Idea Sea

The Entropic Power of Energy and Natural Resources
A perspective that links energy and resources with economic growth, evolution, and the laws of the universe

Jianxi Luo
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
January, 2007
luo@mit.edu

I view entropy is the inherent governing power of natural resources. The entire world of existence can be viewed as composed of an evolving subsystem and a non-evolving subsystem. The entire physical world is governed by the Entropy Law, while the local evolutionary subsystem is also governed by the Evolution Law. The entropic power of natural resources fuels evolution that creates value and increases order locally in the evolutionary subsystem, while leading to retrogression and disordering in the non-evolutionary subsystem. In the overall world, entropy is irreversibly increasing, and is evidenced as natural resource depletion, economic inflation, waste, and pollution. The purpose of this article is to provide a new view on the energy and resource challenges facing the human society, and suggest a solution based on this view — promoting a low-entropy living culture in which humans fuse with nature.

Traditional Power of Natural Resources

No human activity is independent of the use of natural resources, which are the nutrition of the world. Through economic processes, natural resources are extracted from the environment, and then transformed into consumables. In particular, our economy and life have been highly dependent on such non-renewable resources as petroleum and coal. Without them, economic activities and human life could not continue, and the world would be dead.

The possession of or access to natural resources often determines a country or region’s economic and political power in the world. OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) is controversially influential in the world only because its member countries control the major portion of the world’s explored petroleum, the life blood of today’s global economy. Wars and conflicts are often due to natural resources. For instance, before World War II, the energy and natural resource supply could not catch up with the rising needs from the fast industrialization in the Axis countries, and this led to inflation, unemployment and societal turmoil, and then drove them to invade other countries to pillage natural resources.

Examples are countless. However, the power of natural resources has been widely underestimated. On one hand, we used to attribute economic growth more to technology, business models, and social regimes, than to natural resources. On the other hand, despite our awareness of the traditional influence of natural resources, such as the examples above, human society still widely ignores the more fundamental power of natural resources, which I call “entropic power” and is actually the governing power for the existence and growth of human society, nature, and the world.

Entropy

The Second Law of Thermodynamics says the differences in temperature, pressure, and density tends to even out over time in any isolated physical system. Entropy is defined as the measure of the irreversibility in such processes. Entropy can never be destroyed, but only be created. The total entropy of any isolated system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value. Entropy is also a measure of order. The higher the entropy of a system, the higher the disorder it has. Here after, we will call the Second Law of Thermodynamics the “Entropy Law”.

The Entropy Law is universal to any process irrevocably moving from usefulness to uselessness, or from order to disorder — from low entropy to high entropy. Because of its ubiquitous nature, the Entropy Law finds wide applications as in such fields as information theory and economics.

In my view, the Entropy Law is not just a useful paradigm, but an inherent governing law of the holistic physical world of humans and nature. [To be careful, we should also be aware that the Entropy Law does not govern the transcendent spiritual world.]

Entropic Power of Natural Resources

- The Entropy Law Governs Economic Processes That Turn Natural Resources into Pollutants and Wastes in Environment

Traditional economics considers economic activities to take advantage of labor and capital to create value through production. However, the Entropy Law introduced to economics by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen made natural resources central. By definition, the Entropy Law also governs all the economic processes, moving them in one irreversible direction – changing natural resources from available to unavailable, from usable to unusable, or from low-entropy states (e.g., petroleum and uranium) to high-entropy states (e.g., CO2 and nuclear waste).

The irreversibility of economic processes has two aspects, in my view. First, such processes turn low-entropy natural resources into economically valuable products as well as high-entropy pollutants and wastes (Kummel, 1989). Products also become wastes at the end of their lives. Thus, non-renewable resources like petroleum and rare minerals are being permanently reduced. Meanwhile, pollutants and wastes are being irreversibly increased. For the example of nuclear waste, by far the human society still has no better disposal solution than storing it at geological repositories for long term isolation from the biosphere (MIT: The Future of Nuclear Power, 2003). Second, in the course of the extraction, distribution and transformation of natural resources, they, particularly energy, are consumed and dissipated, and pollutants and wastes are created.

