifying what could serve in practice this search for new indicators "Natural" value, and also to show some of the great difficulties of their task, I will touch on the case of energy, certainly the most studied and the relatively easier.
As said before, you can compare goods and services based on the amount of energy required to manufacture a unit of weight of a commodity or a unit of a service: for example to allow a person to walk a kilometer. We may thus speak of the energy cost of a product or a service.
This way of reasoning touches, however, some finer points of the same theory of value: the rest of the classical economists, and Marx himself, thought of something physical when a theory of value based on the amount of work "embedded" in goods, needed to produce it. Basically, the labor value is associated in some way a measure of the amount of energy --- human --- in this case needed to produce the goods, is associated with the entity that is the mysterious "use value" of goods, a value in some way linked to the "nature", as Marx says in "Critique of the Gotha Programme" (1875) when he says that "nature is the source of use values \u200b\u200b(and this is true wealth !) just because the work, which is itself only a manifestation of a natural force, human labor power. "
Martinez-Alier has analyzed in his book A significant number of people who have sought to develop a theory of the energy value of the goods or an analysis of the relationship between energy, labor and goods. The Ukrainian Sergei Podolinskij doctor wrote in 1881 an essay appeared in German, French, Italian and Russian, on a proposal for a physical value of the goods. The essay was recently translated and analyzed critically by Titian Bagarolo.
But continuously various people, more or less ideologically motivated, were attracted by the search for some level of value that was free from the slavery imposed by the monetary unit of capitalist accounting. In the twenties of this century, for example, a theory of value in physical units has been proposed by F. Soddy (who had won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of isotopes of the elements), the writer HG Wells (one of the "War of the Worlds"), and others.
Of particular interest is the movement, which arose at the time of great crisis in 1929-33 and in the wake of the ideas of Thorstein Veblen called "technocracy" and based on the idea that technical rather than financial strength, would have a dominant role in economic decisions and productive. As part of this movement, a Howard Scott suggested a curious theory of distribution of goods, according to which the money would had to be replaced by a currency unit based on energy. The proposal, published by Scott in the January 1933 issue of Harper's Magazine, claimed that the industry would have produced as efficiently as a large amount of useful commodities if the government had printed in quantities of energy certificates equivalent to the total amount of energy he considered useful for use in a year in the production of goods.
These certificates should be distributed equally among the population, each citizen would use the certificates at its disposal to purchase goods or services required, each characterized on the basis of its energy by adjusting their tastes and choices made on the basis of physical constraint on the amount of energy allocated by the community.
who wanted to buy a commodity with high energy costs would have fewer certificates to buy other goods, but he could get from other energy certificates. The energy certificates should be transferable and should be of limited duration.
The Italian Salvadori and his Forgot measure the energy value of the goods
Measuring the energy cost of goods was proposed, even in the thirties, by Renato Salvadori, an obscure professor of merceologia University of Florence, proposed a unit of value expressed in commodity-energon. Renato Salvadori there is little news, taken from a "curriculum vitae" dated 1931. He graduated in chemistry in Padua in 1896, which suggests that he was born around 1870. Mel 1899 he went with a scholarship at the University of Gottingen in the laboratory of prof. Nerst. After two years of teaching in Sassari in 1902 won the competition a full professor of chemistry Technical Institute in Florence and in the same year he obtained a teaching qualification. From 1926 to 1934 he held office for the course (then two years) of the Commodity at the Faculty of Economics and Business in Florence. You may have lived until about 1940.
In his book "Commodity general. Theoretical principles. II. The properties of things. III. Concept of energy commodity ", Florence, Cya Publisher, 1933, introduced the concept of" energy commodity "defined as" the sum of the energy required to create a separate commodity, so you can determine the commercial value energy " . The term "commercial energy value" Salvadori meant "the absolute value of the unit of measure of a commodity product, determined by the technical conditions of its preparation. Each type of good is, ultimately, an amount of energy that is always greater than the energy theory that the product itself. "
Salvadori called the" energon-goods "as the sum of the energy to produce a unit of weight of each commodity, the sum is always greater than the "energy content" of the goods and depends on the losses and inefficiencies of the process. A Salvadori, it must be credited with having introduced, albeit with unclear language, the idea that there is a theoretical minimum energy consumption for producing each commodity --- equivalent, in a sense, the Carnot efficiency of heat engines - - and that the actual consumption of energy depends on the losses from technical inefficiency, and so on. Incidentally, the same concept for several production cycles was taken in 1974 by the American Gyftopoulos.
