Why use energy and not CO2?

CO2 is the parameter mostly used in environmental impact assessments, both in literature and in public policies.

However, it remains something difficult for people to understand, primarily because it is not normally associated with any everyday experience.

Even the concept of the weight of a gas is not obvious to many people. So much so that stating that a given product or behavior has an environmental impact equal to 100 grams of CO2 equivalent is meaningless for almost all people, since in most cases this number could be equal to 1, 10, or 1,000 without them perceiving the meaning of this difference. With respect to CO2, almost all people are like four-year-olds, for whom there is no difference between 1, 10, 100, or 1,000 kilometers.

In fact, how many people, faced with the statement “this T-shirt has an environmental impact equal to 60 g of CO2 eq,” would be capable of questioning its validity?

Yet this data is grossly inaccurate (a T-shirt has a footprint of approximately 7 kg of CO2 eq)! Few would miss such an error in a more common measurement context (e.g. if somebody says: “apples at the market cost €400 per kilo).

Energy concept —although far from simple from a physical standpoint—is something closer to people’s everyday experience, at least in relation to the electricity bill.

In Suasì, energy is measured in EmCoins, which stands for Embodied Energy as a Coin: energy incorporated in the porducts which corresponds to the kilowatt-hour.

Emcoins are further divided into “gray” (from fossil fuels) and “green” (from renewable sources).

Because not all energy is the same…!