https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/10/15/or-should-it-be-five-es-and-a-c/

Among the delusions flowing from our belief in infinite growth on a finite planet is that practical knowledge is also infinite. And if not infinite, then, with the expansion of higher education, at least available whenever we want it. But in our supranational corporate neoliberal system, some knowledge is over-valued while some is greatly undervalued solely on the basis of its immediate impact on corporate profits. Certain branches of law, for example, which deal with the corporate sector are highly valued – and those who have this knowledge are handsomely rewarded for the immediate benefits they bring to the corporate monopolies and cartels which long ago sucked the metaphorical oxygen out of markets. The same goes for branches of economics and accountancy focused on bank profits, causing huge distortions in the labour market because of the gargantuan rewards to be had in the banking and finance sector.

If these corporate sector monopolies and specialisms attract workers with the requisite knowledge, we might – once we are aware that even labour (and the knowledge that comes with it) is finite – wonder from where it is attracted? That is, if a disproportionate part of the knowledge workforce is attracted to banking and finance, which sectors face an opposite and equal loss of knowledge? One area of loss that followed the expansion of higher education in the late-1990s was in skilled manual occupations such as plumbing, electrics, and carpentry – although the resulting shortage has greatly raised the cost of these skills to the point that these days over a lifetime a plumber will be no worse off than a better-paid (but longer in qualifying) university professor. Indeed, it is in some areas of teaching that knowledge shortages are now the most pronounced. And one area in particular – physics – has suffered more than most:

“In total, 46% of teachers said their school was understaffed for physics teachers – more than twice the proportion as for biology teachers. The problem is most acute in England with 50% of teachers reporting a shortage of physics teachers, followed by 46% in Wales and 40% in Northern Ireland. This disparity is reported to be less of a problem for schools in the Republic of Ireland (16%) and in Scotland (23%).

“The survey of 2,932 teachers, heads of department and technicians, including 1,735 physics teachers, in the UK and the Republic of Ireland, highlights low morale in the physics teaching profession, with 30% of physics teachers saying they want to leave their school by 2025. Of those physics teachers wanting to leave their school, 17% said they wanted to leave the education sector entirely for a career change.

“Physics teachers may also favour moving abroad. When asked to describe their preferred next step, a third of those who responded (34% of 47 responses) wanted to move abroad…”

Most economists will likely tell us that the solution to this shortage is to pay more. But that doesn’t really work in a system in which even learning physics is deterred in practice. Not least because those physics teachers currently working are often overloaded with classes in chemistry, biology, and mathematics too because of the general shortage of teachers in the STEM subjects. Meanwhile, a history graduate can rise through the banking and finance sector to become the £600,000-per-year governor of the Bank of England (enjoying a higher salary than a teacher all of the way up the ladder).

If we had been fortunate enough to live in an infinite world, knowledge shortages of this kind would be of little concern. But as industrial civilisation hurtles past a basket of Earth limits (of which, climate is but one… and not necessarily the deadliest) having a population – including those at the top who make the decisions – largely illiterate about STEM subjects in general and physics in particular, is as dangerous as Earth limits themselves. Primarily, as Alexander Pope warned, because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Had our illustrious economic leaders had access to STEM subjects, particularly physics, they might have paid attention to three “Es” – Energy, exergy, and entropy (these last two might be added to the “three Es” (energy, economy, and environment) that this blog is concerned with. Energy, of course, is at the core of the real economy since, as Steve Keen famously put it:

“Capital without energy is a sculpture; labour without energy is a corpse!”

Nothing gets done without energy. Although, remarkably, economic models seldom include energy (which is why they are invariably wrong) or when they do, energy is assumed to be just a minor input to the productive process, and of far less value than capital and labour. In large part, this failing is due to the medieval thinking on which modern economics is based. Classical liberals like Adam Smith and David Ricardo could only describe the world as it appeared before them – they had watched old, feudal arrangements breakdown as a new industrial (although still largely powered with renewable energy) economy developed in the north of Britain. Aside from a few, inefficient, Newcomen beam engines, most of the new manufactories were powered by water. And most of the work appeared to be done by a growing army of wage labourers.

