View source for Political Economy of Thermodynamics


=Discussion=

James Quilligan:

"The laws of thermodynamics, introduced fairly recently in history, created new possibilities for the utilization of energy. During the past two centuries, applications of the first and second laws of thermodynamics have increased social complexity, improved living standards, and increased social and environmental control, creating extraordinary benefits for civilization. These advances include technological efficiency, agricultural productivity, human longevity, mass literacy, the rise of democracies, and countless other gains. Yet most people are more aware of the practical impact of thermodynamics in their lives than its empirical significance in science. Since the sciences of thermodynamics conduct their research out of public view, our everyday assumptions about the relationship between energy and economics are sparse. Just as the dynamics of energy were a mystery to our ancestors, the links between energy and profits, interest rates, deficits, and debt are equally unclear. For these reasons, we survey the political economy of thermodynamics.


=== The first law of the conservation of energy ===

A variety of researchers postulated the first law of the conservation of energy. This group includes Galileo (1564–1642), Christian Huygens (1629–1695), Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), Isaac Newton (1643–1727), Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888), and William Rankin (1820–1872). All contributed to the principle that the total amount of energy and matter in the universe remains constant. This means that energy and matter may be converted from one form to another, but are never used up (Georgescu-Roegen 1971, 280). The law of conservation of energy became a primary influence during the first Industrial Revolution (1680–1740), when the idea of transforming energy into matter was applied in the creation of iron and material products for mass distribution. The machinery in factories was activated by coal combustion and steam pressure. This led to breakthrough innovations in chemistry, manufacturing, mining, metallurgy, transport, and agriculture, as inventors and industrialists learned to turn this productive power into large volumes of popular goods. Their hard, energy-driven work became highly profitable.

Business practitioners of the first law typically extol the freedom of individuals to make a living by creating goods that are useful for the rest of society. This logic, following inductive reasoning from the part to the whole, concludes that energy use must be expanded for the sake of material development and growth. Instead of directing the energy of human labor to the service of meeting people’s basic needs, however, the energy-value of resources is subsumed by the exchange-value of finance—the amount of money that individual demand will generate from the sale of products or through an investment in their production and distribution. Fundamentally, the greater the energy-powered production, the greater the financial return on investment (ROI). This is the basic application of the first law in economics. ROI incentivizes society to add value at every stage of the energy-value chain—from the stocks of extraction and production to the flows of transport, retailing, and consumption. Often called cost-benefit accounting, the widespread use of energy-produced ROI has culminated in the free market economy and has become international in scope.

Since the 1970s ROI has influenced many businesses to orient their investments, technology, and institutional change toward sustainable practices. By converting dense industrial production into lighter ecological solutions, companies frame sustainable development as a naturally adapting balance between the supply of nonrenewable resources and the demand for renewable resources. While this has led businesses to experiment with a wide variety of methodologies and metrics, there is a lack of reliability, comparability, and transparency in much of the data on green energy solutions. A major reason for these disparities is that ROI rarely accounts for the true costs of the thermodynamic pressure, heat waste, and labor involved in the manufacturing of green energy technologies or the production of green energy. Another reason is that financial value in the cost-benefit model of ROI is often calculated without internalizing the deficits and risks that arise from resource depletion, ecological overshoot, and social inequality. Thus, when companies are rewarded for their efficiency gains, higher asset prices, and lower capital expenses, it is generally because their bookkeeping has neglected the substantial costs of producing more energy to create new energy. This is why innovative technology and increased efficiency result in greater energy consumption and overproduction, rather than lowering their environmental impact per person (Jevons 1866).

