Understanding the implications of a thermoeconomic perspective on sustainability

No two sciences have been more directly informative of sustainability than thermodynamics (the science of energy and material resources) and economics (the science of how those resources are allocated for production, distribution, and consumption). Both disciplines share a preoccupation with understanding efficiency, which is critical to many interpretations of sustainability and so it is not surprising to discover that investigative approaches to sustainability in one discipline can be analogous to the other. However, there are significant differences as well, such as the difference between price and value, the importance of time, the necessity of reference states and analysis of ecological systems. Both perspectives have important implications for understanding sustainability, including strong vs. weak formulations, and aggregation of data flows with different qualitative characteristics.