By Murray Grimwood*
The biggest problem facing Infrastructure Minister Bishop (and our government and ourselves) is Entropy; known to scientists, but little-known and even less understood in the wider community.
Entropy is the one-way progression from compact energy to dispersed energy, every time work is done.
Entropy is the trend from order to disorder. It is burning, rust, corrosion, failure, waste. It is reflected in aging and depreciation; it is a contributor to inflation. We ignore it at our peril.
This simple diagram I have put up before, but it sets the scene and the scene is immutable:
The flow is strictly one-way across that diagram - from left to right - with the (in practice, partial) exception of recycled materials. An example is a piece of firewood; years of solar energy (sun on tree), carbon-stored, which can be turned into heat energy which in turn can be used to do work (cook food, turn a steam-engine). The result is a pile of ash, some released gases, and a lot of low-grade heat. Energy cannot be destroyed, but it’s compactness is reduced every time work is done; it would take more energy to reassemble the ash and gases into firewood (reconstituting the carbon bonds), than the re-burning of it would return. Which is why it is never done and never will be.
In energy terms, this is the Second Law of Thermodynamics; the end result being unusable low-grade heat (another example is a hot cup of coffee in a closed room; the cup will always cool, leaving the room very slightly warmer. But it would take more energy to scoop that room-heat back into the cup, than the energy which had left the cup).
In Systems terms, entropy is degradation; our species turned the ‘Fertile Crescent’ into saline desert, even without the aid of fossil energy (no doubt there were Bishop-types in the late stages of the Sumer empire too; history fails to name them). The only redress to entropy is the application of compact, high-quality energy (in Earth’s case, sunlight); to grow more plants, accrue more stored energy-stock. In material terms, enough energy applied to recycling/reconstitution, could theoretically go close to giving us 100% material circularity. In reality, we are creating material entropy (waste) faster than we can apply even the amount of energy currently available, to it. The same applies to carbon sequestration; letting the sun build trees is partially human-effort-free, albeit a temporary move. All other approaches (gathering CO2 from the atmosphere, burying it) take too much energy to scale, ever.
Given that the only input (to our closed System, otherwise known as a ‘Bounded’ System) is solar energy, the long-term limitation to work do-able by our species has just been defined; the amount of real-time solar energy we can commandeer. Also, obviously, we need to release the same amount of (low grade heat) energy into space; more and the planet would cool; less and it would heat up. That solar input is not all up for grabs; all of it is doing something now; the net result of all that something is the liveable habitat we have evolved in. Commandeering solar energy falling on ‘wasted spaces’ like deserts, is fine in theory; in practice it requires huge material input, to build (and maintain) the required capture, transmission and storage infrastructure.
We have thrown a spanner into the above diagram by choosing to pursue the exponential growth of extraction/production/consumption/excretion. Of stuff; therefore of material throughput; therefore of energy use. Time is the crucial factor; we chose to extract exponentially more, burn exponentially more, consume exponentially more, create exponentially more waste. It takes no Einstein to see that those exponentially-up graphs cross the exponentially-down depletion/degradation ones, at some inevitable point.
Our increasingly inadequate accounting measure – money, a debt-issued token, presumed redeemable using future energy and materials – has had to be modified to accommodate entropy, albeit remotely. Depreciation is a cover-word for aging, degrading, deteriorating. Inflation is a cover-word for ‘less energy and/or less materials available, per issued ‘dollar’. Even addressing both, will not solve the overarching dilemma; the failure being traceable to the misunderstood word ‘funding’. As we can see from the diagram, we don’t ‘fund’ anything; we apportion energy and materials to a proposal. It they aren’t available; the proposal won’t happen – not even at thrice the price! Nor do we ‘invest’, in terms of inputting anything; we merely put a foot in the door of those two incoming arrows, demanding a piece of the action.
The compounding of multiple forms of entropy, creates further problems. We gather the most concentrated materials – and energy stocks – first (presumably a trait born of ecological competition; if I don’t grab the best, someone/something else will). The result is that not only are the remaining material-stocks ever-more dispersed, so too are the energy-stocks with which we extract/mine/collate them. Compounding that trend, is our tendency to use the best sites first. Thus every next site is further away, less convenient, colder, hotter, windier; always something less easy to mitigate (a Bishop headwind of hurricane magnitude). Mitigation therefore takes ever-more energy, for instance to get the energy which smelts the steel which took more energy to extract, to build the cars which now commute from further away, demanding more roading from less-compact sources of bitumen and more-distant quarries. Meaning that all suburban sprawl is not equal… This is the hard physical fact which tells us that Bishop is on (back on?) the wrong track. A graph of an extraction-based activity, will initially show increasing improvements/returns, but they will all reverse over time; this is NEVER anticipated in Economics-thinking, even though (see links below) many have tried to ‘apply’ the Second Law to the ‘dismal science’.
