A physical economic model of ecosystem services

To make full use of the power of economics, ecosystem services accounting can show how work done can be understood from the carbon cycle and compared with the economic actions represented in the Circular Flow of the Macroeconomy. The comparison is useful in fitting data from both fields on the one spreadsheet to assist in economic and environmental management. This requires some review of concepts originally formed before the industrial revolution discoveries of modern science. Though labor and capital are conventionally considered as distinct, the concept of “work” is shown in a simple case study to be a unifying concept derived from the factor, “force” which may be biological or mechanical, almost invariably fueled in purposive action by the combustion of a carbohydrate (food or organic fuel) or hydrocarbons. Adapting from Odum’s “fractal cascade” of usable energy, 30,000 solar photons pass through a hierarchy of 5 phases to deliver work done by the breaking 2 carbon-hydrogen bonds. For the Earth in 2015 the increase in broken C–H bonds over those reconstituted naturally was 18×1038, emphasizing a unidirectional trend to higher costs, rather than any hoped-for recovery of business cycle.