How serious is the addiction to oil of developed society? A multi-scale integrated analysis based on the concept of societal and ecosystem metabolism : Part 2

In these years the growing concern for both global warming and peak oil has put the energy issue back on the front burner of the political debate. In technical terms, this implies looking for alternatives to fossil energy as the primary energy source powering the economic process of modern economies. This paper (the second of series of two) presents a methodological approach called Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism, which can be used to study this problem. After a short introduction, section one presents the basic rationale and the theoretical building blocks of this approach (Mosaic Effect Across Levels and Impredicative Loop Analysis). Section two presents a few results of previous applications of this method which confirm its validity, then illustrates how MSIASEM can be used for checking the feasibility and desirability of alternative energy sources. Finally, the last section of this paper illustrates the link between societal and ecosystem metabolism, which makes it possible to study the compatibility of societal metabolism on its interface with ecological processes. In conclusion, with this paper we claim that the MSIASEM approach can provide a heuristic vision of the "quality" of potential alternatives to fossil energy, due to its ability to contextualize such an analysis in relation to the characteristics of the metabolism of a given society, the characteristics of its energy sector and the characteristics of the metabolism of the ecosystems embedding them