Drawing on Jeremy Rifkin’s Entropy, I discuss the impact of energy use and technological advancement on the future of humanity. The author argues that an increase in entropy is inevitable, but that humanity can overcome it through technological advancement, and suggests ways to solve current problems.
Entropy is the title of this book and an accurate representation of the author’s worldview. Entropy is a concept that most of us have encountered in physics class or in the literature, but it’s probably not the most familiar. Entropy can be described as “disorder” and is a measure of how much energy can be put to good use. The author explains entropy by the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy always increases. It is possible for entropy to decrease in a particular system, but the fact that it always increases in the aggregate does not change. When we burn oil to heat our homes in the winter, the chemical energy contained in the oil is converted into heat energy to warm the room. The first law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy, states that the total amount of energy is constant: the amount of chemical energy consumed is equal to the amount of heat energy produced. However, the entropy of the newly created thermal energy changes to a much higher level than the entropy of the chemical energy.
The author applies the second law of thermodynamics to major topics in society to analyze current problems. With the advent of industrialization, humans have become surrounded by machines like never before, and as a result, a single person requires hundreds of times more energy to live than a serf in the Middle Ages 500 years ago. While this may have made life easier for individuals, the massive increase in energy use by society as a whole has naturally led to an exponential increase in the amount of entropy that society emits. This increased entropy came in many forms. We’re running out of oil, polluting the atmosphere with emissions from burning fuel, and creating tons of waste from our increased consumption. Worse yet, energy consumption is only going to increase in the future, and the rate of waste production is only going to increase. If this industrialized society continues on its current path, the author warns that soon there will be no more energy sources available, and the planet will become a garbage heap, heading towards the end of time.
I would question the author’s pessimistic projection of the future: according to him, humanity will end in the not-too-distant future. That’s when all of the Earth’s energy will have been transferred to a high entropy state that we can’t utilize. However, this prediction is only possible if the current level of technology and energy use is maintained. Human technology is improving by leaps and bounds, and we all realize that we need to move away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy as our primary source of energy. The world is working together to solve the problem of creating clean energy. I think we will find a breakthrough.
In some ways, the high entropy of society is a relative concept. If we look at the agricultural society of 500 years ago with our current technology, it will appear to be very low in entropy, and if we look at the industrial society of today with the technology of that time, it will appear to be full of entropy. In other words, if we look at the past when underground resources such as coal, oil, and gas were abundant with current technology that can freely use underground resources, it will feel low in entropy, and if we look at the current natural environment that is polluted with past technology that only had agricultural and fishing technology, it will feel high in entropy. Therefore, even in the same environment, the level of entropy experienced is different depending on the level of technology. The catastrophic scenario that the author envisions could occur if the rate of increase in entropy is much faster than the rate of technological advancement in energy utilization, resulting in a shortage of available energy sources in the near future. However, human technological progress has also accelerated, and we have learned to obtain energy from sources other than fossil fuels, such as nuclear fission and renewable energy. Hydrogen, the raw material for nuclear fission power, is almost inexhaustible in the oceans, and solar energy, the source of renewable energy, is inexhaustible. We have the technology, but we don’t use it, and we rely on fossil fuels simply because it’s still cheaper and easier to make energy from them. When the fossil fuel-based society reaches the entropy watershed that the authors predict, we can move to a society based on other energy sources. We haven’t reached that point yet, but we already have the technology to do so.
Other scholars are discussing similar issues. For example, environmental economist Nicholas Stern emphasizes the need to respond to climate change and argues that we need to fundamentally rethink the way we use energy as technology advances. His report cites the economic losses that will result from climate change and warns that if we don’t change our current economic system, humanity will face not only great financial losses, but also an environmental crisis.
To avoid a tragic ending, he says, a paradigm shift is inevitable. Using less energy, slowing down the rate of energy flow and thus the rate at which entropy increases, is the way to ensure that humanity can survive longer. But even if we don’t change the paradigm, it doesn’t seem to matter. Even if we don’t reduce our energy use, we can still find different ways to get energy and take advantage of the abundance of energy sources. By further developing technologies that use energy sources that are faithful to the paradigm of modern industrial society, we can generate more energy than we use in the future. This seems reasonable given the accelerating pace of technological progress.
More than 30 years have passed since the author wrote this book, and contrary to his predictions, we still have plenty of oil, coal, and other fossil fuels, and the technology to harness new sources of energy is well underway. We are not facing a darker future than we were 30 years ago, but rather a more abundant energy age. If we stop developing new technologies, the future predicted by the author may come to pass. But if we continue to move forward, and if our individual efforts to move forward are combined on a national and global scale, we can expect to see a future that is free and bright, not bound by the laws of entropy.
Of course, the concept of entropy still carries an important caveat in that the future is uncertain. Climate change, resource depletion, and the dangers of failing to address these issues are all part of Rifkin’s “end of entropy”. This means that we need to rethink not only technology development, but also the way we use energy and our entire economic system. We shouldn’t be lulled into a false sense of security that our current technologies can solve our problems.
