Exergy, Ecology and Democracy - Concepts of a Vital Society or A Proposal for An Exergy Tax

The vitality of the society is strongly depending on the management of physical, environmental and human resources. The dilemma of the modern society can be stated: misuse of physical resources from poor understanding of concepts such as exergy, misuse of nature from ignorance of ecology and misuse of people or human intelligence from lack of democracy. Exergy is a well-established concept in engineering, the awareness of the living nature and its behavior increases and new rules for management of people are successfully developed in Japan. Optimization of real world processes involving energy, matter and people must include all these parts, otherwise, it will only be a sub optimization doomed to failure. An exergy tax is suggested as a first step to improve present resource use and decrease environmental destruction.