Not obvious to begin with, those water wheels – particularly when reinforced with iron – were far more powerful than the puny efforts of even the strongest industrial worker. And even as Adam Smith was publishing his Wealth of Nations, his near neighbour was putting the final touches to the technology which would usher in a spectacular period of coal-powered growth. Even Marx (in the Grundrisse) was moved to imagine that the coal-powered machinery of late-nineteenth century England must surely be a source of value even greater than that of labour alone… although he rejected the thought as it contradicted his political philosophy.

Marx was almost right though. It wasn’t the machinery – or the drive shafts which powered coal-fired manufactories of the period – but the potential energy locked up in the coal which was the source of value. As chemist turned economist Frederick Soddy explained in the early-1930s:

“Still one point seemed lacking to account for the phenomenal outburst of activity that followed in the Western world the invention of the steam engine, for it could not be ascribed simply to the substitution of inanimate energy for animal labour. The ancients used the wind in navigation and drew upon water-power in rudimentary ways. The profound change that then occurred seemed to be rather due to the fact that, for the first time in history, men began to tap a large capital store of energy and ceased to be entirely dependent on the revenue of sunshine. All the requirements of pre-scientific men were met out of the solar energy of their own times. The food they ate, the clothes they wore, and the wood they burnt could be envisaged, as regards the energy content which gives them use-value, as stores of sunlight. But in burning coal one releases a store of sunshine that reached the earth millions of years ago…

“Then came the odd thought about fuel considered as a capital store, out of the consumption of which our whole civilisation, in so far as it is modern, has been built. You cannot burn it and still have it, and once burnt there is no way, thermodynamically, of extracting perennial interest from it. Such mysteries are among the inexorable laws of economics rather than of physics. With the doctrine of evolution, the real Adam turns out to have been an animal, and with the doctrine of energy the real capitalist proves to be a plant. The flamboyant era through which we have been passing is due not to our own merits, but to our having inherited accumulations of solar energy from the carboniferous era, so that life for once has been able to live beyond its income. Had it but known it, it might have been a merrier age!”

Insofar as we – physicists excepted – think about energy at all these days, we tend to think of it as just another resource or commodity to be consumed. A physicist though, might point to the first law of thermodynamics, aka the conservation of energy. That is, energy is neither created nor consumed, it is merely changed from one state to another. The potential energy locked up in coal may undergo a chemical change using heat and oxygen, the by-product of which is heat. If this heat (far greater than the initial heat used to generate the reaction) is used to boil water (particularly pressurised water) we can produce sufficient steam to drive an engine or spin a turbine. That is, converting heat and pressure into the motion we require to make our machines work.

Physicists have a name for the work we derive from processes which convert energy from one state to another… exergy. And exergy translates into economics as value:

“Value, at its simplest, is merely the consequence of acting upon the world in a manner which ‘improves’ (some might say despoils) some part of it. If, for example, someone takes a pile of timber, a saw and some glue and nails, and then turns it into a table, they have added value. The same is true of goods and services across the economy. Wherever people act to improve the goods and services that we collectively consume, value is added… governments even attempt to tax that additional value via, well, Value Added Tax…”

Which would be great… if we lived on an infinite world where the first law of thermodynamics was the only one. Sadly, it isn’t. And the second law of thermodynamics haunts us. The second law, sometimes known as the irreversibility of natural processes, introduces us to that fifth “E” … entropy. Put simply, things break down not up (although this is not entirely true, since the universe creates pockets of complexity) or move from an ordered to a disordered state. One consequence of this for economics is that whenever energy is converted some of that energy is always lost as waste heat (which in physics means any temperature above absolute zero – but for practical purposes, we can observe that manual or mechanical work also generates heat well above the temperature that water freezes).

