Definition
“Energy” is traditionally defined as the ability to do work; it represents the physical capacity to achieve anything. Indeed, nothing can happen without the irreversible expenditure of energy. It follows that adequate affordable energy is essential to the maintenance of civilization. Society should therefore be aware of the implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the entropy law), which is the primary natural law governing biophysical processes, including energy use.
The Second Law states that every real process increases global “entropy” or disorder. Economic production and consumption necessarily consume and dissipate usable energy and other material resources and pollute the ecosphere no matter how efficient or circular the economy is – there are no exemptions from the Second Law (see Circular Economy and Society and Steady-State Economy).
History
Modern techno-industrial (MTI) society is the product of abundant cheap energy, mainly fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) (see Energy Consumption Behavior). Fossil fuels (FF) are the means by which an industrializing society could produce the food and all other resources needed to sustain the growth of the human enterprise. Since 1820, the human population has ballooned from one billion to eight billion and the world has experienced an unprecedented 100-fold expansion of real gross world product – all propelled by a 917-fold expansion of FF combustion (Table 35.1).
As expected, the MTI society continues to rely on FF for approximately 81% of its energy needs. Virtually every agricultural product, from artichokes to zucchinis, is grown using FF, and most industrial processes and products – including the service sectors – are powered mostly by FF. Even the recent explosion of seemingly material-free artificial intelligence applications has been accompanied by a massive increase in electricity consumption – and 60% of the world’s electricity is still generated by FF.
There is an ominous consequence of the second thermodynamic law: Modern society’s fossil-powered expansion has propelled humanity far into ecological overshoot. Overshoot drastically accelerates entropy, with humans consuming resources and polluting at rates that exceed the ecosphere’s regenerative and assimilative capacities. Anthropogenic climate change, tropical deforestation, plunging biodiversity, ocean acidification, land and soil degradation, microplastic contamination, the pollution of everything – indeed, virtually all so-called environmental problems – are entropic co-symptoms of overshoot. MTI society is consequentially depleting and disordering the biophysical basis of its own existence (Rees, 2023).
[TABLE]
The best-known symptom of overshoot is climate change. 75% of climate change/global heating is attributable to increasing carbon dioxide () emissions, the major entropic waste output by the weight of industrial economies. Industrialization has elevated atmospheric by 50%, from a preindustrial 280 parts per million in 1800 to about 420 ppm in 2024. Other greenhouse gases have increased by even greater percentages. Consequently, the world is recording temperatures unprecedented in the past 24,000 years, with 2023 as the warmest year in the instrumental record so far. The International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) strong target of limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial times is getting out of reach, as current government policies would cause an average global temperature increase of 2.7°C by 2100. This is sufficient to destroy agriculture in many regions and render large areas of Earth uninhabitable. There will likely be mass human migrations, complicated by global food shortages, regional famines, and inevitable geopolitical chaos. By definition, overshoot is ultimately a terminal condition.
Humans tend to respond to problems in simplistic, reductionist ways. Is anthropogenic global heating a concern? And is it caused by carbon dioxide emissions? No problem – without systems thinking or an ecological context (and ignoring overshoot), the solution seems simple: just replace fossil fuels with a clean, green alternative. Thus, a whole new industrial sector is born, encouraged by the widely publicized fantasy of 100% renewable green energy by 2050 (Jacobson et al., 2017). Indeed, according to industry hype, the modern renewable energy (RE) transition is well underway, led by wind and solar electricity generation.
The supply of RE has grown by approximately 2% annually since 1990 and global investment in energy transition technologies exceeded $1 trillion for the first time in 2022. However, wind and solar power – where most investment is going – still provided only 14.3% of global electricity in 2023 (compared to about 60% by FF). In short, wind and solar power only cover about 2.8% of the world’s final energy consumption (see EI, 2024). It would be necessary to install additional capacity four times the current cumulative global stock of wind and solar infrastructure to fully displace fossil fuels from electricity generation alone – and the 80% of the global energy mix, which is non-electric would have yet to be addressed.
The above scenario assumes no increase in demand, even though demand is increasing – in 2023, total primary energy consumption grew by about 12.3 exajoules (EJ). FF accounted for 7.4 EJ, while the increase from wind and solar was about 5.4 EJ in FF equivalent terms. In short, the growth in RE electricity generation lags behind total demand growth. FF combustion and emissions therefore continue their inexorable increase – at least until recoverable reserves are depleted/dissipated.
