Chapter III. The Energy of Environmental and Economic
Sustainability
“What comes out of the factory door
is private property. What comes out of the factory smokestack is
the public’s problem.”
– unattributed
Perhaps Al Gore more than anyone else exposed the fallacy that
economics and the environment are opposing choices. In his film An Inconvenient Truth, he
showed a campaign poster metaphorically depicting a judicial scale
balancing gold bars against the Earth. The idea that a balance must
be struck between the economy and the environment stems largely from
the stereotype that environmentalism has an agenda of no growth, as
opposed to an agenda of sustainability and public health. Economic
sustainability depends upon environmental sustainability, and yet
most analyses of either system are flawed by overlooking--or
downright denying--the second law of thermodynamics. They neglect to
completely account for the 2nd law facts that 1) energy is
ultimately dissipated, 2) order in one system comes at the expense
of another (the surrounding) system, 3) systems not receiving energy
move to disorder, and 4) the net effect overall (universe) is a move
toward disorder. Before going further, it is imperative to examine
what is meant by a “system” in these cases. In so doing, one quickly
reveals the true cause of many polarizations within and between
economics and environmental issues: “winner-take-all” political
systems that select a winning system at the expense of a losing one.
A system, including an economic system, is just an isolated part of
reality, be it abstract or material, set aside for study, use, or
maintenance of its mechanisms. Once the definition of the system is
made, the net of all of the inputs and outputs are evaluated from
the perspective of that system, usually neglecting the impacts to
the surroundings or on another system. Ecosystems in ecological
study are defined in terms of energy inputs, usually solar
energy: transformed, transferred, hoarded and shared by
entities within the system. The biomass in sum represents the
collective energy stored in the system. Economic systems are defined
in terms of “work” inputs, not necessarily the physical energy
definition of work, but represented by money: transformed,
transferred, hoarded and shared by entities within the system. The
money in sum represents the assumed collective wealth stored in the
system. The collective wealth is based either on commodity
or fiat.
Environmental systems and the economics that depend on them are
entwined by the laws of energy. The boundaries of systems are
especially vulnerable to assumptions. When the order in one economic
or environmental system comes at the expense of disorder in another,
related political issues arise and become polarizing. We hear
contentious discourse and debates framed, rightly or wrongly, as a
choice being made between conflicting economic and environmental
objectives, particularly apparent when the issue at hand is about
environmental preservationism. But more often, apparent
environmental-versus-economic conflicts have a more deeply rooted
social underpinning. One system is going to get the “order” while
the other the “disorder.” The protests of the system receiving the
disorder are best exemplified by the NIMBY syndrome, and
by the relatively recent concept of environmental
racism. Racist or not, ordered versus disordered environmental
systems have always been apparent economically. Metaphorically we
allude to the “other side of the tracks.” An example to visualize
the metaphor environmentally, “one side” has streets lined with
flowerbeds while the “other side” has streets lined with trash.
Extending the metaphor thermodynamically, it takes work to maintain
the flower beds and a place to receive the trash. Consistent with
the 2nd law, one system gains order at the expense of the other’s
disorder. The environmental contention becomes socially apparent
when the energy that maintains the “one side” comes from the
gardener and the trash collector who live on the “other side.”