Getting the priorities straight: resource use, emissions, impacts, avoidable/unavoidable waste

Excerpt

Five years ago, in a previous editorial (Varbanov et al. 2018), it was argued that while the supply of energy from renewable sources is an important and necessary component of sustainable development, it is not the only one. The reasoning was based on the structure of the US economy energy balance, where the 2/3 energy waste share significantly overshadowed the potential share of renewable sources on the supply side of the balance. Nowadays, 5 years later, visiting the LLNL Flowchart website shows exactly the same structure of the energy balance. Moreover, this structure is typical for the time periods since at least the year 2000. Since that time, there have been periods of relatively low energy prices and other periods with high energy prices. The final energy demands grew or shrunk, but the proportion remained stable: 2/3 waste vs. 1/3 used energy. …