A scientific measure of economic activity

I thought I was close to submitting a paper to Ecological Economics journal that would be convincing that the breaking of oxygen-oxygen bonds could serve as a quantifier of economic activity.  I had subheadings:

• Introduction
• Energy, force, work
• A Theory of Costs
• Not “Labor”, but “Work”
• Analysis of work at the level of atoms
• Not “Energy”, but comparison of electromagnetic forces

But as I used wind turbine as an example of how to count to 70Tj consumed in LCA, I realized that the 824 Tj produced was induced by moving magnets and that was a long way from oxygen bonds yet somehow of economic significance.

So now back to basics, looking at what is a “charge” and how is it related to electricity (fairly easy) and chemical bond (can’t see it in the literature, even for H₂).