Our current impasse is that we have not just approached maintainable planetary throughput limits; we’ve overshot them. Getting back to a level of energy/material throughput which allows the parrying of entropy (which allows enough solar-energy ingestion to offset our dissipative activities, real-time) WILL happen, because that Second Law is immutable. Whether we go there willingly, or in nature-forced chaos? is the 64,000-Joule question.
Vaguely-seen, the trend to ‘renewable energy’, is a partial acknowledgement of the problem, but ‘renewables’ (more accurately described as rebuildables) are more entropic (less compact) than the fossil energy we currently squander. Thus our always-pushing-the-margin ‘economy’ balks whenever it tries to run on them; confusing ‘cheaper’ with ‘more energy returned for the energy we invest’. If energy – via the doing of work – underwrites money, then it is blindingly obvious that a less-compact energy can never be ‘cheaper’; more efficiently produced and/or more efficiently utilised as it scales (until it comes up against hard thermodynamic limits) yes, ‘cheaper’ in overall terms, no.
The problem is now defined; not only do we make bets on future energy/material supplies without ascertaining how much of either will be available; we make no-or-inadequate physical allowance for degradation/decay/waste/recycling. This shows up in oblique ways; rail failures; grid failures; water-system failures; longer waiting-times; water-pollution; land-pollution; ocean-pollution; extinctions; biodiversity-reduction; deferred maintenance; lack of resilience, exponentially-increasing local-body rates, increasing (and increasingly unrepayable) debt.
Thus, ‘getting back on track’ was already a physical impossibility, before this lot campaigned their way to power with their (innocently ignorant? or calculatedly false?) promise. Labour did better (but still woefully short of what is needed) with their ‘wellbeing’ budget concept, indeed much of the world’s leadership looked on, hoping to be led out of the pending impasse. Sadly, that impetus recoiled before it even began; confused by incorrect understandings of ‘poverty’, wealth, and energy/materials/physics/ecology.
It is no surprise that the current government are proposing incoherent policy; essentially lobby-induced rape of the remaining unplundered physical environment. Their problem, though, is that they cannot transcend the Laws of Physics – no matter how hard some pray that things may be otherwise. Growth – even partial growth beyond the possibility of further ‘doublings’ – gets ever-harder within a Bounded System (within a physically-defined arena). The odds are that a jarring event - like Cyclone Gabrielle or escalating war(s) over diminishing resource-stocks, locally requiring materials and energy to address - will happen in this parliamentary term. It is guaranteed that entropy will not sleep; three years from now, every building, every pipe, every pole, every wire, every dam, every bridge, every road – will be three years older. The Infrastructure Commission is beginning to catch on: but they omit the point that this proportion is changing; true maintenance demands (not costs!) will approach 100%, and – inexorably - go beyond. At which point triage will be the only game in town…
Even the complete removal of ‘red tape’, cannot solve the entropy problem, at this level of planetary over-extraction. There will be an echelon of believers – in future invention/technological improvement, in transgressing the Second Law – who will have to be bypassed by the next leadership (cometh the time; exit-eth the obsolete). The majority of this – and the last - government seem to be cranially-flawed in this regard; in turn – given that we do the voting - that suggests we have some public learning to do.
Some folk have tried to apply entropy to economics (see links below). The results are comical; the ‘temperature of a share-market’? Spare me. They would have been better using the above diagram, and ascertaining stocks (more important, in the long game, than flows). Ironically, the flow from energy (from reality?) to money is one-way, just like the entropic traverse of energy; money needs energy to underwrite it, the reverse is untrue. One glance at those two arrows coming into the box, verifies this, begging the question: Whither debt, per time?
Clearly, we need a different accounting-measure. For a token to be a ‘store of wealth’, there obviously has to be a future supply of energy and materials, commensurate with the holder’s expectation. ‘Time’ and ‘store’ are the critical factors; most of us have lived through several ‘readjustments’ when herd optimism ignored real underwrite (’87 comes to mind, and I’m sure some who are reading this got their fingers burned then but are still laying forward bets; we are slow learners).
