The hidden cost of decarbonising Canadian buildings : comparing the embodied suffering of air-source heat pumps and natural gas furnaces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the hidden social inequities (termed embodied suffering) within the supply chains of building heating technologies in Canada. Using a Social Life-Cycle Assessment (S-LCA), this dissertation compares an air-source heat pump (a decarbonisation strategy) with a natural gas furnace (business-as-usual strategy). The research addresses whether ethical decarbonisation is being pursued and discusses the trade-offs between greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions and embodied suffering in supply chains. This dissertation applies a Reference Scale S-LCA across a cradle-to-grave system boundary, using generic data to identify social hotspots along life-cycle stages: extraction, manufacturing and assembly, construction and use, and end-of-life. The dissertation examines the S-LCA results against energy justice types (distributional, procedural, recognitional, restorative, intergenerational, and cosmopolitan). The S-LCA reveals that Canadian buildings are decarbonising more ethically, as natural gas furnaces have more embodied suffering hotspots than air-source heat pumps. However, the ethical advantages of air-source heat pumps are not absolute; embodied suffering remains present across both technologies. For the Raw Material stage, China, India, and Chile are the key hotspots for air-source heat pumps, while China and India are the key hotspots for natural gas furnaces. For the Manufacturing and Assembly stage, China and Sweden are the key hotspots for air-source heat pumps while China, France, Malaysia, United Arab Emirates, United States of America, Italy, Japan, and Germany are the key hotspots for natural gas furnaces. Under the Construction and Use stage, air-source heat pumps have more hotspots than natural gas furnaces. Under the End-of-Life stage, China, India, Thailand, and Vietnam are key hotspots for both air-source heat pumps and furnaces. The dissertation concludes that current decarbonisation efforts risk reinforcing global inequities via colonialism and extractivism. Recommendations to rectify this include supply chain transparency and ethical procurement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".