For those of you who want the short version of this blog, the answer is false. For those of you who want to know more, read more here!
 
To assume that reducing embodied energy will make society sustainable implies that production is the root of all our sustainability evils.  While production is part of the problem, this assumption ignores the fact that goods are only produced to be consumed.  If we weren’t consuming them, they wouldn’t be bought: no business in its right mind would produce something it couldn’t sell!
 
To that end, ‘sustainable society’ needs to be defined as a combination of both production and consumption with very little waste or by-products. Unfortunately a sole focus on embodied energy covers only half the equation; likewise, exclusively focusing on consumption also misses the point.
 
To this end it is surprising that governments and environmental groups spend so much of their time arguing for policies that reduce either production OR consumption energy, and very little time arguing for policies that combine them both.
 
Arguably the problem is metrics, or a lack thereof.  It is easy to target embodied energy because business already measures the energy it uses to produce goods and services.  Therefore, not only can large users of energy be identified, but governments can easily point to reductions in energy use as examples of good policy outcomes.
 
Conversely, the energy we use consuming products has no immediate or public metric. The easiest example is probably a household because we can measure electricity bills, but ultimately privacy laws prevent such information being used to reduce household consumption because ‘naming and shaming’ is political suicide at best, undemocratic at worst.
 
Therefore, instead of measuring actual household energy consumption, the best metric we have is a proxy: the energy efficiency of a house’s building envelope.  This is measured using star ratings and assumes that a higher star rating will reduce the amount of energy consumed by building occupants.
 
Given the limitations of actually measuring energy consumption, this isn’t a bad metric and one which State and Federal Governments should continue to refine and evolve.  Despite the effectiveness of this metric (or perhaps because of it), the production (embodied) energy discussion has started to emerge at recent conferences (SB08, ABSA & BEMP to name a few).
 
While great in concept, this discussion epitomises the either/or thinking around energy and sustainability, and moves the economy no closer to the Holy Grail of a combined metric.
 
Furthermore, it doesn’t recognise that in some cases the use of extra energy creates additional benefits such as durability, and in the case of buildings, more thermally efficient walls that actually reduce (and in some cases eliminate) the consumption of energy for heating and cooling.
 
What is interesting about this discussion is that it seems to be occurring outside of the current policy debate in Australia about emissions trading: if the debate was integrated, proponents would realise that embodied energy will soon be more expensive and incentives will exist for business to reduce the production energy in their products.
 
While emission trading is a positive tool to incentivise investment in energy efficiency, as a single policy instrument it makes no allowances for the benefits of extra energy to produce more durable and thermally efficient materials.
 
The missing piece of this puzzle is full Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) which considers not only the embodied energy and operational energy requirements of the product, but also factors such as maintenance and replacement costs.
 
While full LCA seems simple in concept, unfortunately, it is not. How a product is used and the operational energy required is hard to quantify and the results tend to be vague.
 
Despite this – and especially for the built environment – full LCA is a necessity and we need to persist with the development of robust assumptions, methodologies and data. To not do so would mean we continue to rely on metrics that only tell half the story and which ultimately do not point the way toward a more sustainable society.