The physics of all this is simple; there are maintainable levels of throughput (both input arrows, factoring in recycling percentages) beyond which we could only go temporarily, thanks to drawing down pre-existing resource stocks (including finite energy stocks; oil, coal, gas, firewood, uranium etc.). A globally-maintainable throughput rate, is far below our current level. Physics is relatively dispassionate as to how we divvy things up; military might (ironically a major energy-requirer) gets you a front seat, and we have been lucky enough to have been in the front row for the last 200 years. Others will challenge. Within nations, rentier vs renter has seen widening gaps between front and back seating; spillover resentment is why Trump, why Brexit, why polarization.
Given that the volume of those incoming arrows will inexorably reduce; per-head access is the key to both reducing competition (reducing conflict) and guaranteeing real personal wealth. Population is therefore one of two predominant factors; the other being preferred consumption-rates. Growth, therefore, is an invalid target; entropy overrules, as the ruins of every prior civilization demonstrate (they all had now-invalid presumed-store-of-future-wealth proxies too). We will see more decisions being made as a result of it, albeit many will be made unwittingly; triage is likely to be the common denominator, as per ferry-replacement cancellations.
Entropy can be – partially and diminishingly – parried by technology, but never overcome by it; the Second Law is immutable. The sooner we factor entropy into our accounting system, the better; the system we are running currently, resembles the excrement of a male bovine. And is destined to last about as long. As for urging the growth of cities, either out or up, Minister Bishop should spend an hour watching an Auckland arterial, and imagine it beyond fossil energy; an inevitability well within the design-life of almost everything he sees. He should ask how many cities of over 1 million managed to exist – let alone thrive – before fossil energy? (The answer is: none). And he should then ask: What format do we need to design – and build while we still have the energy – to fit the future?
Because the future sure as hell won’t resemble the past; Entropy and the Second Law tell us so.
"Useful links":
https://drum.lib.umd.edu/items/506e53e2-66e1-463d-96d5-92991928b29d
https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/12/5223
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211467X1830021X
https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/19/4/163
https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/11/4909
https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/26/1/24
https://www.academia.edu/35765552/Applications_of_Entropy_in_Finance_A_Review
*Murray Grimwood comments on interest.co.nz as powerdownkiwi.
35 Comments
"Given that the only input is solar energy, the long-term limitation to work do-able by our species has just been defined;" - only if one's definition excludes nuclear energy.
“Fundamentally, in light-water reactors, out of the uranium we dig out of the ground, we use a half a percent of the energy that’s in the uranium that’s dug out of the ground,” Gehin told CNBC in a phone interview. “You can get a large fraction of that energy if you were to recycle the fuel through fast reactors.
...There is enough energy in the nuclear waste in the United States to power the entire country for 100 years, and doing so could help solve the thorny and politically fraught problem of managing spent nuclear waste.
That’s according to Jess C. Gehin, an associate laboratory director at Idaho National Laboratory, one of the government’s premier energy research labs.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/02/nuclear-waste-us-could-power-the-us-for…
- Had Germany spent $580 billion on nuclear instead of renewables, and the fossil plant upgrades and grid expansions they require, it would have had enough energy to both replace all fossil fuels and biomass in its electricity sector and replace all of the petroleum it uses for cars and light trucks.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/09/11/had-they-b…
profile,
My nuclear expertise in zero, but I found an article on what was happening in Ontario rather interesting. It was headed; 'How Ontario can transform nuclear 'waste' into 5000 years of noncarbon energy'. It was written by Peter Ottensmeyer, emeritus professor at the University of Toronto. One paragraph was as follows: Reactors like the small ARC-100 or larger GE-Hitachi PRISM or TerraPower NATRIUM, coupled with recycling of used fuel by electrorefining, would turn all of our current radioactive 'waste' into fuel.
This is an interesting read.
That's an underestimate. Only about 0.7% of Uranium is fissile U235. However if you use a breeder reactor you can convert the other 99% of Uranium (U238) into Pu239 which obviously is fissile and can be used in a reactor. You can also convert more abundant Thorium into U238 in a breeder reactor (this is different to a thorium reactor which is a more interesting technology.) That's all before you get into reprocessing nuclear fuels. We will never want for energy in that regard basically.
