[brudgers]

There might as well be a book called "Fifty Shades of Green". The embodied energy of a product includes the amortization of the industrial infrastructure to produce it, to sustain the workers involved in its production, and that consumed by the logistics entailed in its acquisition.

In a model using solely exchange values, it is practical to cast fungible money directly into energy and thus treat the price of a physical good as roughly equivalent to its embodied energy. [it's a plausibly reasonable first approximation].

Again to a first approximation and absent detailed figures we're unlikely to obtain easily, we could say that the $300 ARM desktop carries $210 of additional embodied energy compared with the $90 recycled machine. That's about four years of a Pentium 4 idling 24/7. This assumes that an ARM consumes zero power at idle and that no energy is consumed in the disposal of a P4.

[jkot]

There are comparable ARM desktops for $100