Different Perspectives
There are several additional sources of entropic disordering. The International Energy Agency projects the total mineral (e.g., copper, nickel, or cobalt) demand for clean energy technologies to double under existing policies and quadruple in their sustainable development scenario (SDS). Mineral demand associated with electric vehicles and batteries would grow approximately 30-fold under the SDS by 2040. Lithium consumption grows fastest at over 40 (possibly 50) times. The SDS projects a 40% increase in demand for copper and 60–70% for nickel and cobalt. It is further relevant to consider the massive increase in demand for steel, concrete, and glass – among the most carbon- and resource-intensive modern building materials – needed to build out RE infrastructure. All this portends an unprecedented explosion in pernicious mining, smelting, and manufacturing activities whose impact will likely worsen as the quality of ore grades declines over time.
And what about the competition for space – including agricultural land – represented by the expansion of wind and solar power. For example, given the average energy density of US solar power arrays (Bolinger & Bolinger, 2022) and the power consumption of electric vehicles, it would take as much as 4,400 sq miles of solar panels (almost the area of Connecticut) just to keep the electric equivalent of four million mostly diesel 500-miles-per-day Class 8 trucks on US roads – and this represents a small fraction of total US energy demand.
In short, the mining, transportation, refining, manufacturing, installation, and maintenance activities – mostly still fossil fuel dependent – associated with the growth of RE, combined with the loss of land productivity, would impose a formidable additional, often toxic, entropic burden on Earth’s waters, land and atmosphere. All this is on an ecosphere already reeling from the excesses of overshoot (Fletcher et al., 2024).
Application
While the RE transition is barely underway, its implications for the planet and people are already alarming. It augments existing energy supplies and thus accelerates the entropic disordering of the planet. This comes as no surprise, as RE and supportive technologies are actually intended to maintain the growth-based status quo by alternative means. In this light, MTI society’s simplistic approach to combating climate change is a delusional distraction from facing overshoot as a crucial meta-crisis.
What the leaders – and many citizens – of our “world-in-overshoot” refuse to acknowledge is that even today’s egregiously unequal levels of production and consumption are unsustainable. Sustainable production and consumption mean absolutely less production and consumption combined with greater social equality (see Sufficiency, Fair Consumption Space, Degrowth).
The good news is that it is at least technically possible to increase the energy and resource productivity of industrial economies by up to 80%. Indeed, the measures to realize this productivity increase will almost certainly be demanded. It is ironically inevitable that renewable energy will power any future society, but much of it will be low-tech energy – think “oxen” and “water-wheels” – serving much smaller local economies and many fewer people living in inter-connected but more nearly self-reliant bio-regions.
The crucial question is whether the rulers of the MTI world will act in time to organize an orderly transition to “one-Earth living” or whether the planet’s responses will impose their own solution.
Further Reading
Bolinger, M., & Bolinger, G. (2022). Land requirements for utility-scale PV: An empirical update on power and energy density. IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics, 12(2) (March), 589–594. https://doi.org/10.1109/JPHOTOV.2021.3136805.
EI. (2024). Statistical review of world energy. 2024. Energy Institute. Available at: https://www.energyinst.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/1542714/EI_Stats_Review_2024.pdf (accessed: 8 January 2025).
Fletcher, C., Ripple, W.J., Newsome, T., Barnard, P., Beamer, K., Behl, A., Bowen, J., Cooney, M., Crist, E., Field, C., Hiser, K., Karl, D.M., King, D.A., Mann, M.E., McGregor, D.P., Mora, C., Oreskes, N., & Wilson, M. (2024). Earth at risk: An urgent call to end the age of destruction and forge a just and sustainable future. PNAS Nexus, 3(4), 106. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae106.
Jacobson, M.Z., Delucchi, M.A., Bauer, Z.A.F., Goodman, S.C., Chapman, W.E., Cameron, M.A., Bozonnat, C., Chobadi, L., Clonts, H.A., Enevoldsen, P., Erwin, J.R., Fobi, S.N., Goldstrom, O.K., Hennessy, E.M., Liu, J., Lo, J., Meyer, C.B., Morris, S.B., Moy, K.R., & Yachanin, A.S. (2017). 100% clean and renewable wind, water, and sunlight all-sector energy roadmaps for 139 countries of the world. Joule, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2017.07.005.
Rees, W.E. (2023). The human ecology of overshoot: Why a major ‘population correction’ is inevitable. World, 4(3), 509–527. https://doi.org/10.3390/world4030032.