I think though the future of humanity will be a much smaller population, 8bn people is an ecological disaster and the realistic target should be a fraction of that. What will be interesting is which regions depopulate fastest.
The argument presented above hijacks the second law of thermodynamics to assume that all input of any sort degrades to rubbish.
It quotes the aging of human life as being a consequence of the second law, which is patently ridiculous, and ignores the creative enterprises of a life, including producing offspring, art, literature, ideas and inventions (to name a few), which far exceed the energy of the life that created them.
Applying the second law to the totality of human endeavour, civilisation, and culture is absurd.
It quotes the aging of human life as being a consequence of the second law, which is patently ridiculous,
?! Humans are exempt from the physical laws of the universe?!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics#Living_organisms
https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/10/2/100
I think your overlooking that all of those 'creations' take energy and have all flourished whilst we burnt up all the easy stuff - due to the leisure time this energy burn gave us.
If you want any real time evidence just ask yourself - why the state of aggression between the powers at present? Energy scarcity perhaps?
Murray is onto it. The denialism is expected as it's scary stuff.
In a small Petri dish within the confines of a laboratory, a population of bacteria flourished under the watchful gaze of scientists. With each passing moment, the bacteria's numbers doubled, a relentless cycle of growth that unfolded every 20 minutes. At their peak, after countless doublings, the bacterial civilization stood at the pinnacle of its exponential rise, boasting a vast empire within the limited expanse of their world.
As the bacteria reveled in their boundless expansion, they became intoxicated by their perceived might and invincibility. Their once-humble colonies had burgeoned into sprawling metropolises, their intricate networks weaving a tapestry of dominance across the Petri dish. United in their belief of eternal abundance, they proclaimed themselves the masters of their domain, blind to the impending threat lurking on the horizon.
However, with their rapid proliferation came the rapid depletion of vital resources. The limited space and finite nourishment within the Petri dish could not sustain the insatiable appetite of the burgeoning population. Despite the warnings of the prescient few among them, the majority dismissed any notion of scarcity, convinced of their infallibility and supremacy.
As the last doubling approached, the strains of exponential growth pushed the bacterial civilization to its breaking point. The once-prosperous colonies now found themselves competing fiercely for dwindling resources, their grandeur giving way to desperation and conflict. The stark reality of their overreach dawned upon them, a harsh awakening to the consequences of unchecked expansion and arrogance.
In a swift and merciless turn of events, the once-mighty bacterial civilization collapsed under the weight of its own hubris. The Petri dish, once teeming with life and activity, now lay silent and barren, a poignant testament to the folly of unrestrained growth and the dangers of assuming limitless power.
As the scientists watched this all unfold, they chuckled amongst themselves and condescendingly agreed that bacteria lacked wisdom.
Meanwhile, as the scientists chuckled, some intrepid bacteria hitched a ride on a mosquito and made their way to the blood stream of a human whereupon they embarked on a long journey of replication and mutation to become the ultimate masters of mankind by exploiting this hapless primate's gut to brain pathways.
Later, some even managed to become frozen on a comet after a probe crashed onto its surface and eventually seeded other worlds throughout the galaxy where all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures evolved.
The argument above applies the second law to the totality of Earth's energy systems, and concludes that entropy could be reached in the foreseeable future. This is a nonsense.
Part of the fallacy is that the only energy source is incoming solar. Commentators above have pointed out that this ignores nuclear fission. It also ignores the extraordinary potential of wind, tide, geothermal, hydroelectric, natural hydrogen, nuclear fusion, high-efficiency solar, and in the naughty corner, oil, gas and coal. There are certainly other new energy sources to be discovered and developed, for example utilising the geomagnetic field for power generation, off-planet solar, asteroid mining, etc.
We are not going to run out of energy and attain entropy any time in the next several billion years. The cost of production is already decreasing rapidly for solar, and new more efficient materials and methods are continually being discovered and developed.
The quest for solutions to global warming, environmental damage, mitigation, infrastructure requirements, etc. are challenges to the human spirit of inventiveness, initiative and enterprise. It is our nature to rise to such challenges and overcome.
Some may respond by retiring to the bush and living like a Hobbit. That is of course their right, but expecting all others to follow suit is .... (choose your adjective here).
Always learn something more - always makes me think more. Like all the analogies - and the 'ferry' as a case study in triage.
