Arthur Noll
On the Energy Resources Yahoo Group, David Delaney wrote:
Using energy does not make the used energy disappear, but reduces its capacity to support further use. When we “consume” energy, we really consume its capacity to do work. the energy itself remains in existence, but dispersed and degraded.
The trouble with applying entropy to our troubles, is that the most important energy coming into our system, has not degraded to being less useful. Sunlight continues to be as good as it ever was. Over very long time spans, we can expect it to degrade, but for the moment, what drove life in the past remains as high quality as ever.
Our real problem, is that we have injected extra energy into the system, energy that had been stored outside of the biosphere, and predictably, when you put too much energy into a system, things come apart.
I believe we have the instinct that disordering things in many cases is good, we have it mixed up that we have actually ordered things, when a more rigorous inspection reveals disorder. We tend to see a tangled thicket of bushes and vines as disordered, for example, and a smooth surfaced area where we can walk freely and see easily, as ordered. Yet to cut down the bushes, trees, and vines, kill them and let them decay without replacement, is actually a huge disordering.
Whenever you have one entity, with it’s set of defining dimensions, and break it down into two or more entities, each with it’s own set of defining dimensions, you have vastly increased the “ways of being”, that define order and disorder. Since adding enough energy to a system will generally cause things to come apart, this disorders the system. But since our instincts are often seeing this as good, we tend to do too much of it, we disorder the earth too much.