Climate, technology and chaos Blog

Physical Entropy

• Living systems take energy from outside their own fuzzy boundaries in the form of sunlight and/or food.
• The boundaries are fuzzy, because the living system would not exist without the food and sunlight. They use this energy to build, repair and develop themselves.
• In this building, repairing and developing, living systems turn energy sources into waste, in the form of excreta: gasses, liquids and ‘solids’.
• In a coherently evolved system this ‘waste’ then acts as food for other beings (plants, insects, worms, etc). The waste does not accumulate, poison or overwhelm the system as a whole, but is ‘recycled’ as part of the Gaia system.
• Eventually most living systems either change through processes of evolution, start to run down, or can no longer extract enough energy to keep their processes completely functional. They wear out and die – assuming that they do not die by accident or through feeding some other being. As they wear down the chances of accident increase – they can avoid fewer accidents or recover from them as well as previously.
• We can call this process, after it starts, “physical entropy” to distinguish it from normal entropy which is the dispersion of energy, into non-usable forms (usually as heat).

Social generation of Physical Entropy

• All social systems, like all other systems, generate entropy or energy dispersion. This what they do. As long as the Sun keeps going this is not a problem for Gaia as a whole, although systems which use non-renewable energy may face considerable challenge.
• ‘Physical entropy’ likewise happens normally, but can also be generated by economic and social systems, to a degree which overwhelms these social and economic processes.
• Sometimes this may arise from the system slowly suiciding, although the system may be able to responsively change and adapt, and not suicide (as argued in the Toynbee cycle [1]).
• This blog considers social generation of ‘illth,’ the term John Ruskin developed for the generally ignored (by the elites), but socially generated forms of harm which manifest as increasing physical entropy. Illth is the opposite of wealth. Ruskin appears to argue that true wealth is collective.
• The blog recognises Illth as arising from the following processes. There may be more.
  • Pollution: when materials are released into the ecologies, which are poisonous or non-reprocessable by those ecologies. It is contrasted to recyclable ‘waste.’
  • Dispersion: when essential materials are dispersed into the ecology, and require too much energy to be able to recompile. Contemporary Marxists talk about this as the ‘metabolic rift’.
  • Destructive extraction: when the process of gathering essential materials destroys or poisons ecologies, faster than they can regenerate, or makes regeneration impossible in a humanly ‘reasonable time frame’.
  • Harmful production: when the process and products of economic action hurt beings.
    This includes harmful labour and work which poisons people, causes them to develop occupational or consumerist illnesses, distracts them from challenges, hurts their modes of being and thinking, and so on.
  • Expansion – involves a society or a social process growing beyond the ability of the ecology, or the extraction system (etc) to support it. Expansion can also involve military force aiming to get new ‘resources’. Any social feature which demands increasing ‘growth’ is going to lead to crisis in a finite bounded system, possibly fairly quickly. Estimates show that we already ‘overshoot’ or consume more in a year than the planet can produce in a year. This should show that continual growth is no longer an option. In 2023 we consumed Earth’s production by the 2 August. In 1971 we consumed it by nearly the end of December, so the increase of destruction is marked. We are already highly indebted with a lowering income.
    • [I don’t know if this is correct or not, but these figures result from using the exponential growth calculator. Let us assume that we currently consume 1 earth per year and are just about balanced. Let us also assume that we grow at 2% per year. That’s pretty small by capitalist standards, probably bad for business. In just 100 years (assuming this would be possible without interruption or collapse), we end up consuming 7.2 Earths per year. That is clearly not ‘sustainable’. Continuing expansion is destructive]
• Physical entropy can be ‘natural’ and the system slowly evolves to a new equilibrium (attractor point).

Power Relations and Physical Entropy.

