Re: Joule and Carnot are either laughing or turning in their graves

I'd given up participating in these discussions for the kinds of reasons
Nuno gives: they are entropic by themselves and generate much low-quality
heat and very little light.

Nevertheless, I can't resist a comment on Nuno's somewhat hubristic
departing raspberry. First of all, to my certain knowledge Jay Hanson and
probably most other discussants here, do have at least the Ladybird Book of
Thermodynamics grasp of the matter which Nuno patronises us with. Most of us
are aware that earth receives solar fluxes and is not in that sense a closed
system. We are also mostly aware that there is a lot of underutilised energy
in sunlight. We have all heard the mantras of techno-utopianists, that oil
is easily substitutable a la neoclassical thinking and that we'll move
smartly along to fully sustainable fusion or sunlight-driven futures once
the price is right. We have, of course, been hearing about fusion and
unlimited hydrogen all of our lives. I remember reading about the British
variant, 'Zeta', in the Manchester Guardian in 1956. I was eight years old.
I became quite excited by the idea that there is enough energy to provide
electric power for Britain, in one bucket of seawater. I had just come back
from holiday at Blackpool where I spent two weeks mucking about with buckets
on the beach, so I definitely grasped this. That same year, we were told by
the Government to play indoors and not to drink milk because of a leak of
radiation into the atmosphere from Windscale, which is just up the road from
Blackpool. Since then (or so the Guardian somewhat mournfully told us only
this week) the British taxpayer, goaded on by the likes of Nuno, has forked
out fifty billion pounds (about eighty bn US dollars) and littered many of
said coastal resorts with ghastly and highly polluting reactors, without
however managing to ignite a single light bulb from said bucket of seawater,
not in my house anyway. So much for fusion. Incidentally, Jay is one of the
people who drew to our attention the fact that this vast and entirely
wasted, unnecessary and incredibly dangerous investment, represents a
cross-subsidy from (scarce but temporarily cheap) fossil fuels, which were
used to provide the energy investment in nuclear power. And the sad fact is
that, even if they'd succeeded, and the world was now covered with fusion
generating stations, and nuclear power was not historically a net drain on
precious fossil fuels but a genuine addtion to global energy budgets: why it
wouldn't help anyway, because the high-entropy waste heat the powerstations
produce would be just as greenhouse-heavy as burning carbon, and the ice
caps would still melt. (Does Nuno believe in global warming? Probably not, I
suppose. You can hold the telescope to the eyes of these techno-utopians,
but they still cannot see that 'it moves'.).

This leaves photovoltaics (and the other latest gee-whiz gizmo from Nasa and
Detroit, fuel cells).

It is possible to say without much fear of contradiction that PV's cannot
replace petroleum under any conceivable technological scenario, no matter
how promising is the gleam in Nuno's eye. The reasons are quite simple,
fundamental and unarguable. It means that, never mind what happens in the
peripheries, Life As We Know It will not be possible in the 'burbs of the
core states either.

Actually, Nuno is a dystopian who foresees a horrifying future after the oil
runs out. He's closer to Hanson than he admits, or probably understands. The
plain fact is that whether you like it or not, we are in for another of
those goddamn paradigm shifts (and we only rose out of the Neolithic
quagmire two and a half centuries ago!). As Cutler and others have shown,
materials and energy flows through modern 'post-industrial' society
continuie to increase (far from declining!), so all the indicators are set
in the wrong direction. And we are already into the oil-shortage scenario,
never mind what happens in 10 years time; it is impossible to explain what
has been happening to the world economy since 1973 unless you identify
energy as a key constraint on growth, one which keeps on reappearing in and
through each new economic crisis; today the oil price has doubled as a
result of nothing more than Asia beginning to crawl out of a slump. The
energy famine is already a fact and one which conditions rivalries and
relations between the three core zones, and which has hobbled a straitjacket
around the world economy which dooms the peripheries (now including Russia,
where a gasoline-famine is now endemic) to precipitous declines; a process
which is bound to affect the cores too, and is already.

Mark Jones





----- Original Message -----
From: Nuno P Barradas <nunoni@itn1.itn.pt>
To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 1999 9:55 AM
Subject: Joule and Carnot are either laughing or turning in their graves


