Entrophy---A Taste of Fate

I pulled this piece off some other source, both the text and the graph. They are not necessarily connected but do have a relationship. The graph is about energy use. Energy use speaks to CO2 emissions mentioned in the text. Thus, they are closely related. My interest here is in the word entropy and the 2nd law of Thermodynamics.

The critical information here is that "the rate of growth in CO2 emissions in 2011 exceeded that of global GDP".

There may be many complex economic reasons for this, such as the growing coal consumption in China, but it also reflects the most fundamental and inviolable law of the Universe: the Second Law of thermodynamics, or the Entropy Law.

Every energy use or conversion results in entropy, or waste, pollution, heat, disorder and chaos. Entropy accumulates and never reverses. While it's possible to create instances of local order (which is what all technologies do) - such as a city, a factory, a house or a consumer product - that results in a disproportionate export of entropy to the environment.

As we use up the "low-hanging fruit" of available energy and material resources, each subsequent effort to reach the higher fruit will require ever more energy expenditures and hence result in ever more entropy.

CO2 is a form of entropic waste and climate change is the inevitable entropic outcome. The faster we race, in our technological effort at "progress", the farther behind we get. That is fundamentally why the growth in GDP results in an even faster growth in climatic entropy. That's a law of the Universe.

We cannot undo our accumulation of entropy, any more than we can reverse the flow of time (which are one and the same). We can only choose to increase entropy faster or slower, but increase is unavoidable because it's the law of the Universe.

The problem with our response to climate change is that we are still dealing with it as a problem. A problem has one or more solutions. A crisis, however, does not yield to solutions but only to a response. We must begin to decide how we are going to respond to what is inevitable and unavoidable, and we can do that by bunkering down behind our Stand Your Ground laws, or by coming together in communities to share our simple skills and essential knowledge to co-create a more sensible paradigm for human life on this fragile little planet Earth.

Robert Riversong