The Sustainability Babel Fish

Abstract

This paper proposes a quantitative measure of sustainability. Using primary energy as a metric, it enables decisions to be made across different activities such as electricity, fuel and water use. By relying on bill data, we eliminate the need for new measurements and readily connect to economics through market prices. We choose the primary energy content of a gallon of gasoline as the basic unit, which turns out to be the right size to appeal to common intuition. We highlight that there are no 'one size fits all' rules governing sustainability decisions. Rather, the appropriate choices depend on location, time, and personal attributes. © 2012 The Author(s).