The economic breakthroughs of the first law have led many in business to assume that increasing the production of energy through fossil fuels will result in a greater amount of solar energy (Thomson 2023). But this is a misinterpretation of the first law that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Matter and energy may be transformed into one another, but this pressure-induced change in physical form does not mean that matter or energy can reproduce themselves through a major net energy gain. Numerous proposals to turn the ancient biomass of dead plants and animals into affordable solar energy incorrectly surmise that these limited fossil fuels can be extracted and burned at a minimal cost to create solar power through the positive profit ratios of ROI. But a prime reason why producers struggle to create surplus energy from the energy needed to generate green technology is their persistent undervaluations of energy sources, energy extraction, and net energy gain (Jansen 2023).

Despite many important advances in the field since the 1970s, the amount of energy required to transform fossil fuels into alternative energy is still greater today than the amount of energy that is produced (Holechek et al. 2022).6 This has resulted in large energy imbalances, increasing ecological overshoot and delays in plans for developing renewable forms of energy (Union of Concerned Scientists, n.d.). Many entrepreneurs and investors remain confident that solutions will be found to lower the costs of producing renewable energy through nonrenewable energy. But the advocates of first law applications have yet to show how societies will make this crucial transition to a solar economy through ROI measures without compensating for the net loss of energy. In the meantime, there is mounting daily evidence of the overconsumption and social inequality that result from focusing on a narrow interpretation of the law of conservation of energy and matter (Syal 2022).


=== The second law: all systems seek to be in equilibrium ===

The second law of thermodynamics, formulated by Sadi Carnot (1796–1832), James Joule (1818–1889), Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888), William Thomson (1824–1907), Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), and Constantin Caratheodory (1873–1950), maintains that all systems seek to be in equilibrium. From this perspective, expending energy and matter is different than the conversion of these forms into equivalent states (Prigogine 1980, 5--12). The first law maintains that the quantity of energy and matter does not change during the pressure-driven transformation from one to the other; yet the second law demonstrates that the quality of energy and matter is significantly altered in this process through changes in temperature. When heat passes from hotter to colder objects, energy dissipates as it flows from a densely structured, warmer condition toward a less-ordered, cooler condition. So, as coal is burned up to produce steam power, the energy that is expended through temperature loss cannot be recovered and thus cannot be explained by the first law. The ignition of high temperatures in mass production was in wide use in the second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914). The heat that was depleted through the energy-matter conversions of various types of industrial products—in baking ceramics, forming metals, refining crude oil, developing chemicals, drying crops, and processing food—exemplified the energy diffusion and disorder postulated in the principle of entropy. Through the increase and decrease of heat required in the process of economic production, low-entropy energy and matter are ultimately consumed and dispersed as high-energy waste and pollution (C. A. S. Hall and Klitgaard 2018, 71).

In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) commented on the harsh effects and unceasing disparities of human existence. In justifying the need for centralized government, he observed that the quality of life of a person in the state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” unwittingly identifying the symptoms of entropy in nature and society (Hobbes 1651, pt. 1, ch. 13; Chakrabarty 2021, p. 217). Beginning in the late eighteenth century, when pollution, resource depletion, and human alienation began to increase through industrialization, some liberal governments proposed that the satisfaction of people’s basic needs and the alleviation of personal fear, illness, and disease should become part of governments’ guarantee of security, welfare, and justice for their citizens (Daly and Townsend 1993, 55--67).7 Largely because classical and neoclassical economics could not account for the dissipation of entropy in any form, the idea of maintaining a healthy balance of net energy while compensating for the social and natural imbalances resulting from entropic heat waste became a strong influence in several nineteenth- and twentieth-century governments. These include the United States, England, France, Germany, and Norway.

Proponents of this second law application in economics during the Progressive and world war eras sought to address the debilitating effects of unequal energy exchange, overconsumption, class society, inequality, and ecological destruction (Rifkin 2014, 117--206). Rather than rely on clergy or kings to provide for people’s earthly security as in prior eras, the second law of thermodynamics encouraged sovereign governments to foster complex inventions and policies for the public good, as well as social safety nets to protect people from the consequences of entropy. Many innovative products were chartered, developed, or subsidized by modern governments to relieve personal work and stress, provide convenience and entertainment, and foster human communication, understanding, and social betterment. Such inventions include the telegraph, electric motor, light bulb, radio, television, automobile, airplane, satellite, transistor, integrated circuit, computer, and information technology.

