At a late winter lecture to a classroom full of business students, Alberta energy analyst and author Peter Tertzakian touched on a question that industry leaders, politicians, eco-crusaders and even regular folks are increasingly grappling with. What is the socially optimum energy mix?

If that sounds like economist-speak, it is. A socially optimum allocation would be the amount of energy that would reflect its costs – both of production, which are obvious, and of its byproducts or externalities, which are not so obvious.

Pollution is the most regularly cited “negative externality” but its costs are hard to quantify. The same people who argue that industry does not pay the full costs of that production – environmental degradation being a huge part of that – generally resent having a value put on a sunset, even though factory smoke obscuring it would deprive nearby residents of that exact value.

It is hard to explain to people that things that are priceless can become things that are valueless if they are not quantified. But getting these types of messages across are the problems natural resource economists face at dinner parties. These are not things that are contemplated by people as they drive to work spewing exhaust into the faces of cyclists.

They may not be contemplating this nasty reality, but both the driver and the cyclist involved are making choices that influence the social energy mix and its proximity to the optimum.

The question becomes who has the most profound influence? Is it the driver, churning along in his SUV, his fuel use determined by his desire for the comfort of enjoying a constant temperature and leg room plus the status of having the nicest vehicle in the parking lot? Is it the cyclist, depending on his plastic helmet to stay alive and his bicycle, built with various petroleum byproducts, to transport him from point A to point B along roads that remind us, with their tarry summer smell, of the materials from which they are made?

Perhaps most of the blame for this dilemma can be laid at the feet of the economist, who, when absent from dinner parties, is constructing policies based on incomplete models and inaccurate predictions (what predictions are truly accurate?) which determine what fuel should be favored over another – if, of course, permitted by the political climate.

It is a complex thought experiment to try to resolve the interesting issue of who exactly is responsible for how we consume and produce energy.

This is the type of issue that Tertzakian tells me he explores in his newest book, Energy Obesity, which is scheduled for publication this summer. His 2006 book, A Thousand Barrels a Second, flew off the shelves by the modest standards of energy economics literature. It provided some of the foundation for what the economist is talking about now.

However, from the author’s description of Energy Obesity’s premise, the new book definitely takes a step back from his initial dramatic conclusion that we are headed into a shock that will make our current energy mix and consumption levels unsustainable.

That initial warning seemed reasonable when energy prices were skyrocketing at a dizzying pace and in seeming defiance of well-understood laws of supply and demand. Now it is less so.

So then, says Tertzakian, maybe it won’t be a price shock or a geopolitical reality that will force us to change our consumption patterns. Maybe we just need to be proactive about it and start thinking about an optimal social energy mix by balancing its three main dimensions: continuing prosperity, energy security and sustainability.

The need for a change is driven by a discomforting fact. We are energy obese, he says, setting up a string of metaphors he uses to get his point across. Our diet is the energy mix we consume and our appetite is our level of consumption. Both are integral to our health.

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