In Just 60 Years, Neoliberal Capitalism Has Nearly Broken Planet Earth

[NNadir]

37. No offense taken.

I generally have a strong reaction to implications that a particular socio-economic system is responsible for environmental degradation.

I made fun of that concept - that solutions to problems are only viable to the extent that they are absorbed or possible in only some (usually idealized) economic system - some years ago, in a poll I attached to a post on another website, where, interestingly, I was banned for telling the truth:

Smashing the Corporate Robber Baron Centralized Power System with Individual Power Systems.

I have always wanted to be a "socialist-libertarian advocate of liberationist hemp farming in the Cuban people's state," but never had the guts to do it.

(The banning was delicious, and well worth it; particularly as I find rote anti-nukes to be an ethically questionable, indeed, dangerous lot.)

It was not so much the "second law" part that got me, it was the "neo-liberal capitalist" part that set me off. I don't attribute the degradation of the environment to be a function of a particular political ideology or system. I attribute it to generalized ignorance and myopia. The best system in the world will fail if the participants are fools, as we are currently seeing in the American elections.

I am aware of Schroedinger's book on life, but never actually read it, although the origins of life has long been an interest of mine, chiefly because of what may pass for a "spiritual" need to believe that life on this planet is not as unique as I often think it is. I've flirted with a lot of crazy ideas in my already too long life, among them, the Anthropic Cosmological Principle about which Frank Tipler's always prattling. It seems to me that if some of his rhetoric were true, then the fact that unintelligent life is replacing intelligent life in this planet, and that the unintelligent life is engaged in biological event in which it destroys its own carrying capacity, well then the whole universe is in a world of hurt.

Still, I'm an optimist, in the sense that if this planet dies, another will be born, and the nice thing about dying is to make room for that which will be born, in my less than humble opinion anyway.

To show we're still friends, in spite of our coarse words in this exchange from the series of desultory lectures they give at the Princeton Plasma Physics lab - the lectures making the lab more useful than generating electricity from fusion power has proved to be - let me suggest a video lecture on the origins of life that I watched with my son the aspiring artist, rather than my son the aspiring materials scientist:

COLLOQUIUM: Chance, Necessity, and the Origins of Life It's not too heavy, and it's kind of fun, and since you mention the Maximum Entropy Production Principle, it has a nice statistical concept that I attempted to explain - a lot less elegantly - to my father, a creationist, when I was a kid. It's given as a "back of the envelope" calculation. Try it, you may like it.

I am not familiar with the principle of maximum entropy, but a quick look through Google scholar and that all wonderful Wikipedia suggests to me what it is, an effort to apply the mathematics of Boltzman and others to information theory. (I have seen this point about information theory raised in connection with Maxwell's Demon somewhere, the Demon being, like Schroedinger's cat, a useful analogy to visualize concepts in physics.) My cursory glance suggests that this theory applies to the interpretation of data sets, but that which it predicts must be testable.

I don't think that the proposition that "Neo-liberal capitalism" either by its presence or absence has lead to the demise of the planetary ecosystem is in fact, a testable hypothesis. If what you call "Neoliberal capitalism" refers to imperfect but worthy efforts to reach "World Development Goals" as articulated by the UN, and sometimes, for better or worse, funded by the (gasp) World Bank, I disagree with this. The Millenium World Development Goals is one of those rare international efforts that has succeeded to an appreciable degree: The proportion of people living on less than $1.25/day has dropped below one billion for the first time in many decades.

I note that rich countries often have birth rates well below replacement value; this would be true of the United States were it not for immigration, but lest anyone question it, I believe the United States is enriched, and has been enriched, but its immigrants, and the beautiful things their cultures bring to us.

To return to the second law of thermodynamics, we can say that on a planetary scale, the entropy of one critical element has in fact increased radically. That element is carbon. Stuart Kauffmann interestingly described life - which is carbon based - as an "eddy in thermodynamics." I once had the great privilege, with my sons, to sit for about two hours sitting and talking with Freeman Dyson in his office, during which that phrase came up, "an eddy in Thermodynamics" and he said that it was an elegant statement, and then went on to do a riff on Stuart Kauffman, and their acquaintance. Carbon of course, is the main carrier of that eddy, the matrix in which it occurs if you will. That, I think, is where the second law is most relevant to the environment.

Don't worry though, be happy: We'll soon have solar roadways in France.

Have a nice day tomorrow. No offense intended, none taken.