When an economist or politician talks about “improving productivity,” what they actually mean is the use of technology (and technological improvement) to maximise the useful work (exergy) and minimise the waste (entropy) generated when energy is converted from one state into another. This, of course, comes with the problem that technological improvement follows an “S” curve in which a series of cheap and easy modifications push us closer to a technology’s thermodynamic limit, leaving us with only difficult and expensive improvements which are often not worth the effort to make… there’s a reason why Mallard still holds the speed record – 126mph, set in 1938 – for a steam train, why commercial airlines no longer use supersonic aeroplanes, and why the latest attempt to build rockets to take people to the moon are beset by the same problems NASA encountered in the early-1970s.

Entropy has two impacts on value. The first concerns the quality of energy itself. Uranium and fossil fuels are lower entropy than diffuse sources like wind and solar… which is why the space needed by solar and wind farms is massive – they have to concentrate the energy source before they can convert it – in comparison to a nuclear power station or an internal combustion engine. Only a madman or a politician would believe that these energy sources are interchangeable and that a complex economy built on low entropy fossil fuels can continue unaffected when switched to high entropy renewable energy.

The second impact of entropy is equally dangerous, because maintaining complexity requires exergy. This is easiest understood when considering our built infrastructure. I refer to this as “the net energy pincer,” since it operates independently of the “energy cost of energy” – the exergy which has to be diverted to the transformation of energy to provide exergy to the wider economy. As time goes on, and infrastructure and technology built long ago is subject to the inevitable process of entropy, the energy cost of maintenance also grows:

“Since much of the built infrastructure that allows us to extract/generate and productively use energy was built decades ago, it creates a growing drag on the energy available to run the economy as a growing proportion of the energy available to us has to be diverted into repair and maintenance. Worse still, replacement costs are even higher. Whereas, for example, a power station might require hundreds of thousands of pounds in maintenance in a year, this is a tiny fraction of the billions of pounds required to build a replacement.”

Thirty years ago, the UK’s road network was among the best maintained on the planet… so much so that drivers were exceeding the speed limit simply because the ride was so smooth. At the same time, water and (especially) sewage infrastructure was undergoing a positive transformation as clean drinking water reached all but the most remote locations even as our rivers and beaches qualified for world-leading cleanliness awards where once raw sewage outflows had been common. Today, the opposite is true. Our rivers and beaches are among the worst in Europe, and even clean drinking water is no longer guaranteed. Nor is there a journey of more than a mile in the UK free from potholes or the rough, temporary repair thereof. Meanwhile, public buildings constructed in the 1970s are now having to be propped up with scaffolding poles as even the cost of repair is too great. And in one sense, these are the good news stories, since we can at least see entropy at work. The bigger problem lies in the raft of infrastructure which is quietly decaying out of sight. Concrete structures erected in the 1970s, for example, suffer spalling – sometimes called “concrete cancer” – which must be regularly treated to prevent structures from collapsing. And since, very often, the spalling is not visible from the outside, collapse can be sudden and catastrophic.

This type of entropy is obvious enough and can be commonly observed in our daily lives. Nobody ever bought a second-hand car, TV, or toaster and then watched it get better over time until it was as good as new again. The best that can be achieved – with considerable energy input – is to refurbish and recycle… but even here, entropy enforces decay and waste. Nevertheless, economists and political decision makers believe – or at least act as if they believe – that entropy does not apply to the economy. While vast volumes of currency may be provided for shiny new infrastructure (although even this may be coming to an end) nobody (governments, corporations, nor NGOs) wants to take on the hard task of maintaining the infrastructure we already have… and which billions of humans depend on for life support. The underlying assumption – based on economic theories and models developed at a time when resources were abundant while the human population worldwide was no more than 500 million – is still that we will have everything we need whenever we need it for ever and ever.

