Chapter II, Section B. Why the crisis?
The first law of thermodynamics is fundamental to the sciences and
easy to state, thus it is repeated throughout the entire science
curriculum, K-12 through college: energy is neither created nor
destroyed, it just changes form. A cynical mnemonic plays off the
first logical alternate of the first half of the statement, “You
can’t get something for nothing.” But if neither is it destroyed,
what is the problem? Can’t we just take some of the energy preserved
all around us and convert it into a form we need? It’s the second
law that says no. The second law of thermodynamics is equally as
fundamental as the first, but, unfortunately, is not so easy to
state, and thus is too often overlooked in the science curriculum.
In his book The
Hydrogen
Economy, Jeremy Rifkin wrote perhaps the best statement of the
second law in words: “...energy can only be changed in one
direction; that is, from usable to unusable, from available to
unavailable, or from ordered to disordered.” He adds, “Everything in
the universe, according to the second law, began as available
concentrated energy and is being transformed over time to
unavailable, dispersed energy.” The cynical 2nd law mnemonic
follow-up says, “You can’t even break even.”
We can’t even break even then. If Cheney is right and money is
energy, then why do our economic models through history assume we
can? The second law of thermodynamics puts us on our continuous
quest to find energy in a usable “concentrated” form, both the quest
of our economy to attain energy resources, and the quest of our
bodies to find food. The two are not unrelated. The “concentrated”
energy used to grow, water, fertilize, harvest, process, transport,
refrigerate, and market food is staggering. Richard Manning
elucidated that the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs is needed just to
turn the soil every year in Iowa. Another significant quantity of
energy, plus the hydrocarbon resource itself as an ingredient, is
required to make ammonia to fertilize that soil. Our bodies can
continue to grow--upward or outward--only so long as “concentrated”
energy in the form of food can be found. Likewise, our economic
systems can continue to grow only so long as “concentrated” energy
can be found in an energy resource. Once that concentrated energy is
found–and our economic models assume it always will be found–the
rest of the economy can move forward, just as our bodies can
continue to function. Ironically the discovery of concentrated
energy resources enables our economy to deny the 2nd law of
thermodynamics with an erroneous assumption of continuous or at
least cyclical growth. In violation of the 2nd law, there is an
assumption in our economic models that energy is always available.
But growth is not the only consumer of energy. The second law also
dictates that systems undergo irreversible change, from order to
disorder. Thus some energy must be used to restore order. All of our
systems—our infrastructures—are continuously changing and require
maintenance. More easily stated, our economy must continue to
consume energy, at whatever the going rate, just to maintain itself,
let alone grow. Thus the debt continues to pile up. In a living
system, including both our own bodies and an entire ecosystem,
energy is also continuously consumed just to maintain itself, let
alone grow. The energy of our economy is currently based on
combustion, while the energy of living things is based on
respiration, not radically dissimilar processes, both extracting
energy and producing CO2 from a carbon-based fuel. Thus CO2 is an
excellent measure of the cumulative energy spent. The living world
strikes a balance by drawing energy from the sun to recycle the CO2,
but our economy on the whole does not. In fact our current economics
depends on the ability of the natural world to recycle our CO2 in
order to maintain the environment we take for granted. Both the
build-up of extra CO2 in our environment, and the debt in our banks,
measure our economy’s cumulative spent energy used to maintain
itself through history.