Stuart Jordan responds to criticism of his article on ecology and entropy in Solidarity 672. The text here is an expansion from the printed version.
The interesting thing about the ecological economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s application of the entropy law, for Marxists, is that it explains something about Marx’s theory of metabolic rift.
Metabolic analysis of human society developed alongside ecological economics and is now the established science of material flow analysis. It is due in part to the efforts of these scientists that statistics on CO2 emissions and other wastes are readily available and subject of public debate. Ecologist Marina Fisher-Kowalski credits Marx and Engels as the founders of this school which has produced prolific literature and empirical data since the 1960s (Industrial Metabolism, 1998).
Fisher-Kowalski notes the use of the term metabolism to describe ecosystem-scale or even planetary material flows is not uncontroversial: “whereas the concept of metabolism is widely applied at the interface of biochemistry and biology when referring to cells, organs, and organisms in biology, it appears to be a matter of dispute about whether to use this term further up the biological hierarchy… the contested point is whether there exist any controls, information-mediated feedback cycles, or evolutionary mechanisms working on the systems level as such.”
What is not is in dispute and is common ground between energy/ material flow analysis, ecological economics and ecological Marxism is that that “the economic process, like any other life process, is irreversible (and irrevocably so); hence it cannot be explained by dynamics alone. It is thermodynamics, through the Entropy law, that recognises the qualitative distinction which economists should have recognised at the outset between the inputs of valuable resources (low entropy) and the final outputs of valueless waste.” (Energy and Economic Myths, Georgescu-Roegen).
Common Ground
Paul Vernadsky’s claim that there is no common ground here is wrong. The evidence of this common ground can be found throughout the work of Burkett and the other metabolic rift theorists, and in the mature works of Marx and Engels. The common ground exists because it is firmly rooted in material reality.
Paul invokes the sun as proof that “entropy is insignficant for the ecological crisis” as if he has just discovered something that has been overlooked by 50 years of ecological science. Zack Muddle (Solidarity 673) also thinks the existence of the sun was overlooked by the ecological economists.
This is a misunderstanding. Georgescu-Roegen writes on how “the sun radiates annually [a] fantastic flow… only [a small part is] intercepted at the limits of the earth’s atmosphere, with roughly one half of that amount being reflected back into outer space...The total world consumption of energy currently amounts to no more than [a fraction]. From the solar energy that reaches ground level, photosynthesis absorbs only [a fraction].”
The human social metabolism is in open dissipative system situated within the open dissipative system of the biosphere. Solar energy, mostly via green plants and trophic cascade, creates low entropy terrestrial stocks of solar energy on Earth. We also draw directly on low entropy flows of solar radiation.
The stocks we find in our environment are largely products of living organisms that have already fed off low entropy solar energy: food, fossil fuels, mineral deposits, timber. The issue that the ecological economists are concerned with is how human society sustains itself and grows by drawing on the low entropy stocks produced by the biosphere as well as directly tapping the low entropy flows from solar radiation. By squandering low entropy stocks capitalist society has broken “the budget constraint of living on solar income” (Herman Daly).
Georgescu-Roegen’s “gloomy pessimism” is due to the fact that he sees the entropy producing practices of the capitalist social metabolism as something inherent in the human condition. “Green plants store part of the solar radiation which in their absence would immediately go into dissipated heat, into high entropy. That is why we can burn now the solar energy saved from degradation millions of years ago in the form of coal or a few years ago in the form of a tree. All other organisms, on the contrary, speed up the march of entropy. Man [sic] occupies the highest position on this scale, and this is all that environmental issues are about.” (Energy and Economic Myths)
While this is no doubt true in the abstract, it is also true that the speed of entropy production could be significantly reduced by a more careful, planned, ecologically sensitive organisation of human labour. Such an approach is precluded by the incessant pursuit of profit. This is the point of departure for Marxists and ecological economics. The secular trend to increase labour productivity means ever increasing material throughput per labour hour. The social metabolism under capitalism is a blind, fossil-fuelled acceleration of the materials of the earth into ecological crisis.