During the latter half of the twentieth century, many policymakers sought to counteract the effects of CO2 pollution and waste from climate change and its impact on social poverty, seeking to relieve the grim aftermath of entropy through public education, health care, economic and social opportunities, pensions, environmental protections, transportation infrastructure, and subsidies for energy businesses. But increasing the quality of life through governmental restrictions on the stocks and flows of energy—from its extraction, production, transport, sale, and distribution to its consumption, waste, and pollution—has had mixed results (Daly and Farley 2011, 51--57; Schiller 1980). Governmental policy measures for keeping entropy low, based on deductive reasoning from the whole to the part, conclude that collective heat waste must be minimized for the sake of personal material well-being. The problem is that governments have no systemic way of measuring many types of energy waste as empirical units on a broad scale. Thus, the second law of thermodynamics, which establishes that the entropy of matter and energy will increase through time, has yet to be administered through steady-state homogeneity or social welfare to address its heat effects, including CO2 emissions in the atmosphere, pesticides in the soil, microplastics in the oceans, and temperature stress in living beings (Speth 2008, 107--25).

In recent decades, the measures of energy return on energy investment (EROEI) and net energy gain (NEG) were developed.8 EROEI differs significantly from NEG. EROEI is the usable energy obtained from a source divided by the energy that is required to deliver this energy; and NEG is the energy that remains in surplus after enough energy has been used to extract or produce it.

With the rapid spread of industrial production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the first law of pressure conversion and the second law of heat waste have demonstrated that holding entropy as low as possible through a reasonable degree of social care or well-being has been a losing proposition for governments. Preventing harm in society requires more than offering utility or welfare to its citizens. Public taxes end up subsidizing businesses and bailing out banks for their ROI undervaluation of net energy losses through waste and pollution (Gilding, 184–93). As the costs for labor, products, transportation, infrastructure, social programs, and heat-wave safety rise with increasing entropic waste and disorder, the continuous expenditures for maintaining social order become excessively high. This reveals why government’s use of ROI in measuring fiscal redistribution policies, balance of payments deficits in trade, and long-term monetary debt are actually inverse forms of entropic accounting that signify the changes in temperature resulting from energy exchange.

Although governments have yet to discover fiscal tools for tracking energy flows beyond these inverted measures, EROEI and NEG could serve as guideposts for the future management of energy programs that estimate entropic increases over time, such as CO2 emissions, nitrogen loss, and the heat risk to species. For example, let’s examine EROEI as an indicator of the efficiency of oil production in the United States since 1930.

Consider that EROEI—the ratio between the amount of oil available from oil sources in the United States and the amount of oil that is expended to produce more oil—has been steadily declining for nearly a hundred years, during which time average land surface temperatures have increased. Also consider that to be cost-effective at 20 percent ROI, an EROEI no lower than 5:1 is necessary (C. A. S. Hall and Klitgaard 2018, 286, 402). The data in table 4 show that the efficiency of oil production is on a crash course with anthropogenic global warming. Calculations like EROEI are an incisive way of tracking energy conditions and planning ahead, but do not provide in-depth solutions."


