Re: Peter Grimes: THE HORSEMEN AND THE KILLING FIELDS

In his excellent paper “The Final Contradiction of Capitalism”, Peter
Grimes makes frequent reference to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. There
is a long history of the misinterpretation of this law in social
commentary, with Georgescu-Roegen’s writings being an especially
influential example (popularized by Jeremy Rifkin and even supported by
some Marxist commentators). The dissipation of waste heat as a product
of material economic activity is of course an inescapable consequence of
this law, but incremental heat over and above the natural infrared flux
from the Earth’s surface is essentially avoidable in a solarized global
economy. Waste heat is dissipated whether or not a small fraction (say
0.1% which is equal to the total anthropogenic flux) of the solar flux
is used to do work. 
Georgescu-Roegen confused the thermodynamic concepts of closed and
isolated systems. The Earth’s surface is essentially closed on an
anthropogenic time frame, but not isolated to energy transfer. An area
of 140 x 140 km with 10% conversion by photovoltaics would generate an
equivalent to the present U.S. electricity production. This area is far
less than the land now used for U.S. military installations (Golub and
Brus, 1993, The Almanac of Renewable Energy).   
Humankind is very far from facing an energy limit to either social
complexity or growth if global civilization is solarized.Physical
throughput in the technosphere could significantly grow in the
transition to a sustainable global economy, at least initially during a
period of elimination of North-South disparities in quality of life
along with the restoration of the biosphere.  However, future growth
will likely become more and more intensive rather than extensive with
the dematerialization of technology, industrial ecology, energy
efficiencies possible when wasteful production/consumption, including
transportation, becomes progressively reduced by global planning, in the
context of progressive solarization.  Solarization will radically solve
the other problems discussed by Grimes, i.e., environmental cleanup,
resource availability and fresh water shortage (the ocean is a near
infinite source using solar-powered desalinisation and recharging
aquifers). Grimes contends that only fossil fuels ccan be used to
produce fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides. If he is referring to the
molecular “food stock”, they are superabundant in the atmosphere and
ocean (e.g., industrial fixation of nitrogen). Otherwise his point is
unsupported.
What about the limits to food production, an key issue raised by Grimes'
paper? Others have contended that a significantly expanded
suburban/urban agriculture utilizing greenhouses, along with
agroindustrial ecology (i.e., recycling human wastes; see Commoner's
seminal "The Closing Circle" and “Paradox of Plenty: Hunger in a
Bountiful World, edit. Douglas Boucher, 1999, Food First) could
radically boost global food production while reducing pollution and
energy consumption. 
Of course the main obstacle to global solarization is the formidable
power of the transnational energy corporations and institutions. Solar
energy is no panacea, but it is a necessary but not sufficient condition
for a sustainable global civilization meeting both human and nature’s
needs. Sufficient conditions are arguably solarization’s political
economic context and physical “mode of production”, which includes
adopting the containment policy with respect to the technosphere.
On these issues and others, I invite the subscribers to this list to
check out the Marxism and Ecology issue of Science & Society, Fall 1996,
of which I was guest editor:
Partial Contents:
Limits to Growth?, Derek Lovejoy
Not with a Bang but a Whimper [response to ecocatastrophism], Douglas
        Boucher
Tragedy of the Commons: The Meaning of the Metaphor,  John Vandermeer
Solar Communism, David Schwartzman