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Energy systems are currently designed focusing only on minimizing their cost or, at most, including limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, electricity technologies performing well in global warming potential might not necessarily behave equally well across other sustainability criteria. Hence, policies focused solely on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions could potentially resolve one problem (i.e., climate change) by creating another, thereby leading to burden-shifting. Here, the occurrence and severity of burden-shifting in energy systems design are both investigated through the application of a novel approach integrating multi-objective optimization, life cycle assessment and multivariate regression based on elasticities. Environmental impacts are classified into three categories: no burden-shifting, total burden-shifting and partial burden-shifting, providing for the latter two a measure of their severity. Due to inherent trade-offs in the life cycle performance of technologies, discussed in detail in this work, the Paris Agreement 2 °C targets would lead to burden-shifting in the United States (total or partial) in up to eight environmental impacts. On the other hand, stringent carbon emissions reductions in line with the 1.5 °C targets can lead to burden-shifting in three environmental impacts. Indeed, in both cases undesirable increases in some damage categories of up to 1.64% for every percentage increase in cost can take place as a result of more stringent limits on greenhouse gas emissions compared to the least cost solution. Overall, this work aims to foster fruitful discussions on how to generate energy within the Earth's ecological capacity by expanding the analysis beyond climate change. • Policies focused solely on climate change could worsen other life cycle impacts. • A framework is developed to assess trade-offs between environmental metrics. • Five sub-categories of burden-shifting across life cycle impacts are found. • 2 °C emissions mitigation pathways could induce burden-shifting in eight impacts. • 1.5 °C emissions mitigation pathways could induce burden-shifting in three impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We incorporate life cycle impacts to energy systems models via monetization. • The cost of leaving the Paris Agreement for the US is 1103 billion USD 2013 in 2030. • Further economic savings could be realized by minimizing life cycle impacts. • Wind onshore is critical for minimizing all environmental impacts concurrently. • The Paris Agreement could induce burden-shifting between sustainability criteria. Current energy systems models focus on cost minimization with a bound on some greenhouse gas emissions. This limited environmental scope can lead to mixes that are not consistent with our sustainable development. To circumvent this limitation, we here make use of the concept of monetization and life cycle assessment to quantify the indirect costs of electricity generation in the design of energy systems. Applying our approach to the United States, we found that the indirect costs of electricity generation could be reduced by as much as 63% by meeting the Paris Agreement. Consequently, the total opportunity cost (i.e., direct and indirect costs) of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and continuing with the current mix would be as high as 1103 ± 206 billion USD 2013 in 2030 (i.e., 6% of the United States gross domestic product in 2017). By optimizing the direct and indirect costs of electricity generation concurrently, we found an optimal ecological solution that attains total economic savings compared to the Paris Agreement mix of as much as 373 ± 164 billion USD 2013 in 2030. Our work highlights the need to extend the environmental policies that regulate energy systems beyond the direct greenhouse emissions to consider other critical environmental criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]