It is common in knowledgeable circles to talk about the development of civilization in terms of entropy discussion. The term 'entropy' was introduced to describe the natural law always governing the flow of energy from source to sink. Sunshine is radiant energy from our prime source, the Sun. We can regard it as income because we can rely on it to supply the energy to power some of our technological systems as well as all the natural systems. However, most of the concentrated energy that powers technological systems comes out of the fossil fuels and uranium in crustal store. So it is energy capital that is being irrelaceably dissipated as it does work in industrialized infrastructure for us. Replacing some of that use of energy capital by using energy income in solar and wind systems to intermittedly supply some electricity will only slightly ease the inevitable powering down.
Moreover, useful energy is always a property of materials.In many cases, these irreplaceable materials are transformed into waste by the action of friction with such unintended deleterious consequences as land, sea and air pollution, climate disruption and ocean acidification and warming. So society will have to adapt to an industrialised civilization running down.
No comments:
Post a Comment