The Economics of entropy

[Terry in Austin]

The current installment in a series by John Michal Greer. Insightful as ever, and definitely worth a read.

Some highlights:

...The Second Law of Thermodynamics: ...one way or another entropy’s price must be paid. ...In the halcyon days of industrialism, it was all too easy to forget that this vast abundance of {fossil-fuel} energy was a cosmic rarity.

...There are plenty of diffuse energy sources left, but raising them to concentrations that will allow them to power our current civilization would require huge amounts of additional energy to be sacrificed to entropy – and once you subtract the entropy costs of concentration from the modest energy supplies available to a deindustrial world, there isn’t much left. Try telling that to most people, though, and you’ll get a blank look, because we’ve lived with abundant concentrated energy for so long that very few people recognize just how rare it is in the broader picture.

...Economics, once again, feeds this blindness. Most economic models... explicitly reject the role of entropy in the primary economy, insisting that resources are always available by definition if you only invest enough labor and capital.

...With the end of the age of cheap abundant fossil fuels, the world faces a very substantial decrease in the amount of primary and secondary wealth in the world, and the notional wealth of the tertiary economy will have to lose value even faster to make up for that decline.

[lapfog_1]

1. Uh... economics people should not refer to physics.

and

E = mc(2)

There is plenty of energy available, more than enough for the human race. Getting it is another matter.

[NNadir]

3. Actually, if you actually read the scientific literature connected with energy production,

industrial energy production, you will find it replete with economic arguments, not arguments that are designed to assauge the denialist guilt of bourgeois brats who think they are going to be able to afford a Tesla electric car some day, but the arguments of engineers and other applied scientists who actually are responsible to producing stuff.

One of the most common words in this literature, which is generally ignored by people who won't hear what they don't want to hear, is exergy which is the maximal useful work extractable from a system.

Some people like to pretend that the second law of thermodynamics is subject to repeal by congress. Many of them write here.

[lapfog_1]

5. Again, the author is using the second Law of Thermodynamics

to make a point about energy production (and "concentrating" it).

The second law of thermodynamics is an expression of the universal principle of increasing entropy.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics

Or, I use to say to my college classrooms... "All of this pales in insignificance when compared to the impending heat death of the universe". Which I'm sure is a quote by someone else, but I can't find the attribution right this instant.

But the point I was making is that all of matter is energy, as we all know. Releasing that energy is difficult, BUT possible. We simply have to hold on (as a race with a functioning technology base) long enough to get there.

In other words, when those engineers are using economic models to describe what's possible, they neglect to take into account the "Eureka!" discovery moments. Moments that do, in fact, happen, but can't be predicted. When we DO have that moment with matter to energy conversion, we will no longer face either an energy crises or an environmental crises... in fact, our ability to control our environment will increase significantly.

For planning purposes, by all means, look at what is available today, or is possible with evolutionary progress. But to totally discount revolutionary discovery is also wrong.

[NNadir]

6. I don't think I need Wikipedia - or for that matter a college instructor - to explain the second law

I understand that law quite well.

I am also familiar with the history of technology and science.

In fact, there has been ONE, and only ONE, completely new form of energy discovered and commercialized in the last 500 years, and if you look, you will see that lots of people with very, very, very, very, very, very, very poor science educations despise it.

And yes, solar and wind have been around for more than 500 years, and they were, um, largely abandoned on the grounds of energy density considerations, somewhere in the early 19th century.

Personally, I am sick of the magical thinking that contends that "all we have to do is wait, and some really, really, really smart guy will discover something swell."

Smarter than whom?

Enrico Fermi, maybe?

There are close to 7 billion people on this planet, now consuming more than 500 exhales of energy each year. Of this, less than 10% of those exhales come climate change gas free forms of primary energy.

In the last 55 years since the discovery of the PVC cell - not really a "new" form of energy at all - there's been lots of hand waving and magical thinking, but of the 100 more than exhales of industrially sourced energy now consumed in this country, less than 0.1 of them are provided by solar energy, for instance.

How long should we stand around waiting for miracles. As long as the Catholic Church has waited for Jesus?

We now live in the golden age of physics, chemistry, and materials science, and we recognize from this that even with our formidiable knowledge it is not simple to act.

In spite of our great scientific capability, the fact is that stupidity rules the day.

[Strelnikov_]

2. In graphical form . . .

[NNadir]

4. Have a recommend. You could get more recommends, of course, by

starting a thread that is titled "The Wind Power Available in North Dakota Could Power The Entire Earth Plus Venus, Mars and Jupiter!". It wouldn't matter if you said "A study shows that the all of the inner planets could be powered by wind energy in North Dakota by 2090..."

But somehow I don't think you'll start that thread.