=== The third law : there is no agreement among scientists ===

Since On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1809–1882), there have been numerous discussions about the need for a new law of thermodynamics alongside the first law of energy pressure in physics and the second law of energy temperature in chemistry (Allen, Tainter, and Hoekstra 2003, 328--34). While different versions of a third law have appeared in books and on the internet, there is no agreement among scientists. Some of the strongest third law arguments come from the field of biology, where researchers have challenged the idea that the regulation of energy intake through the cells of living systems is primarily a physical action. One leading proposal in this area is the constructal law developed by Adrian Bejan, which expresses the biophysical principle of self-ordering and self-sustenance within thermodynamic systems (Bejan and Lorente 2004). This proposition, no system persists in time without accessing energy, would account for the sustainability of organic life. While its independence from the first two laws is not fully accepted by physicists and chemists (Georgescu-Roegen 1966, 47--82), common sense suggests that living things have their own form of power. We take it for granted that trees, plants, animals, and people exhibit biological increases in energy throughout their lifetimes. Our ancestors also observed this organic growth, experimented with it, and used it to their advantage in agriculture, reproduction, family life, and personal health (Allen, Tainter, and Hoekstra 2003, 328--34). Nonetheless, a law that explains the metabolic energy inherent in biological life has yet to become an accepted part of a mainstream narrative in science and economics (Snyder 2023). Some of the historical foundations for a third law based in biology are summarized below.

Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) was an English cleric who pioneered ecological evolutionary theory by examining why a population increases faster than its food supply. His views remain controversial. In emphasizing the conservation benefits of smaller families, for example, Malthus may have been promoting population reduction through eugenics. In addition, he underestimated the ways in which the discovery of new lands and new types of energy, transportation, industrial production, and technology would impact the rates of food and population growth. Yet, by applying the principles of population biology that were used for plants and animals directly to human beings, Malthus anticipated the principle of logistic growth: how the size of a population continually modifies its ability to provide enough natural energy for its survival. Pierre François Verhulst (1804–1849) was also a forerunner of this potential third law. In bridging the different domains of organic growth and population needs within a closed system of limited resources, Verhulst was the first to develop a measure of carrying capacity. His logistic growth curve, also known as the Verhulst curve, gave mathematical credence to Malthus’s intuition of a dynamic relationship that distinguishes logistic from exponential growth.

Growth begins when a population is small and resources are abundant. As growth increases more rapidly and the population enlarges, the population growth rate becomes exponential. When population size nears the capacity of its environment to sustain it, the competition for resources intensifies and the growth rate slows. Eventually, the population levels off as resources become more limited and growth decreases to zero, indicating a stable population size at its carrying capacity. Thus, in determining a rate of sustainable yield for the natural energy that is consumed by living species, including human beings, the logistic growth curve demonstrates how units of measure from differing domains of analysis can be used to calculate the dynamic balance between the resources available in a habitat and the needs of its population for those resources. For example, the (first law) energy yield of soil within an area could be viewed in relation to the (second law) caloric needs of the population in that same area, indicating the dynamic metabolism (and possible third law) that exists between living bodies and the environment in which they live.

Other proponents of a third law, like Walther Nernst (1864–1941), recognized that because the first two laws constitute an isolated system, any energy exchange between them is bounded or limited. This implies that a third force is at work within bounded ecosystems, a principle that earlier researchers called negentropy. This term means that organisms like insects, animals, or humans, despite their exposure to steadily declining temperatures that result in material waste and disorder, continue to create and maintain highly ordered internal structures. Luigi Fantappie (1901–1956) explained why this third law of negentropy is not a “negation” of entropy. Just as Earth adheres to the first law of energy pressure and the second law of energy temperature, the third law establishes the independent conditions for organic growth, enabling the material elements of ecosystems to cohere by utilizing the energy that is available to them. Fantappie called this syntropy—the intentionality of living things to self-organize and sustain themselves (Prigogine 1980, 77--90). This self-producing quality of biological life exhibits the principle that no living system is without energy. All organisms concentrate radiant energy within their bodies to build resistance to energy dissipation, insulating them from the physical outcomes of entropy and transforming this specific form of sunlight into unique patterns of energy (T-W-Fiennes 1976, 43--56). For example, the natural self-ordering created through photosynthesis occurs through the absorption of solar energy and carbon dioxide by plants and trees, which is transferred indirectly to animals, humans, and other living organisms that consume the biomass of vegetation. This is how emergent, self-organizing systems work in syntropy with the second law that all material things move randomly toward waste and disorder. If a self-organizing physical being were not governed as much by syntropic as entropic qualities, the organism would not live for as long as it does (Prigogine 1980, 103--28).

