  In this paper we study the transverse energy spectrum for the Drell-Yan
process. The transverse energy is measured within the central region defined by
a (pseudo-) rapidity cutoff. Soft-collinear effective theory (SCET) is used to
factorize the cross section and resum large logarithms of the rapidity cutoff
and ratios of widely separated scales that appear in the fixed order result. We
develop a framework which can smoothly interpolate between various regions of
the spectrum and eventually match onto the fixed order result. This way a
reliable calculation is obtained for the contribution of the initial state
radiation to the measurement. By comparing our result for Drell-Yan against
Pythia we obtain a simple model that describes the contribution from
multiparton interactions (MPI). A model with little or no dependence on the
primary process gives results in agreement with the simulation. Based on this
observation we propose MPI insensitive measurements. These observables are
insensitive to the MPI contributions as implemented in Pythia and we compare
against the purely perturbative result obtained with the standard collinear
factorization.