• As shown, in social systems, physical entropy can be generated by unconsidered social processes, or through elites ignoring both the entropic challenges which are arising and the energy needs for repair. They presumably are worrying about other things, or severely implicated in producing the entropy to maintain their status or power, and worry about other things to keep themselves from worrying about their own self-destructiveness.
• Social entropy often involves power relations, or the ability to keep on generating illth processes, against opposition, or evidence of impending collapse.
  • Power relations allow pollution to be usually dumped on the relatively poor and powerless.
    Elites think they will be immune.
  • Power relations and technologies allow elites to consider that dispersion of materials will be overcome by economic need and economic processes.
  • Power relations allow people and other beings to be dispossessed from their land or water (or even killed), and for that ecology to be destroyed. The inhabitants and users are ignored, while the elites consider themselves immune.
  • Harmful production: the elites consider themselves immune from harming others, and are able to make people work in harmful labour.
  • Power relations make expansion continue, because it is thought be elites to be essential, and it gives the less powerful some hope of sharing in social wealth.
• The more energy is dispersed and systems start to break down (perhaps because of power relations) the more vulnerable the system becomes to accident overtaking the ability to repair, especially with cumulative accidents, such as wild weather events coming one after the other. Hence the system is also likely to collapse, unless this challenge is dealt with. For example, the Lismore floods reached 11.6m in march 2017. Repairs were not complete before the record floods of 2022 when the flood level reached 14.4m. Lismore today is still full of damaged and unusable buildings (personal observation), and obviously there is some lack of human energy, because we don’t know how long it will be before the town and surrounds seriously floods again.

Capitalism, Developmentalism and power

• Capitalism and developmentalism, especially their neoliberal forms, can be considered as a systems of: power relations, exchange, production, and illth generation.
• Many other systems are systems of production and exchange which are not remotely capitalist – unless you are willing to define capitalism so generally that even a working communism would count as capitalism.
• Many other economic systems can generate illth production. Overthrowing capitalism may not be either necessary or enough to stop illth. We are simply referring to the obvious present.
• Neoliberal Capitalism and developmentalism (and state communism if you wish) seem patterned by their illth production and the power relations that allow this to continue.
• As cleaning up, not polluting, not dispersing, not destroying etc, cost companies money, and therefore subtract from profit, capitalist organisations will make non-destructive behaviour secondary and consider illth to be an externality which is no concern of theirs, unless they are compelled to prevent it by regulations and legislation. Pro-corporate politicians will often try and remove any restrictions on pollution as part of their service to profitable polluters and destroyers.
• Power relations and normal capitalist processes of advertising, PR, hype, marketing, misdirection, etc, also corrupt the production and distribution of information, and disempower movements against illth. Workers do not have the knowledge to act and face the dangers or asking. For example: Exxon knew about climate change and denied it to maintain sales and profit [1]. [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8].

Not Suiciding by Physical Entropy

Not suiciding or system continuance, requires, at a minimum:

• 1) System repair: Systems that are wearing out, need repair or replacement. Repair or replacement need available energy, money, ‘resources’ and organisation.
• 2) Maintaining renewable resources: Renewable resources (including oxygen production), should not be used, or destroyed, faster, than they can regenerate.
• 3) Replacement of non renewable resources: non-renewable resources should be replaced by renewable ones, wherever possible.
• 4) Fewer physical entropy and illth generating actions: Only production of recyclable waste and less pollution, less dispersion, less destructive extraction, less harmful labour.
• 5) Careful waste production: no waste should be produced faster than it can be recycled or re-processed. Obviously that includes CO₂ and other Greenhouse gases.
• 6) Recovering awareness: Less unconsciousness of the social and economic destruction of systems that support continuance – ecologies, other people and so on.
• 7) Better information sources, that are independent of corporations and governments.

These are all relatively obvious, sensible and logical processes, hence they have been avoided for 50 or so years. We cannot assume that sense and logic is persuasive to the elites or the populace.

The next blog speaks more directly to solutions.

Tags: entropy, illth, neoliberalism, philosophy, renewable energy, science, sustainability

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