A Different Take on the Emergy Baseline – Or Can There Really Be Any Such Thing

The phrase ‘emergy baseline’ refers to the total yearly environmental support to the geobiosphere in terms of the emergy concept, and should include all three fundamental sources of exergy (i.e. sunlight, tidal exergy and deep earth heat). Ever since its introduction, the emergy baseline has undergone a continuous revision process, which, however, has so far focussed on the underlying equations and resulting numerical values, without questioning the fundamental theoretical soundness of such calculations. An alternative take on the issue is presented here, namely that it may be epistemologically incorrect to seek a simple scalar baseline encompassing all three exergy sources. Instead, a ‘baseline vector’ could be defined, where the three fundamental inputs of exergy to the geobiosphere are kept separate at all times, not unlike the three independent axes of a Cartesian space.