Energy choices
Sanders, Scott
BOOKS Energy choices ENTROPY: A NEW WORLD VIEW by Jeremy Rifkin, with Ted Howard The Viking Press. 305 pp. $10.95. Scott Sanders Earth is a finite and orderly system . If we mean to survive...
...We will soon have to quit spending this accumulated capital, as Buckminster Fuller calls it, and live on our income— the daily dose of solar radiation...
...Rifkin's best chapters are those devoted to the economics and politics of the transition from fossil fuels to the solar era...
...To many of us, this ancient wisdom may seem so elementary, so transparently true, that it hardly needs saying...
...By focusing attention on the energy basis for all human activities, Rifkin enables us to see the connections between our environmental and our social crisis...
...We blink, agree with this plain fact—and go on gobbling...
...Entropy reminds us forcefully that each wasteful use we make of the Earth's bounty diminishes the opportunities and increases the difficulties for all future life on this planet...
...New energy technologies, such as synfuels, nuclear fusion, and orbiting solar collectors, are spectacular examples of this...
...Knowing this, how then should we behave...
...Breathing, building nuclear reactors, digesting soybeans, writing books—it all requires energy, it all contributes to the increasing disorder of the planet...
...According to thermodynamics, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but the amount of usable energy within any closed system is conScoff Sanders is a novelist, essayist, and professor of English at Indiana University...
...We are like the child who is told that gobbling all the Halloween candy today will leave none for tomorrow...
...The book opens with some rather gimcrack intellectual history, showy but superficial, designed to prove that the Law of Entropy is bound to displace the Myth of Progress...
...In the last third of the book Rifkin readmits the sun...
...Thus Buckminster Fuller announces that Earth is a spaceship, with a fixed stock of provisions...
...By the way we choose to live and behave, we decide how quickly or how slowly the available energy in the world is dissipated...
...Toynbee, Spengler, Ortega y Gasset, and Marx, for example, are summed up in one paragraph and then sent packing as "gentlemen who have identified part of the historical jigsaw puzzle...
...Stated in another way, any system, left to itself, will become less and less orderly...
...Entropy is a measure of this disorder, and for the universe as a whole it is constantly increasing...
...Barry Commoner speaks of the planet's "carrying capacity...
...Having sketched his energy-equations, Rifkin then applies them, throughout the middle third of the book, to global problems ranging from urban decay to unemployment...
...Garret Hardin, likening the planet to an overgrazed pasture or exhausted woodlot, speaks of the "tragedy of the commons...
...Guess who has put the whole puzzle together...
...The heat-death of the universe, after all, may be inevitable, but it is also remote...
...Every structure we build— whether Trident submarines or bicycles, skyscrapers or geodesic domes, armies or food co-ops— represents an energy choice, and therefore also a moral choice...
...Borrowing a concept from physics, Jeremy Rifkin adds to this list of cautionary metaphors the notion of entropy...
...When people make these basic changes in the ways they relate to the world, their world view changes to reflect, rationalize, encourage, and explain the new circumstances...
...Ignoring the sun for a moment, we can speak of the Earth as a closed system...
...the more complex the structure the more energy required to sustain it...
...Just as the era of abundant fossil fuels brought forth the ideology of progress, the notion that bigger is better, the infatuation with growth and consumption, so now, in the twilight of the fossil fuel era, we grope toward an ideology of conservation, the notion that small is beautiful, less is more...
...Thus Rifkin shows that inflation should be blamed not on government spending or wage demands, but on the Law of Entropy...
...While the Law of Entropy will likely be incorporated into the emerging ecological world view, it is not likely to be embraced quite so fervently as Rifkin seems to hope...
...From Dennis Meadows we learn of the "limits to growth...
...Since each unit of energy produced costs more in entropic terms than the previous unit, the long-term real costs of energy use are bound to escalate...
...The Sears Tower in Chicago burns roughly the same amount of energy as Rockford, Illinois, a city of 150,000 people...
...A structure can be preserved only by drawing energy from the remainder of the system...
...Yet for the past two centuries of frantic industrialization this truth has been flouted...
...And the overdeveloped nations, including our own, still behave as if Earth's resources were infinite and its ecology were infinitely malleable...
...stantly decreasing...
...The Law of Entropy then tells us, if common sense has not already done so, that "every action we human beings take in this world either speeds up or slows down the entropy process...
...Critics of our gluttonous civilization have launched a variety of metaphors aimed at persuading us not merely to 'acknowledge but to act upon this ecological wisdom...
...Solar energy, of course, prevents Earth from being a closed system, and thus makes it possible for us to mitigate the effects of the Law of Entropy...
...Every gallon of poison dumped in the ocean, every pound of radioactive waste, will be left to contend with...
...Put briefly: Things fall apart, and it takes energy to mend them...
...Scott Sanders Earth is a finite and orderly system . If we mean to survive here for long, we must conserve the planet's wealth and respect its natural order...
...Our industrial civilization is powered by fossilized sunlight, in the form of coal and oil...
...Pretentiousness aside, Rifkin's central claim (which he could have found, incidentally, in Marx) appears valid: "When energy environments change, people are forced to change their ways of doing things—namely, the ways in which they transform energy from the environment...
...Ask any homeowner...
...Every barrel of oil we burn now will be denied to our descendants...
...When Rifkin says every action, he means just that...
Vol. 45 • February 1981 • No. 2
