Thermodynamic Footprint update

[GliderGuider]

I was recently informed that my concept of the "Thermodynamic Footprint" is identical in all respects to the concept of the "demotechnic index" developed in 1975 by Canadian ecologist and population activist Jack Vallentyne. He was the man behind the removal of phosphates from the world's detergents as well as the author of the book "Tragedy in Mouse Utopia" about the work of John Calhoun.

I hunted up an online paper about Vallentyne, and used his thinking to refine my own approach. The similarity in our work includes the reasoning behind the use of "technological energy" as a proxy for our impact on planetary systems; the use of the generated index as the "AT" term in numerical representations of the I=PAT equation; and using the index to permit the calculation of the "thermodynamic population equivalent" represented by our technological energy use. I find this convergence fascinating, given the differences in our backgrounds and that we arrived at the idea from completely different directions.

It turns out that my original estimates of the human Thermodynamic Footprint were very close to the numbers Vallentyne arrived at. for example, he calculated at a "D-index" for the USA of 95.7 in 1973. My corresponding TF figure for the same year is 92.1. Much of the difference is in the power generation we attributed to an "average" human body. Vallentyne assumed 113 watts, while I assume a slightly more generous 125W.

I will be updating my web article over the weekend, but I thought I'd give everyone here a sneak peek at the results. The world currently has a numeric population of about 7 billion. But when we take into account our use of technological energy, we are creating the equivalent environmental impact of a population of about 138 billion people - twenty times as many. This graph tells the tale:



The projections I show out to to 2040 are both linear. They describe a numeric population of 9 billion and a thermodynamic population equivalent of 190 billion, just 18 years from now. In the 75 years from 1965 to 2040, our population will have increased by about 6 billion humans, while our load on all planetary systems will have increased by a staggering 145 billion human equivalents. In other words, our added load on the planet will exceed our population increase by a factor of 25.

I really don't think passing out condoms, changing abortion laws and educating women is going to cut it in the face of this magnitude iof change. This is what has prompted me to set aside the traditional activist concern of "What can we do about this?" in favour of the deeper question, "What the fuck is really going on here?" The fact that the problem all seems to be centered around energy use is the reason the thermodynamic interpretation of our conundrum is so persuasive to me.

[phantom power]

1. I'd be interested in your thoughts on unit analysis for 'TF' and 'DT'

what are the relevant units, and what do they mean, etc

[GliderGuider]

3. The relevant unit might be the "Human Thermodynamic Equivalent".

What it means is another question.

After all, how do you draw together all the different impacts we're having on the various planetary systems into one single measure? How much is a .001 change in ocean pH worth compared to a loss of 1 cm of topsoil in Kansas or 10 meters of aquifer in Rajasthan, or the loss of 10 species of insects, or an increase of 10% in a country's autism rate?

It's more of a pedagogical tool than an analytical one, as far as I can tell.

Maybe we should just call the unit the "Fukitup"? We're running at 140 Gigafukitups today...

[phantom power]

5. I wonder if the unit should be wattage...

but in a slightly non-standard context.

For example: two going ways to look at the impacts you listed above are: (a) degradation of environmental services (i.e. the water cycle's ability to refresh aquifers, ability of topsoil to support human crops, or natural vegetation, etc) and (b) increasing the entropy of existing planetary systems (all the myriad ways that human activity excretes entropy into the environment -- fucking shit up)

I think that items in category (a) can all be baked down to embodied energy provided to the biosphere at a certain rate (so, watts). What answer one gets depends a lot on how one chooses to do the accounting, which is by no means an easy methodology question to answer, but generically speaking one can always express what's going on in units of energy/time.

For (b), entropy is the amount of unusable energy. So, again, there's a *rate* at which we increase that unusable energy: energy/time -- watts.

(a) can usefully be thought of as the various channels by which (b) is restored. All cycles being ultimately pumped by the sun. Human civilization's entropy-wattage is now exceeding the wattage of the environmental service channels.

at any rate, watts seems like the lynch-pin unit.

[GliderGuider]

6. Watts is the underlying unit.

However, that doesn't communicate the essential pedagogical point of the problem being the impact of energy-driven human activity on planetary systems. If we talk just about watts, in most people's minds the problem get reflexively reduced back to one of having insufficient energy, rather than the concept that we are already using too much energy - which is really the point as far as changing planetary systems are concerned.

I'd like to take the focus off energy, and shift it to the effects of human activity instead. As technically correct as the "watts unit" may be, I don't think it's the right unit to use for that purpose.

[The2ndWheel]

2. Our technology is just an extention of ourselves

Both on larger and smaller scales. We can build bigger, and manipulate smaller.

What do they say, a barrel of oil has the equivalent energy of 100 slaves?

It makes sense to me that the amount of energy we use is the issue, no so much what we use. We can see what we've been able to do with limited energy sources. Imagine the human imagination coupled with what we hope is limitless energy. I can't think of a way that that won't create even more complex problems than what we have today. Sure, we'll be able to do and accomplish much more, but that's the very reason the web gets more tangled.

I would think the long term goal is to basically have technology(and the energy required for it) to do all the work, thus freeing people to do whatever they want. That alone will cause plenty of issues. But then you factor into it that humans would then just be takers, without balancing the scale. It's give and take, not just one or the other.

There's always a balance. Predator and prey. There have to be more prey than predators. The smaller the species, the faster they usually do things, and the more of them there usually are. The larger the species, the slower they usually do things, and the less of them there usually are. That's the trade-off.

Humans seem to want the best of everything. We don't seem to want to give. Of course humans are limited in a limited world, and the only way we can break free from physical limits(for a short time at least) is to use ever increasing amounts of energy. Humans don't travel at 50mph, we can't fly, etc, etc. The give part of us doing that in the give and take relationship is our ever increasing environmental issues(because really, what else is left?). We try and fix those environmental issues by using more energy to come up with ways to fix it. It's a fun ride.

[CRH]

4. So, I guess what your thermal dynamic footprint analysis comes to,

is we need to use less, or compensate for using more, or go back to the population dynamic; which also has the potential to reduce the stress, or at very least explains the source, of the crisis. I still maintain, the source of crisis is from choice, and not an equation or inescapable path from our genetic behavior. Just my humanistic two cents.