Estimating environmental impacts based on costs

When something is expensive, there's a good chance it takes a lot of energy, materials, or labor to make.

This is especially important when considering potential green solutions. It's tempting to assume that money/capitalism is the only thing holding an idea back, but we should try to test that empirically if we can, by looking at material conditions.

Unfortunately, good data is hard to come by. When in doubt, we can at least do a rough estimate of an idea's environmental impact, by looking at its cost.

Electronics

For green tech that involves a lot of computer chips, sensors, etc - we could probably multiply their costs by some general average energy intensity^{[RESEARCH needed]}, minerals intensity(...)( for example, semiconductors can probably be assumed to contain (on average) a particular proportion of silicon, copper, cobalt, PGMs, etc )^{[RESEARCH needed]}, and labor intensity(...)( not technically an environmental impact, but worth knowing nonetheless )^{[RESEARCH needed]}.

This section needs research to obtain useful numbers.