Energy—The Critical Resource - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 25

Principle 1—The Real Economics of Energy
All economic activity constrains energy. It does not use energy.
All economic activity is a process of constraining the flow of energy to maxi-
mize its usefulness, while simultaneously conserving its sustainability and
the right of future generations to the same quality of life we, in the present
generation, enjoy.
Entropy, according to the laws of thermodynamics, is basically the ability
to do work. High or low concentrations of energy within energy-providing
materials represent the potential ability to perform useful tasks. Ability to
accomplish work, in turn, is dependent on concentrations of energy-yielding
materials. A piece of firewood contains concentrated solar energy from the
last few decades. A lump of coal has within concentrated solar power from
millions of years ago. Similarly, a gallon of oil or gasoline, termed fossil fuel , is
probably more appropriately recognized as partial solar energy from bygone
geological eras. It is nonrenewable because we cannot bring back sunlight,
the plants that captured it, or the life-forms that used it from past millennia.
It is readily understandable that humans focused economic activity on
such attractive sources of energy as firewood, coal, and liquid fuel, because
they represent highly concentrated forms of energy. Burning them releases
the stored energy, even as it reduces the material to ashes, carbon dioxide,
and water, thereby offering the ability to do what we humans deem useful
work. It can heat our homes, generate electricity, or power our engines. Of
course, once the materials are burned, the concentration of energy dissipates,
and the overall system within which the economic activity occurs moves
toward a state of less available energy to do further work.
The process of accumulating sources of energy can be examined within
this context. Because a situation of complete dissipation of stored energy
would entail no concentrated ability whatsoever to accomplish work of any
kind, the process of accumulating energy is essentially an act of concentra-
tion. We mine coal. We cut trees for firewood. We drill for oil the world over,
which incites wars and much political strife—but that is another story. These
are merely acts whereby we attempt to replace situations of dwindling con-
centrations of energy with those of high concentrations of energy.
Many of the common attitudes about this process are incorrect or illusory
when examined in the larger picture. The fundamentally important point of
the laws of thermodynamics is that we have no ability to create new energy
but merely to move it around. Even as we seek to exploit and thus accu-
mulate an energy source, such as mining a pile of coal or cutting a stack of
firewood, the larger system within which we operate is moved inexorably
toward the rapid dissipation of available energy. We may be pleased that
we have stored some firewood for the winter, but the entire forest system is
moved slightly toward a lesser ability to supply more firewood. The coal may
have come from a mountain in West Virginia (a geological storehouse of a