Abstract
Many important earlier writers, including sociologists Leslie White and Fred Cottrell and ecologist Howard Odum, as well as economist Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen have emphasized the importance of net energy and energy surplus as a determinant of human culture. Human farmers or other food gatherers must have an energy surplus for there to be specialists, military campaigns, and cities, and substantially more for there to be art, culture, and other amenities. Net energy analysis is a general term for the examination of how much energy is left over from an energy-gaining process after correcting for how much of that energy (or its equivalent from some other source) is required to generate (extract, grow, or whatever) a unit of the energy in question. Net energy analysis is sometimes called the assessment of energy surplus, energy balance, or, as we prefer, energy return on investment, depending upon the specific procedures used. To do this we start with the more familiar monetary assessment and then develop how this relates to the energy behind economic processes [1].
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References
Modified from Hall, Balogh and Murphy 2008, which contains supporting references. An update is available in Murphy, Hall and Cleveland (in press).
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Hall, C.A.S., Klitgaard, K.A. (2012). Energy Return on Investment. In: Energy and the Wealth of Nations. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9398-4_14
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