ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the concept of societal metabolism in general terms and explains its usefulness for studying the implications of demographic changes on the pattern of energy use in contemporary society. It introduces the conceptual building blocks for an analysis based on societal metabolism, such as group autocatalysis, the flow-fund model of Georgescu-Roegen, bioeconomic and environmental pressure, and endosomatic and exosomatic metabolism. It then explains, with simple numerical examples, how to quantify the societal metabolic pattern. The quantitative analysis is based on the construction of an energy end-use matrix to identify and compare the characteristic features of the endosomatic metabolic pattern and exosomatic metabolic pattern of energy in human society in relation to demographic variables. The proposed analytical framework identifies five different effects that aging has on the stability of the metabolic pattern of modern societies: 1) a decreasing size of the labor force in society; 2) a growing fraction of the labor force that must be invested in the service sector; 3) an increased rate of energy use per hour of labor in the paid work sector to satisfy the growing demand for services (social assistance and healthcare); 4) a higher rate of energy use in the household (residential) sector; and 5) a growing dependence on imports of food, energy, materials, products, and services because of the contraction of the internal labor force in the primary and secondary economic sectors.
