Posted By: tonyAnd for floating the idea that we should be recording energy rather than (or as well as carbon) - fully agree.

Say more about that? The green building world did indeed just record energy, as good proxy for carbon, for what - 50yrs - until quite recently it dawned that energy is rapidly getting carbon-free, therefore isn't that proxy any more, so carbon has to be recorded, almost 'instead', allowing energy (as long as it's really carbon-free) to be used (a bit more) ad lib. Except that energy does and will continue to cost, especially regressing the relief that PH or near-PH or just rising BldgRegs standards might bring to poorer people. Is that the point that Barnabas was making?

As long as no-one thinks that embodied energy instead of embodied carbon is a better measure - it's a proxy, and in the fossil age was a reliable one, but as grid decarbonisation becomes already highly significant, and sooner than anyone thought looks like becoming almost total, energy becomes hardly a proxy for carbon at all. And it really is carbon that we're interested in, is what's driving climate disaster - not raw energy, whose expenditure may now range from climate-harmless, to disastrous.

Yes, carbon accounting is a minefield, being both invalid to compare calculated figures at different points along the timeline of the decarbonising process, until it stabilises, complete - and only guesswork for the end-of-life part of the calc.

But not even these guys are saying we should account for energy instead of carbon, and they're not saying 'embodied-carbon-a-vanity-metric' - that was a clickbait headline from a Financial Times article, and we can imagine who's sponsoring that kind of propaganda, to gratify that kind of audience. AJ ought to know better than to regurgitate it, and its readers to fall for it.

Florian Urban and Barnabas Calder's 'Form Follows Fuel' book simply says Energy should be tracked, calculated, as well as Carbon. Can't disagree with that. Even the scorned rdSAP does that (although biassing its individualised recommendations to minimise the fuel cost even if that worsens the carbon cost).

They're making a useful proposal, but it's being weaponised, even over-played by themselves at AECB Conf, looks like. Babies and bathwater.

Oh wow, that's maybe an elephant in the room - increasing quantity of raw waste-heat dumped into the biosphere, irrespective of greenhouse-effect. That alone is bound to raise biosphere to a higher equilibrium temperature, in order to dissipate the increased heat (power) to space as fast as it arises. But, everyone assumes, insignificant, at least in climate terms. Or not ?