Book Review – Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy (How do we deal with our inevitable descent into chaos?)

Jeremy Rifkin’s Entropy explains the irreversibility of energy consumption and the inevitability of increasing entropy, and argues for the need to transition to a low-entropy society.

 

A few weeks ago, I was waiting in line at the bus station to catch the school shuttle bus. In the distance, a blue bus I had never seen before approached. On the front of the bus, the words “electric bus pilot” were written. This can be seen as a part of the policy of installing electric vehicles and their infrastructure, which is receiving a lot of attention and active research in Korea and around the world these days. In the 21st century, all countries around the world are spending a lot of money to develop not only electricity, but also bioenergy and solar energy that can replace crude oil. But why is the world so obsessed with developing these alternatives? In this book, Jeremy Rifkin explains why we need to reduce our consumption of non-renewable energy and find alternatives, and outlines the problems and solutions.
When crude oil is refined into petroleum, naphtha, diesel, and heavy fuel oil, carbon dioxide is released. This carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, where it is used by plants as a raw material for photosynthesis and fixed into carbon. The plants store it in the form of sugar, which is then buried and deposited in the ground, and crude oil is produced over time. Following this logic, the energy we currently use is circular and can be renewed, right? We can think of it as a cycle. Jeremy Rifkin would firmly answer that it cannot. To understand this, we must first understand the concept of entropy and the law of entropy.
“Entropy is the degree of disorder, or more specifically, it is a measure of the degree to which useful energy in any system in the universe is converted into useless forms, and the law of entropy is the second law of thermodynamics, which states that everything in the universe starts out with a certain structure and value and progresses toward a state of disorganized chaos and waste, and that it is impossible to reverse this direction.”
To put this in energy terms, to borrow a phrase from Clausius, heat cannot move from a cold source (useless energy) to a hot source (usable energy) on its own; it has to do work around it.
The law of entropy is so self-evident that no exceptions have been found to date, whether physical or chemical. So what happened to the logic of the crude oil cycle mentioned above? In the example above, the entropy appears to have decreased, but the entropy of the system as a whole has actually increased: the entropy of the system has decreased, but the entropy of its surroundings has increased to a greater extent. Refining crude oil requires other sources of energy, and photosynthesis in plants involves the expenditure of biochemical energy. Jeremy Rifkin argues in his book that the law of entropy is absolute, and I believe that there are no exceptions to the law of entropy and that it is impossible to criticize it. We have to accept that the energy we use today is irreversible and non-renewable.
According to the law of entropy, the degree of disorder in the world is increasing, and the amount of useful energy is constantly decreasing. This is to say that humans are living under a great influence of energy, which makes it harder to live. On a global scale, how should we deal with this situation? Jeremy Rifkin has some thoughts on this. He argues that entropy growth is inevitable and that we need to move to a new social framework to slow it down. He argues that a few key changes must occur in the near term in order for this to happen. Ultimately, he argues, there must be a shift from a high-entropy society, or industrialized society, to a low-entropy society. There are several characteristics of a low-entropy society that he describes. Low-entropy societies need to reduce energy consumption as much as possible, and to do this, economically, societies need to limit consumption and curb materialistic expectations. There should also be a massive redistribution of wealth and power throughout society, and in terms of technology, they recommend using labor, not technology, as the means to use resources. Finally, politically, he emphasizes that the government that governs least is the best government, and that workplaces and communities should be egalitarian, not hierarchical, with equal voice.
As I said above, I agree with Jeremy Rifkin’s ideas about the law of entropy. However, his solutions for reducing the rate of entropy growth are so mechanistic that I have to wonder if they are even possible. Consider first the economic consequences of restricting consumers’ consumption in the short term. This reduces the amount of money in circulation, which lowers the production of producers, which in turn stifles investment in businesses. And because there is less demand, the price level becomes lower and lower, which can lead to severe deflation, which can lead to prolonged economic stagnation. I wonder if we can say that a society is a low-entropy society when these outcomes occur. It is also argued that wealth and power should be redistributed, but this is not feasible in practice. Because in a capitalist society, of course, there are some people who have accumulated wealth through unfair means, but can they redistribute the fruits of their abilities and efforts to the society without giving anything in return? Unless you’re talking about a socialist country, most countries in the world are capitalist, so this proposal is unrealistic. It also emphasizes labor-intensive means of production as simple labor, not technology, and argues that the larger the tools of labor, the more capital and energy intensive they are, and the more entropy they create. In response, I think it is a hasty generalization to say that the use of automated tools rather than manual labor leads to faster entropy growth. For example, if a person makes a rice cake by hand and a water wheel that uses the height difference of water to make a rice cake, can we say that the water wheel increases entropy more? In the case of machines that use electricity to automate production, most of the electricity in Korea is generated by nuclear power, but there is also a small percentage of electricity from hydropower, tidal power, and wind power. The driving force behind this power generation is the movement of water or wind by the sun’s heat, so the increase in the sun’s entropy is not attributable to humans. Therefore, using energy from nuclear or thermal power, which increase entropy rapidly, contributes to the rapid increase in entropy, but using automated production tools does not make us a high-entropy society.
What Jeremy Rifkin is trying to say in this book is self-evidently true. The law of entropy dictates that entropy at the cosmic level is increasing rapidly, and we need to reduce our consumption in preparation for the coming energy shortage. However, many of Jeremy Rifkin’s solutions, as mentioned above, seem impractical and are theoretical and idealistic. He asks society to go backwards, from industrialization to agriculture to prehistory. Of course, it will not be easy to find a clear solution, but these solutions do not fit into the modern world and are not realistic, so we need to think harder and find a way forward.