Mathematical formulas for a third law were further explored by Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), Raymond Pearl (1879–1940), and Lowell Reed (1886–1966) as biophysical activities that can be measured through time. They recognized that the cells and organisms of life-forms are in a long-term process of exchanging energy and matter with their habitats, consuming and dissipating their own forms of entropic waste back into the local environment. This concept was further developed by Alfred J. Lotka (1880–1949), who recognized that the two laws of thermodynamics by themselves could not account for the rate at which energy is used within organisms. Calling this the maximum power principle, Lotka explained that the self-regulation of living things involved more than energy pressure and changes in temperature. He demonstrated how the measures of time and power could be used to track the metabolic exchange between the natural energy resources available in an ecosystem and the physiological needs of its population.

In 1953 brothers Eugene Odum (1913–2002) and Howard Odum (1924–2002) examined these biophysical processes in The Fundamentals of Ecology (Odum and Barrett 2005). Elaborating on Latka’s maximum power principle, Howard Odum developed an optimum power principle based on useful energy per unit of time. This focused on the calculation of transformity, the rate of available energy of one kind that is needed to obtain a specific rate of energy output of a different kind—for example, the transformation of sunlight into oil, or oil into electricity, or electricity into digital information. Odum demonstrated that besides energy production and energy waste, every living organism exhibits a rate of metabolic transformation that self-organizes the sustainability of its system. Thus, for a species to endure, it requires the embedded power or quality of useful energy to sustain it over time. This variable of energy yield is used in the formula of carrying capacity, where K (Kapazitätsgrenze) is the capacity limit of the system. Hence, carrying capacity is the optimal rate and efficiency that will allow a species to meet its needs through the specific yield of an energy resource in a bounded area per unit of time.

Odum’s work marked a significant turn in the history of carrying capacity as a practical method of computation. First applied in the shipping industry during the eighteenth century, measures for carrying capacity were then used in the 1870s to determine the mass of meat that pack animals could transport, and in the 1880s to estimate the amount of livestock that could be supported within a specific area of land (Sayre 2008, 122). During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, new applications for carrying capacity were introduced in complexity science, demography, agriculture, wildlife and range management, biology, anthropology, engineering, and other fields. Following the 1987 Brundtland Commission report, Our Common Future, the field of biophysical economics emerged to study the transformations of natural systems in producing energy and material flows and generating wealth. Carrying capacity has found an audience with social and ecological activists and policymakers who are interested in measuring the metabolic balance of natural resources and the species that depend upon them. Carrying capacity has had its share of critics, but recent innovations in the methodologies and measures of carrying capacity have broadened its range and made the formula, its data, and its applications more accurate.9


Perhaps civilization can learn its way forward into a culture of biophysical economics by using the economic applications in table 5 for the governance of Earth’s energy systems, where

* Physical energy transfers gradually convert the energy of a periphery (food, wood, or oil) into the matter in a core (goods, buildings, infrastructure), as measured by ROI

* Chemical heat transfers from core to periphery with a boost, generates heat waste, and degrades infrastructure and society in both areas, as measured by NEG and EROEI

* Biological transfers of embodied sunlight within a bounded ecosystem take place adjacent to, but in syntropy with, portions of the core and periphery, as measured by K.


It appears that the renewal of energy-value will take place only when a framework for energy pressure conversion and entropic heat waste is coalesced within a framework of biophysical metabolism. Supervising these processes on a planetary and a regional basis is essential. In the concluding sections, we propose planetary negotiations for the political regionalization of energy and a transregional campaign for the ecological and economic regeneration of energy resources."

(https://online.ucpress.edu/gp/article/5/1/122343/203074/Who-Will-Pay-Back-the-Earth-Revaluing-Net-Energy)


=Source=

See: [[Impact of the Center-Periphery Model for Net Energy in the Rise and Fall of Civilizations]]


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