Editorial

摘要

This issue highlights the use of energy in goods and services, and the problems in evaluating the impact of engineering decisions on climate change. Two important causes of difficulty are uncertainty and the poor application of the economic methodology for calculating the social cost of the emission of greenhouse gases. Organisations and engineers have to assess many factors in product design and operation; safety, cost, timing and sus-tainability are just a few. Such factors are captured in prices of outputs, such as overheads due to meeting quality standards and regulations. In contrast, this is not yet the case for greenhouse gases, which should have their embodied emissions assessed. That assessment requires judgements on the relative merits of alternative costing methodologies to calculate the CO_(2e) of the embodied emissions.