Lithium
Zack realises refined lithium has a lower entropy than lithium ore. But misses what would be obvious to any lithium refinery worker: the refining of lithium ore requires large energy and material inputs and produces large quantities of useless waste. In fact, this is true for every production and consumption process and is discussed at length in Capital. The movement from low entropy inputs to lower entropy product and high entropy waste is similar to that which describes biological metabolism: "Any living organism simply strives at all times to compensate for its own continuous entropic degradation by sucking low entropy (negentropy) and expelling high entropy. Clearly, this phenomenon is not precluded by the Entropy Law, which requires only that the entropy of the entire system (the environment and the organism) should increase. Everything is in order as long as the entropy of the environment increases by more than the compensated entropy of the organism." (Georgescu-Roegen). So while lithium refining produces low entropy lithium, it only does so at the cost of dissipating greater quantities of high entropy matter-energy into the environment. So it is with all processes of human production and consumption that sustain the social metabolism.
The low entropy lithium is also subject to entropic degradation. Marx does not use the word entropy but he was well aware that entropic degradation occurs both in generative processes of productive consumption and through non-use: "Physical deterioration...is of two kinds. The one arises from use [open], as coins wear out by circulating, the other from the lack of use, as a sword rusts when left in its scabbard" (p527-8, Capital vol 1).
Zack is concerned about the difference between the entropy levels of atmospheric methane against atmospheric CO2. A molecule of methane has lower entropy than a molecule of CO2 yet is a much more potent (and hence destructive) greenhouse gas. But this is the wrong comparison. Nobody claims that it is possible to map precise entropy levels onto scales of ecological destruction. Atmospheric methane and CO2 are waste products from different production processes and the correct comparison is between the entropy levels of the inputs to those production process (object of labour, means of production, ancillary materials like fuel etc) and the waste outputs. Whatever labour process we observe the direction of travel is the same.
The issue is not the precise entropy level but the general flow from low to high entropy in each and every process of production and consumption and how to sustain this on a planet of finite stocks of low entropy matter. The laws of thermodynamics were discovered through the study of heat engines during the industrial revolution and Marx and Engels followed these developments closely (p.171, Marx and the Earth). A key figure is the French engineer, Sadi Carnot, who realised that although energy could not be created or destroyed, human's "can use only a particular form of energy. Energy thus came to be divided into available or free energy, which can be transformed into work, and unavailable or bound energy, which cannot be so transformed. Clearly, the division of energy according to this criterion is an anthropomorphic distinction like no other in science... thermodynamics is at bottom a physics of economic value." (Georgescu-Roegen). Regardless of the precise entropy level of a molecule of methane against a molecule of CO2, for all human purposes both gases are useless by the time they are dissipating into the Earth's atmosphere. Thermodynamics allows us to see that there is a physical scale of uselessness that is related to both energy conversions (during natural and human production processes) and the passage of time.
As Zack says, there is plenty of untapped solar energy and increasing the amount of energy available for human use would allow more complete and careful recycling in the abstract. Herman Daly and others within the ecological economics school criticise Georgescu-Roegen's fourth law on this basis. But this debate about the theoretical limits of recycling is a debate within ecological economics. Both sides ignore the fact we live in a capitalist society which organises production on the basis of minimum work for maximum output. This not only precludes a lot of recycling but also the careful economic planning needed to produce for human need whilst minimising waste.
Planetary boundaries
Paul doubts entropy has any significance to ecological crisis. But accelerating entropic degradation is driving us beyond all planetary boundaries. Rising levels of high entropy atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases are driving climate change and ocean acidification. Rising levels of high-entropy fertiliser and sewage run-off are driving hypoxic deadzones. Rising volumes of high-entropy biocidal novel chemicals are causing biodiversity loss and human health problems. The ever-expanding frontier of primary industry is destroying biodiverse wilderness.
Far from being “insignificant”, capitalism’s accelerating entropic degradation is the tap root of all anthropogenic ecological crises, creating an “irreparable rift in the interdependent process between social metabolism and natural metabolism” (Marx).
There are other ways to approach and understand metabolic rift theory that will be explored in further reading groups.
