From Thermodynamics to Economics and Ecology - Thanatia: The Destiny of the Earth's Mineral Resources - page 79

put forward exergy as a physical measure of the value of things as an alternative to
their market price. Exergy and exergy cost provide complementary, not the sole,
information about the mark that Man leaves on Earth. One should not ignore them
either::: to ignore them is as thoughtless as to extol them as the unique instruments
for the management of natural resources and the environment.
3.3.4 Thermoeconomics a new vision of saving natural resources
Relativism is a main feature of resource accounting. As was seen in Chap. 2, many
economists have sought an objective rationalising principle on which to base their
arguments. This search has noteworthy precedents from historical energeticists who
proposed, as early as the 1880s, an energy theory of value 10 . They identified the
economic value of a product as the sum of energy required to obtain it. This idea
has since been sharply rejected by economists simply because it is not possible
to identify the value formed in the market exchange with the amount of energy
consumed in the production process.
However, a stream of economists led by the works of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
have raised alarms triggered by the fact that it is no longer possible to maintain the
mechanicist myth that the Earth's resources are inexhaustible (Sec. 2.4.4.1). Clearly
depletion of energy resources and raw materials occurs. And clearly no land receiv-
ing residues (chemical, nuclear and/or thermal wastes) does so without absorbing
and eventually suffering damage. Humankind must embrace the conservation of
resources, the protection of the environment and sustainable development.
The 1987 Brundtland Commission Report that lay the foundation for sustainable
policy and practice, stated that in order for developing countries to address the gap
which separates them from industrialised ones and achieve a minimum standard of
living, they must grow to such an extent that by the year 2025 the world's energy
consumption will have increased fivefold. But the planetary ecosystem could never
support this level of consumption, so “the only reasonable strategy is conservation”
(Georgescu-Roegen, 1971).
Hence why, some economists look again to Thermodynamics, in fact, to the
Second Law. Their approach is qualitative, conceptual, metaphorical, philosophical
but not operational. The lack of the latter is not just because of the conceptual
distance between these two fields. As one might expect, it is an arduous task to
explain the concept of entropy to social scientists in terms of heat and temperature
and then convince them that it is related to their respective fields. This is why
entropy is used as a metaphor outside the Thermodynamic realm. In the authors'
view, by simply substituting their terms of “low and high entropy” for “high and
low exergy”, the problem becomes solved. This permits thinking in understandable
energy terms (kJ or kWh) instead of units of entropy (energy over temperature).
Furthermore, as explained previously, exergy, as opposed to energy, is never con-
10 See a thorough description of energeticists thinking in Martinez-Alier and Schlüpmann (1991).