Thermodynamics and the Future of Economics
The worst part of all is that this most fundamental law of the physical economy of the universe is completely counter-intuitive to us. All life depends on matter and energy being concentrated in certain areas, but the universe constantly makes matter and energy spread out more evenly. That means we naturally perceive matter and energy being concentrated in small areas to be good, because we don’t notice the larger amount of matter and energy that had to be dispersed to make that happen.
The part of our brains that gave us the ability to destroy the environment was one of the last parts of our brains to evolve. Most of the rest of our brains evolved back when we were still chimpanzees.
The part of our brains that gave us the ability to destroy the environment was the part that gave us spoken language. That was the last of the three things we needed for human intellect. It worked so well because it gave us our advantage in surviving and reproducing that no other species on Earth could match. Human intellect as a whole let people change their own behavior instead of waiting for genetic evolution to change it gradually, and spoken language let humans make complicated plans among themselves on how to work together. After we got that part of our brains, our brains didn’t evolve anymore, because there was nothing on Earth that could threaten us as a species anymore. Now people could adapt their own behavior to fit their environments, instead of waiting around for genetic evolution to change our behavior over thousands of generations.
Individuals can figure out how the Laws of Thermodynamics affect people and the environment, and entire cultures can figure it out—which is how any group of people learns how to lead environmentally sustainable lifestyles. Or at the very least, individuals and groups can figure out how it affects them within their local environment. This is not to say that every group of indigenous people who leads environmentally sustainable lifestyles has discovered the Laws of Thermodynamics, but it is to say they figured out enough about how their environment worked to learn to live sustainably there—and the environment works according to the Laws of Thermodynamics.
This is an example of different parts of our brains working against each other, but producing the most stable genetic replication reaction possible. Back when we were still chimpanzees (or actually, long before that), our brains evolved to make us perceive that concentrations of energy and matter were good. When we evolved the final part of human intellect, we gained the ability to hunt a lot more effectively than we could without it. That gave us the most stable way of replicating our genes. People acting upon everything their brains made them perceive now started destroying the environment also, but at the time there was so much environment and so few people that the environment could withstand the effects people were having on it. So the environmental destruction people were causing didn’t counteract the new stability of our gene replication that our new intellectual abilities created.
People who lead environmentally unsustainable lifestyles have always had an advantage in the short term over people who led environmentally sustainable lifestyles. People who lead environmentally unsustainable lifestyles can build up to bigger population sizes temporarily. They can also extract more resources from their environment, which means they can build more tools, more weapons, and a higher technological level. Indigenous people who lead environmentally sustainable lives live the way they do because they’ve learned to live with a simpler economy than the Capitalists have. That’s why the Capitalists are tearing down the indigenous people’s forests now and building factories and shopping malls on their land, instead of the indigenous people tearing down factories and shopping malls and replanting forests—because the Capitalists are the ones with the guns and the bulldozers.
This is also why it’s so easy for politicians to win votes by promising to do things to help the environment that can’t possibly succeed. This is also why it’s so easy for Capitalists to make profits by selling people environmental suicide. And, unfortunately, this is also why anti-Capitalists leaving everyone on their own to do whatever feels right to them can’t possibly save the world either. Everyone acting on what they feel to be right is what caused the environmental crisis in the first place.
A big reason the environmental movement is accomplishing so little right now is because there is so much conflicting information floating around—or I should say, so little real information and so much disinformation and misinformation. The Laws of Thermodynamics create a very convenient jump point between physics and biology, because the entire environmental crisis is being caused by that simple conflict between the most fundamental law of physics and the most fundamental law of biology.
As I’ve said, there is no easy solution to the environmental crisis. But by knowing about those two fundamental laws and the fundamental conflict between humanity and the environment they create, people can recognize for themselves whether what politicians and business people are doing is going to help solve the environmental crisis or make it worse.
The Gaia Theory is an invaluable piece of information for environmental scientists, and it’s useful for other people to know about, but it still doesn’t break information down into small enough pieces for most people to use. With the Laws of Thermodynamics, you can see a simpler version of how the global environment works, according to basic laws of physics. With the Selfish Gene Theory you can see how the global environment works according to basic laws of biology. With the Gaia Theory you can see how those basic laws of biology working together for zillions of organisms all at the same time created the global environment. Then with the Laws of Thermodynamics you can see how basic laws of physics are making the global environment break down as a result of our actions.
The only way we can ever solve the energy and environmental crises once and for all is by building down to a global, localized organic agricultural economy, and thereby living within the physical limitations of the energy that we’re getting from the sun. We can’t do that immediately, but with the right political and economic systems, we won’t need to do it for hundreds of years. That means we can build down gradually, which means it will be a much easier transition.
Now that we know why humanity’s current relationship to the environment doesn’t work, how a sustainable relationship with our environment would work, and why we will all be better off that way, we can see what we have to do to get from here to there. Nobody knows exactly how to make the transition, and making the transition will depend on everyone’s input and cooperation, so there is no clearly defined solution to the problem. We will have to figure it out as we go along. But we can rule out a lot of apparent solutions that won’t work—namely, any that make us depend on non-renewable energy and other environmental resources more than we do now instead of less. By being aware of all of this, people can always ask the most crucial questions:
Is this going to help us build down to a global localized organic agricultural economy?
If so, how?
If not, why are you suggesting it?