The value of products must be created at the expense of greater disorder, pollution and waste [Faber, 1996]. Human society is increasingly experiencing such disorders as global warming and natural disasters. The warmer and warmer winters and the polar ice shelf breaks might be more or less evidence of global warming.

The overall effect of the extraction, transformation and use of natural resources is the absolute entropy increase of the world.

- Inflation as a Measure of the Entropy State of Natural Resources

Since all economic activities require natural resources, inflation can be considered an equivalent in economics to entropy in nature. Inflation is directly tied to the depletion of earth’s non-renewable resources. As the global GDP grows exponentially, non-renewable natural resources, like petroleum and rare metals, have become less and less exploitable, and cost more and more to explore, process, and consume. The costs of economic activities rise from the root of the natural resource flow line, and are passed along its each succeeding stage. Eventually, the end consumers pay the final bill for inflation. Furthermore, economic inflation also stimulates social and political disorders, like unemployment and war. Inflation indicates the entropy increase of the world.

Although economists also consider other factors, such as government monetary policies and wage increases, among the reasons for inflation, the depletion of natural resources is a more fundamental force. Although deflation and inflation alternate in the read world, the overall trend has been inflation, and it will continue, simply due to the entropic power of natural resources.

Evolution and Entropy Law

Since economic growth irreversibly increases entropy in the world, why are we still pursuing economic growth? My answer is Evolution. It is evolution that drives such activities of turning natural resources from low-entropy state into high-entropy state.

Human society has evolved from its origin to the current information era under the control of the general evolution algorithm, which is the same as that of biological systems. Value and order are created in the co-evolution of technologies, social institutions and businesses [Beinhocker, 2006]. We are always passionate about any evolutionary progress in these spaces. However, these advances also increase entropy simultaneously. For instance, the massive use of computers and internet has not only improved the efficiency of economic activities, but also accelerated the flow-through of natural resources. A typical Google search (involving multiple attempts) may generate 1g-10g of carbon dioxide [Leake and Woods, 2009]. In the case of a social technology, financial market, capital is more efficiently allocated to stimulate economic activities, and then accelerates the extraction and transformation of natural resources. The value from these advances is actually gained at the greater expense of accelerated natural resource depletion and environment deterioration (This is arguable when examining the benefit and cost in a local system).

With the economic evolution going on, more and more natural resources and energy are expended faster than ever in manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, the military sector, and daily life. More heavily industrialized countries always consume more natural resources, and emit more pollutants and wastes. As Jeremy Rifkin said, “the Gross National Product is more accurately Gross National Cost” [Rifkin, 1980]. The public always views economic evolution, as well as all kinds of evolution including biological evolution, as a good thing because it advances life, increases order, and thus lowers entropy. However, it is only good in its local part. Meanwhile, the cost of evolution accumulates elsewhere. The living matter feeds on negative entropy (negentropy) from, and emits entropy to, the rest of the world that does not evolve (Schrödinger, 1945)

In my view, the physical world can be partitioned into two open subsystems: the evolutionary subsystem (e.g., life system), and the non-evolutionary subsystem (e.g., natural resources and environment). The evolutionary subsystem cannot evolve without sucking low-entropy natural resources from, and emitting high-entropy wastes to, the non-evolutionary subsystem. In the evolutionary subsystem, the Evolution Law controls the irreversible direction of evolution (decreasing entropy). In a larger context, evolution in its open subsystem is actually the driver of the irreversible entropy increase in the overall world, where the Entropy Law is the governing law.

Entropy Law, the Earth and the Universe

One might argue we do not need to worry because the Earth is an open system and the entropy of the Earth system may flow out. However, we should not restrict our observation and thinking within just the Earth. Along with economic and technological progress, human beings will expand farther into outer space. Actually, Clausius, Kelvin and other physicists discovered the Entropy Law by considering the larger context of the universe, assumed as an isolated system. It is commonly believed that the universe is not evolving, but retrogressing. In the far future, when entropy gradually reaches its maximum, no more free energy is available, nothing will take place, and then the universe will arrive at its dead end – heat death of the universe.