Useful information about these attempts to measure the value --- the "use value" of --- merci e dei servizi in unità fisiche, e in particolare energetiche, si trovano nel libro già citato, di Martinez-Alier, e in quello dell'inglese Peter Chapman, "Il paradiso dell'energia".
La crisi energetica del 1973 e la nuova curiosità per il costo energetico
L'interesse per la misura del costo energetico delle merci è ripreso negli anni settanta del Novecento, in seguito alle oscillazioni del prezzo del petrolio e delle materie prime: il petrolio era la stessa cosa, aveva lo stesso valore energetico, quando costava 10.000 lire alla tonnellata nel 1972 o 300.000 lire/t nel 1985 o di oltre 250 euro (equivalente a 500.000 vecchie lire/t) come costa all'inizio del 2004. Il calore che libera, the services it renders, the quantity of goods that can contribute to making, independent variables are the unit price.
The search for an indicator of the energy value of the goods was taken by Martha Gilliland, whose work was criticized by David Hüttner and another proposal for measuring the energy cost was advanced English Peter Chapman, already mentioned, and some studies the "energy cost of goods" have also been conducted at the University of Bari.
A critique of the proposal to measure energy in units of the value of goods is contained in a famous article by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen on the grounds that one must consider not only energy but also matter ("matter matters too ").
The rationale of finding a value of energy, or energy cost of goods and services, is that, knowing these values, an economic entity, a person, a company that wants to consume less energy has (have) provided a physical indicator, in a sense "absolute," to choose between different processes or modes of behavior. For example, between two production processes will be worth "more than providing the same goods with less energy consumption. The different ways of transporting people and goods can be compared on the basis of energy consumption per kilometer route from one person or one ton of goods.
The evaluation of the cost energy goods raises various methodological problems. The first point concerns the identification of a new unit of human activity which is the "process of transformation of nature into commodities and then slag and waste. The "process takes place within the physical boundaries that must be defined well enough, on pain of making mistakes. The process is what happens within the confines of a factory or in the confines of a city or those of a house.
Consider a process production, the manufacture of aluminum, which is, as you know, in treating an ore, bauxite, with chemicals that allow you to recover the aluminum oxide. A second phase converts the aluminum oxide, mixed con adatti fondenti, in alluminio metallico per elettrolisi, con l'uso dell'elettricità. In prima approssimazione si può misurare la quantità di energia elettrica consumata per ottenere un kg di alluminio e si può affermare che tale energia rappresenta il costo energetico dell'alluminio, o l'energia "incorporata" nel metallo.
Però bisognerebbe valutare anche il "costo energetico" degli elettrodi di carbone e dei fondenti impiegati nell'elettrolisi e che sono "consumati" nel processo. Per fare le cose meglio bisognerebbe anche aggiungere il costo energetico del trasporto di questi agenti dal luogo di produzione alla fabbrica di alluminio, e poi il "costo energetico" del trasporto dalla bauxite dalla miniera alla fabbrica and the energy cost of the agents with which the bauxite is treated, and continue at this rate. Including all the energy costs of various production factors, the "energy cost" of the real goods, ie the consumption of energy throughout the production chain, can also be doubled.
If, in the same way, calculate the cost of energy produced from melting of scrap aluminum, we see that the recycling allows for aluminum, which is always the same, with an energy cost which is about a twentieth than it is when you are starting from bauxite, almost as if the treatment would allow the scrap to recover some of the energy expenditure when it is manufactured la prima volta partendo dal minerale e che è rimasta "incorporata" nel metallo.
Altri indicatori del valore
L'analisi del valore delle merci sulla base del costo energetico può perciò aiutare a scegliere le materie prime, a progettare i materiali, gli imballaggi, i manufatti, sulla base di nuovi vincoli, quali la scarsità di energia o di materie prime. Sulla base di simili considerazioni si possono cercare altri indicatori fisici, naturali, del valore, come il costo in risorse naturali e il costo ambientale.
