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.
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