This prompted me to really consider a future doing a master's in economics, because I think those are the kind of people that you're going to need. You're going to need some measurement specialists. I'm not that person.
First of all, this is an example from the biofuels.
I talked to a gentleman named Jeff Golinowski from Tier 1 Energy and he went on an hour-long rant about the biofuels thing because the land is permanently damaged. Had they done the feasibility study in advance and notified everybody about how much would be consumed in the development of this biofuel and what the long-term impacts to the land would be, then they probably wouldn't have gone forward.
To your point, the economists that you probably have access to would look at things like the extractive cost that goes into developing batteries, for example, and how much carbon is liberated in the heavy mining industry to get x number of tonnes out of the ground, let's say. We would put a value on that, and then carry it through a kind of ecosystem. It's almost like the concept of the tiny plastic beads in cosmetics and how they bioaccumulate in the ocean.
This is a very tangible concept that I'm trying to give to something very complex, but you have a very large budget. If you're going to develop something, I would encourage this definition to be the prime focus of the study.
I would encourage you to engage really valuable industry experts and economists who can measure how much.... Maybe you make it on a scale of carbon liberation, because the real problem is how much carbon we are liberating in each process. Tag a value to it, track it really clearly, and have some sort of additive calculation before we proceed to develop things like biofuels or some of the more new-age technology.
I'm sorry I can't be more specific on that.