ABSTRACT
The roots of virtually any problem with energy accounting lead back to the inher-ent ambiguity of the very concept of energy itself (section 1.1, below). So to start, we analyze three epistemological sources of ambiguity that must be acknowl-edged by those willing to account quantities of ‘energy’. First of all, we address the lessons from hierarchy theory telling us that the quantification of the generic concept of ‘energy’ requires us to consider and represent energy transformation one scale at a time (section 1.2, page 15). Then we get to the lessons from classic thermodynamics telling us that different energy forms – e.g. thermal energy and mechanical energy – do have different qualities, and therefore cannot be aggre-gated in a substantive way (section 1.3, page 18). Finally, the development of non-equilibrium thermodynamics (required when dealing with living and self-organizing systems) implies an additional semantic ambiguity associated with the fact that metabolic systems, according to their own identity, define locally for themselves what is useful (negentropy) or waste (entropy) (section 1.4, page 21).
