Articles | Volume 6, issue 2
https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-6-689-2015
https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-6-689-2015
Research article
 | 
13 Oct 2015
Research article |  | 13 Oct 2015

Resource acquisition, distribution and end-use efficiencies and the growth of industrial society

A. J. Jarvis, S. J. Jarvis, and C. N. Hewitt

Download

Interactive discussion

Status: closed
Status: closed
AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment
Printer-friendly Version - Printer-friendly version Supplement - Supplement

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision
AR by Anna Wenzel on behalf of the Authors (07 Jul 2015)  Author's response
ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (10 Jul 2015) by James Annan
RR by Timothy Garrett (22 Jul 2015)
ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by Editor) (28 Aug 2015) by James Annan
AR by Andrew Jarvis on behalf of the Authors (07 Sep 2015)  Author's response    Manuscript
ED: Publish as is (15 Sep 2015) by James Annan
Download
Short summary
This paper uses observations of global and national energy use to attempt to show that the growth in energy use over the last 160 years can be related to the distribution constraints imposed by the networks that link environmentally derived resources to points of end use. Having accounted for the distribution efficiency of this global-scale network, we speculate that the observed long-run return rate on energy of ~2.4%/yr requires regulated deployment of acquisition and end use efficiencies.
Altmetrics
Final-revised paper
Preprint