> >I am trying to understand why certain political forms work and others do
> >not.  I am trying to understand why all human societies reject any
> >scientific discovery that threatens social constructions of reality.  I
am
> >trying to understand why only a handful of people even know that
immutable
> >energy laws indicate our society will end forever in less than ten years.
>
> Dear All,
>
> I joined this discussion group very recently. I am a physicist (PhD in
> nuclear physics, I currently work in a research nuclear reactor), with an
> interest in world system theory (finishing a paralell MA in European
Studies).
>
> It seems to me that none of you, Jay Hanson included, understand the first
> two laws of thermodynamics. They could be stated as (there are many
> alernative, equivalent, ways):
>
> 1. In a closed system, energy is conserved.
> (you can't eat your cake and keep it)
> 2. In a closed system, entropy increases.
> (if you cook a cake, your kitchen will be dirty and there will be some
> washing up to do; if you do not have a sink to get rid of the dirt, it
will
> stay at your place forever. Each cake you cook is hence a step towards an
> impossibly dirty kitchen)
>
> Law 2. is equivalent to saying that, in a closed system, the quality of
> energy decreases. Quality here means the ability to produce work. Example:
> if you release a stone in your hand, it will fall. Gravitic potential
> energy is transformed into kinetic energy. When it reaches the ground,
this
> energy is transformed into heat energy (the ground heats up a fraction of
a
> degree due to friction with the rock). Energy was conserved in the
process.
> Energy would also be conserved in the opposite process: the ground could
> suddenly become colder where a rock stood, that thermal energy could be
> given to the rock in the form of kinetic energy, and the rock would - by
> moto proprio - jump into the air. This does not happen, due to law 2: the
> thermal energy in the ground is of low quality. It cannot be used to
> produce work. The gravitic energy of the rock in the air is of high
> quality: one can use it to e.g. lift a bucket in a well.
>
> The first crucial point is that neither law 1 nor law 2 or thermodynamics
> apply to Earth.
>
> The reason is that Earth is not a closed system. The Sun provides Earth
> with high-quality, low-entropy energy all the time. All life on Earth
> ultimately depends on that.
>
> That is, depletion of coal and oil reserves is ultimately irrelevant. The
> solar energy we are now wasting is, given imaginable technological
> progress, more than enough (not to mention nuclear reactors of the fast
> breeder type - they actually produce more nuclear fuel than they spend -
> but what they produce is weapons-grade plutonium, so their extended usage
> is not on the political agenda; also not to mention controlled fusion,
that
> uses the virtually unexhaustable hydrogen - more than 99% of the universe
> is made of it). If it is not exploited to the full, it is simply because,
> given current world prices of oil etc and current tech, it is by and large
> uneconomical. Changes in oil etc prices and in tech will change this
> situation.
>
> The second crucial point is that neither law 1 nor law 2 apply to any
given
> region of Earth.
>
> The reason is that regions of the Earth are not closed systems. When we
> cook a cake, we get rid of the mess by sending it elsewhere. We also used
> power from the mains, and gas from the bottle or from the tube. That is,
we
> imported low-entropy energy into our home, and exported high-entropy
energy
> to the outside environment.
>
> A whole geographical region can do the same: inport high-quality,
> low-entropy energy (e.g. raw materials) from other regions, and export
> low-quality,  high-entropy energy (e.g. nuclear waste and other noxious
> substances) to other regions.
>
> That is, that the long-term carrying capacity of the planet is only some
> hundreds of millions is only true if the high-quality energy were
> distributed uniformly across the population. As it goes, it isn't. It is
> concentrated in core regions, while the periphery gets the high entropy.
>
> Suppose the atmosphere becomes nearly unbreathable in the short term
> (Hanson's 10 years). What would happen? Air will simply become a
commodity.
> The rich will live in closed systems and will be able to afford the best
> quality air, the Western middle classes will get reasonable quality air,
> the Western excluded classes and the third world will see their life
> expectancy reduced dramatically. This is nothing new! And it definitely
> does not make the world stop, on the contrary, it will probably be good to
> business - a whole, vital, new commodity to exploit. The same will happen
> given dramatic depletion of the ozone layer. The rich will be able to
> afford effective protection against radiation (no problem with that. There
> is a functioning nuclear reactor 10 metres away from where I now sit, and
> no radiation from it reaches this room), the poor will have an increased
> death rate from cancer and other sun exposure-related problems. This does
> not make the world stop, on the contrary - imagine a whole new and vital
> commodity, radiation protection, to exploit.
>
> That is, thermodynamics does not say doom is looming. It just points to
the
> direction that, within the organisation of the social system in which we
> live, doom is looming, as usual, for the periphery. We can have 5, or 10,
> perhaps even 15, billion people in this planet, as long as the vast
> majority have low life expectancy, the lower  the more people.
>
> Careless use of the hard sciences in the social sciences seems to be
> endemic. Read e.g. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont 1997, Intellectual
> Impostures (original in French, editions Odile-jacob, there is an English
> translation). Entropy is one of the most used and abused concepts.
>
> Collectively, there seems to be more ego than sense in this discussion
> group (and I do not mean Hanson). I joined to learn about world systems,
> not to read vast amounts of nonsensical pseudo-scientific material. I will
> be unsubscribing.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Nuno Barradas
>
> _____________________________________________________________
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