Il primo potrebbe essere misurato sulla base della quantità di acqua, o di minerali, o di vegetali, richiesti per produrre una unità di peso di merce; il secondo potrebbe describe the amount of waste - gas, liquid or solid - that accompany the production or use of a unit of weight of goods.
The increasing scarcity of water in the world, even in developed countries, leads us to pay increasing attention to the extent - and lower - of the "water cost" of goods through innovations in water recycling, water usage lower quality for less noble purposes, such as cooling of industrial processes, irrigation, watering gardens and ... cleaning the toilets. It 's absurd that every Italian in its urban life and home, uses each year, 20,000 liters of high quality water for potable and sanitation, and 80,000 other liters of water, too high quality for the toilets and street cleaning.
"worth" more so, it has a higher "use value", the goods or services that require less water. Likewise worth more than the product or service that, during production or use, requires fewer natural resources and has a lower "cost of nature." Again it comes to measuring the amount of natural resources - minerals, fossil fuels, forests, etc. - per unit of goods produced in or for each service.
Finally we can measure the "environmental cost" of each good or service based on the amount of residues or waste which are released into the environment during production or at the end of its useful life. Now begin to be enacted laws establishing the maximum amount of contaminants that may be placed in the receiving environmental bodies: the maximum amount of carbon monoxide, or oxides of nitrogen or sulfur or hydrocarbons that can be released into the environment for each kg of petrol or diesel burned in an engine or for each km driven or per kilowatt hour of electricity produced. However, in most of the processes have very little information on the substances that accompany each process, although these substances depends on the health of workers as well as the environmental impact associated with the stage production or final use of goods.
The delay of knowledge that would allow the measure of the cost (or value) physical "goods and processes depends on the fact that the educational process --- for example training of chemists, engineers, economists are --- focused on measuring the quantity of main products, which are those that have associated monetary exchange, and little attention is paid to the analysis of the amount and type of secondary residue and slag, whose composition, including the ' another, it is more difficult to measure, evaluate, learn, than in the main economic products.
There have been attempts in the past to develop the "process encyclopedia" that the budgets of the flows of materials and energy in physical units, associated with the processes of production and use of goods, but little has been done walk on this road.
Why do I need?
The revival of interest for the new scales of values \u200b\u200bwould be the end to understand something more in the unexplored field of the theory of value in the relationship between man and nature and society. But it would also have some practical utility, would identify the most rational economic choices in an era of scarce resources. In short, capitalist society also closely based on the strict laws of the free market is beginning to recognize that something in the price mechanisms does not work.
For example, in recent years are increasing interest and studies on the characterization of certain goods, considered less harmful to the environment with an "eco-label" or "eco-labels", assigned on the basis of reduced consumption of materials or energy or less pollution, than other goods. Buyers could then be oriented at the same price or even paying a higher price to the goods as "friends" of nature. In a sense this approach is already happening with food so-called "organic", more expensive but apparently obtained with fewer pesticides and fertilizers than traditional ones. It 's easy to see that the operation lends itself to fraud if the measured values \u200b\u200bof "natural" goods are not carried out properly.
Another interesting example of the usefulness of the flow of materials and energy associated with the production and use of goods and services as the application of ecological taxes. Increasingly, to reduce pollution, and proposals are now also applied to taxes proportional to the physical quantity of materials involved: the amount of carbon dioxide emitted from combustion plants, the amount of nitrogen oxide and sulfur emitted during combustion and manufacturing processes, proportional to the amount of solid wastes, and so on.
Finally, the knowledge of material flows is required by procedures that require measurement and evaluation of the so-called "environmental impact" the effect of production activities on the environment. In order to judge whether a place is suitable to house a production facility (should be) requested a budget of materials involved. Needless to say, apart from the actual scientific and technical difficulty of measuring the quantities required, the procedure is very ineffective for the resistance of producers to indicate what was actually treated, the exact amount of waste produced, the danger of the processes and products .
Finally, the research of new scales "natural" value is of great use to measure and plan the operation of any artificial ecosystem as it is, for example, the human city.
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