The conflict that you always bring to top of mind is the question: should we just borrow more tokens 'til the cows come home' whilst they are available to us?
Great thought-provoking article as ever!
Kate,
I have followed PDK's posts for some years. I accept the Second law and find some of the comments made here ridiculous and I accept that we will in due course exhaust the earth's reserves of fossil fuels. What i find much harder to accept are his deterministic views of the future. he believes that societal collapse is inevitable and sooner rather than later-2050 perhaps? In his view the earth's true capacity is under 2 billion inhabitants. I have never seen him admit of the possibility of error and i cannot accept that.
If he is correct, then well within my grandchildren's life, then as Thomas Hobbes wrote; "and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" that will be their fate. Is that inevitable? I don't believe so. I don't know what earth's actual carrying capacity is and neither does PDK.
I certainly accept that the transition to a lower carbon economy will be much more difficult than is portrayed and that future generations may well have to in effect, do less with less, but would that be such a bad thing? We are incredibly wasteful.
I asked Copilot the following question: "Should I worry about the second law of thermodynamics?"
There is no need to worry about the second law of thermodynamics, as it is a fundamental law of nature that describes how heat and energy behave in the universe. The second law does not prevent us from achieving our goals or enjoying our lives, as long as we respect the physical constraints and possibilities that it implies. In fact, the second law can inspire us to be more creative, efficient, and responsible with our use of resources and energy. 😊
The second law of thermodynamics states that the heat energy cannot transfer from a body at a lower temperature to a body at a higher temperature without the addition of energy. ¹ This means that there are limits to the amount of work that can be done by a heat engine, such as a car or a power plant, and that some heat will always be wasted in the process. ²³ The second law also implies that the entropy, or the measure of disorder, of an isolated system can never decrease, and that natural processes tend to increase the entropy of the system. ⁴ This accounts for the irreversibility of natural processes, such as the mixing of fluids, the melting of ice, or the decay of matter. ⁵
However, the second law does not mean that everything is doomed to decay and disorder. The second law only applies to isolated systems, which do not exchange energy or matter with their surroundings. In reality, most systems are not isolated, and can receive energy or matter from external sources. For example, living organisms are able to maintain their order and structure by taking in energy and matter from their environment, such as food, water, and sunlight. Human beings are also able to create and maintain order and structure in various fields of activity, such as art, literature, music, architecture, and social organization, by using their intelligence, creativity, and cooperation. These forms of human expression and creativity are not constrained by the second law, as they do not violate the conservation of energy or the increase of entropy in the universe.
Therefore, the second law of thermodynamics does not adversely influence human endeavour, but rather provides a framework and a motivation for understanding and improving the physical and cultural aspects of our world. 😊
Perhaps you agree with the Club of Rome limits to growth modelling? With a collapse only decades away?
Since the Club of Rome's report in the early 1970s the modelling has been checked at least in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s with similar conclusions.
Then there is the Stockholm Institute recording more transgressions of important global thresholds in the last two decades (the most recent assessment is about 7 of 9 global crucial thresholds exceeded.
Disaster is inevitable unless a degrowth path is followed.
+1, but also:
"I recently learned that waste heat will boil the oceans in about 400 years"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vRtA7STvH4
The true limit to humanity will be when it would take more free energy to extract resources (that produces waste heat) than we can financially afford to physically shift the waste heat into space & extract the resources.
The invention of solar panels to produce free energy with less waste heat and a lower cost is going to extend our fight against the 2nd law for some time.
As the video points out the CO2 is a 10x problem at the moment vs the waste heat.
His views remind me of those religious folk that believe that everything has been decaying since humans were expelled from the Garden of Eden.
Mental gymnastics are also required, like claiming we are living in a "closed system" apart from the energy coming in from the Sun.
Interesting read. I'm surprised that is no mention of "Population", which to me is the root cause of the problems we are facing now and in the future. The photo at the top of the article is a perfect example of population issue, the top modern apartments house multiple families, the bottom old house sits on bigger land but houses only one family. To me, population control is the answer to Murray's concerns. Our ever expanding population consumes too much resources, too much land, too much food, too much energy etc… If we can limit reproduction to max 2 children per couple, we will over time have a slowly reducing population, and new progress in technologies to increase efficiencies, will allow humanity to survive well. If we can't control an ever increasing world population… the future looks grim.
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