The UK – along with Germany – is leading the charge to test this economics to destruction. As successive governments rip infrastructural foundations like electricity generation, oil and gas refining, virgin steelmaking, and even food production out from beneath the wider economic edifice, it becomes ever more fragile and vulnerable even to the kind of shocks that it would have overcome just a few decades ago. It is, for example, highly unlikely that the UK (and possibly Europe as a whole) could survive another banking and financial system reset on the scale of 2008 (and since the debt load has grown exponentially since then, any crash that does occur will be bigger again). The UK is clearly ill-equipped militarily – following decades of cutbacks, most of its remaining armaments having been shipped off to Ukraine to be destroyed by the Russians, what remains is barely bigger than the military deployed to keep the peace in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Electricity blackouts are guaranteed now that the last coal-fired power station (which plugged the gap during last December’s cold snap) had closed, leaving the UK grid at the mercy of intermittent wind and even less secure foreign imports. And without massive subsidies our water and transport systems will continue to decay.

Against this backdrop, we can easily imagine what David Korowicz refers to as a “cascading disaster,” where, because our infrastructure is interdependent, problems do not remain isolated, but spill over into neighbouring systems. In the BBC docudrama, The Day Britain Stopped, the entire transport system of southern Britain is taken out by a growing cascade of failures following two apparently minor crashes on the M25 motorway. We witnessed something closer to the bone in September 2000, when a series of fuel protests by farmers and lorry drivers caused fuel shortages which then cascaded into critical infrastructure throughout the economy. Rail and bus services failed, emergency services became overstretched, and hospitals ran out of critical supplies. In 2014, the UK’s emergency planners carried out Exercise Hopkinson – an attempt at modelling and testing the response to a cascading disaster stemming from one of the (increasingly frequent) severe Atlantic storms hitting Britain and taking out critical electricity infrastructure (which, ironically, has now fallen victim to net zero):

“The assessment, which involved officials from all key departments and major industries, took place this summer following 12 months of preparation. It was designed to ensure emergency power plans were ‘fit for purpose’. Instead it ‘exposed the fact that, where contingency plans against power disruption exist, some of those plans are based on assumption rather than established fact’, according to a report of the exercise, distributed privately last month.

“Populations are far less resilient now than they once were, it concluded. ‘There is likely to be a very rapid descent into public disorder’…”

Fuel shortages of the kind seen in September 2000, for example, would quickly appear:

“One of the major problems identified by the exercise was that crucial fuel supplies, which would be ‘ever more vital in the absence of power, to run generators and emergency response vehicles’, may not be accessible because petrol stations and some fuel bunkers rely on electric pumps.

“The ‘simple’ solution of using generators is far more difficult to establish in reality, the report warns. Hinkley Point nuclear plant would trip off the system, automatically shutting down, when power went off but its ongoing safety would rely on backup generators and refuelling within 72 hours.”

The cascade would take out transport management systems as rail and road signalling failed. Emergency services would also gradually become immobile even taking into account plans to divert emergency fuel stocks to them. Even key grid engineers and equipment would be unable to get to where they are needed. Communications would fail without power as batteries ran down. Drinking water supplies would collapse as electric-powered pumps failed. And since the just-in-time business models operated across the food chain mean that there is comparatively little food in storage, there would be a real risk of starvation if the system couldn’t be quickly reset.

These then, are the overlooked five Es and a C of our current predicament:

Energy depletion as the energy cost of energy rises remorselessly
Exergy limits as our energy-harnessing technologies run into thermodynamic limits
The process of Entropy undermining our infrastructure and taking its toll on the wider Environment, leading to Economic failure, and
Cascading collapse as the critical infrastructure that we have taken for granted begins to fail.

Exactly how these cascading failures play out in practice cannot be known. But what we do know is that as the energy and resources which we used to build and maintain our life support systems deplete, and as energy costs rise even as entropy enforces its inevitable decay, cascading crises are going to feature widely in our future. And, like a rising tide, each new crisis saps away another slice of our former resilience. Until, inevitably, we pass a point of no return, beyond which our complex way of life can no longer be restored.