[a note on what “Universe” is? In Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the Universe is defined as the whole body of things observed or assumed. In Wikipedia, the Universe means the sum of all matter that exists and the space in which all events occur or could occur. It is assumed as an isolated system. In my view, I think the Universe is such a paradigm as God and Buddha, which were created by humans to close the gap of “the unknown” on our knowledge loop. We need them because we cannot afford that we cannot explain infinity. However, limits are set for “infinity” unconsciously.]

Even though there are debates on whether the universe is truly an isolated system, and we might not be able to live that long to see the end of the universe, we are now witnessing the entropy increases on our Earth in the forms of natural resource depletion, economic inflation, waste, pollution, and climate change. In a practical sense, whether the universe is exactly an isolated system is not the key issue. What we should care most about is the entropic power of natural resources, which fuels the evolution in the evolutionary subsystems, while leading to the retrogression in the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the public remains unaware of this fundamental power, or say, unwilling to accept it.

Conclusions and Solutions

The world is governed by the Entropy Law. Entropy must increase globally. Every time we use any amount of non-renewable natural resources, first, there is less available for the future; second, greater disorder is created than the value derived. Meanwhile, the subsystem of human society is also governed by the Evolution Law. In particular, we are unable to stop evolution, which reduces entropy locally, while leading to the depletion of natural resources and the global increase of entropy.

One might feel desperate and hopeless. Please don’t. The Entropy Law is not a threat from which we should shrink, but a truth we should face. Only if we understand nature well, can we behave in accord with it. I am not interested in propagating a despairing or negativist attitude. Instead, I hope the public, especially the business and government leaders, are well aware of the entropic power of natural resources.

Blew is what I think we should do based on the new view on resources, and the world.

First, human society should be aware of the entropic power of natural resources. Only on this basis, can people achieve low-entropy attitudes and behaviors concerning natural resources, economy, and evolution at next steps.

Secondly, I want to carefully mention the recent world-wide enthusiasm for renewable natural resources, and the recycling of non-renewable natural resources. These processes also conform to the Entropy Law, so they might end up consuming even more non-renewable natural resources, and hastening their depletion. The same logic also applies to the efforts for so-called “green” technologies and “green” business models. I personally do not pin hopes on most of them. But, anyway, these efforts may be locally valuable sometimes, even though they are not ultimate solutions.

Finally, what is the ultimate solution? I think it is to change our culture/style/behaviors of life from a high-entropy one to a low-entropy one by education. Human society now is in a high-entropy culture, where the dominating purpose of life is to satisfy human wants by accelerating natural resources flow-through from available to unavailable. However, the proposed low-entropy culture regards humanity and nature as a holistic system. Natural resources are not only the resource of nature, but also the resource of our life. Since we cannot stop the evolution of our life system, let’s slow the global entropy increase by reducing the unnecessary cost of the evolution in a way not to waste any natural resources, and to give up our wasteful habits of living and working. Now that we are unable to stop or reverse the depletion of natural resources, let’s not waste any.

Life culture change is more crucial than any other means to achieve a more sustainable future of the world. However, to make this culture transition take place, we might need enormous and continuous endeavors from education systems, public institutions, governments, and international organizations.

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This article’s draft was first written in January, 2007, and modified several times later. The ideas in this blog article were stimulated by the readings below:

1. Beinhocker, Eric (2006). “The Origin of Wealth”. Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, MA, United States.
2. Leake, Jonathan and Woods, Richard (2009). “Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches”. Times Online, http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134.ece.
3. Faber, Malte, Manstetten, Reiner and Proops, John (1996). “Ecological Economics:Concepts and Methods”. Edward Elgar, UK.
4. Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas (1971). “The Entropy Law and the Economic Process”. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, United States.
5. Kummel, Reiner (1989). “Energy as a Factor of Production and Entropy as a Pollution Indicator in Macroeconomc Modeling”. Ecological Economics, 1 (1989): 161-180.
6. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2003). “The Future of Nuclear Power: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study”. Cambridge, MA, United States. http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/
7. Rifkin, Jeremy (1980). “Entropy: A New World View”. The Viking Press, New York.
8. Schrödinger, Erwin (1945). “What is life? The Physical Aspect of The Living Cell”. Cambridge University Press, UK; Macmillan, New York.