Mastodawn

Jonathan Schofield Dec 21

Exergy seems to be in the currents running through my podcast subscriptions.

@PlanetCritical has an interview with Tânia Sousa about ‘Exergy Economics’ where the emphasis is on specific examples in service to explaining the concepts (56 minutes)
https://overcast.fm/+BTFx1qLQ0U

And Nate Hagens has a very clear monologue that places exergy in the wide thermodynamic boundary of our behaviour (30 minutes) https://overcast.fm/+BTumUml6tU

I found both illuminating

Exergy Economics | Tânia Sousa — Planet: Critical

You’ve heard of energy—but do you have any idea what exergy is? On today’s astounding episode of Planet: Critical, scholar Tânia Sousa explains the concept of exergy—the quality of energy—and why it is critical to understanding our energy systems, our economies, and energy transitions. She explains energy degradation, energy efficiency, and the how differences in available energy actually create the necessary gradients for life to happen. What this means, however, is that the pockets of high quality energy deposits around the world are a gift—and when we go through them, by burning all the oil or mining all the mines, then we will find ourselves in a world where we are capable of doing much less useful work. Planet: Critical is approaching its five year anniversary, and yet this conversation felt like the very beginning of this journey, when every episode was a revelation. And so it feels important to end the year with this mind-blowing hour. Happy festivities to one and all. See you in 2026. 🌎 Subscribe to…

Jonathan Schofield Dec 21

…The key concept is that every time work is done (moving a limb, having a thought, heating a home, generating a stupid LLM response) the scope of the operating differential between the power source and the environment (in which the work is to be done) governs the amount of work that *can* be done.

This is a power source’s exergy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exergy

And thus not all energy sources are created equal. Some offer innately higher gradients.

Exergy - Wikipedia

Jonathan Schofield Dec 21

…What Nate does really well, in my view, is put this in context of the 4th law of thermodynamics.

“The maximum power principle says that if energy is available, systems will self-organize to access and use it. And flatten that gradient over time. When there’s a usable gradient and positive feedbacks, whatever designs, behaviors and structures pull more useful power tend to outcompete their alternatives…

Jonathan Schofield Dec 21

…“That's the fourth law in a nutshell. Successful competing systems evolve to maximize power, the sweet spot of as much energy as quickly as possible.”

Look around in the news and you can see the world’s greediest doing that to a greater degree than the next person, everywhere. But…

“There's a problem. In a finite world, accessing maximum power can, at certain times, like now, imply less power available later…

Jonathan Schofield

…“Fossil energy gives us an explosive burst of growth, but not only are fossil fuels finite, they’re also destabilizing the climate that sustains their continued use.

Sometimes, like now, the very success of energy capture becomes the seed of an organism’s or a species’ undoing.

So here’s the question I want to begin to explore. If life self organizes to maximize energy flow, and we homo sapien sapiens figured this out, is there any chance we can recognize and bend this rule?

Jonathan Schofield Dec 21

…“Can conscious, self-aware creatures like us introduce something akin to a fifth law of thermodynamics?

Imagine a system that maximizes not instant power, but power through time that learns to optimize something like endurance. In other words, a principle of maximum *sustained power*.”

Sounds to me like the question the rest of our lives needs to figure out some lasting answers to

Jonathan Schofield Dec 21

…One of the themes in the discussion with Tânia above is mining. It’s only really skated over, but just enough to highlight that mining is a gradient too.

And one of the qualities of transforming energy is degradation. The process of doing transformation a lot, without invoking the processes of life, is the lowering of gradients *rapidly*.

In Mark’s linked post the question is “What if we don’t have enough?” But the question is also “What happens when we think we do?”

https://mstdn.social/@markhburton/115756784737058486

Jonathan Schofield Dec 21

…Above I said “without invoking the processes of life” because…

I’m no physicist or ecologist or student of entropy but my superficial understanding is that life seems to have engineered some extremely valuable tricks in that it manages to slow entropy. Like industrialism, it captures energy from the environment but, crucially, life does it with unparalleled efficiency and in a way where the byproducts (organisms and their natural waste streams) are recycled regeneratively…

Jonathan Schofield Dec 21

…Crucially for modernity, industrialism is extremely far removed from the tricks that life can do. Its major dynamic is degradation: the flattening of gradients that are never to be regenerated on human timescales.

We cannot just step away from this because we are all inducted into this pattern.

But that pattern cannot last…

Jonathan Schofield Dec 21

…Whether we have ‘enough’ for one initial round of an ‘energy transition’ (that isn’t a transition at all because it is intent on powering more transformations in aggregate) is very far from the only pertinent question to grapple with.

It would be good if we could start to engage with this more broadly than niche degrowthers

Jonathan Schofield Dec 23

…appending to the above exergy-themed thread, its tl;dr is essentially this post from Graydon

https://canada.masto.host/@graydon/115758794075467055

Graydon (@[email protected])

Efficiency is not a suitable objective. Efficiency is one measure by which one can usefully compare equivalently effective processes to achieve an objective. tl;dr, it doesn't matter how effectively you produce something that doesn't work. And you do have to (eventually) define "works" if you want to know what you're doing. (Arguments for efficiency rot my socks, and I've been seeing a bunch go by today.)

Canadian Mastodon Server

Dr Susi Arnott Dec 21

@urlyman This thread continues to get to the point...
#systembreakdown

Jonathan Schofield Dec 21

@SusiArnott I am a broken record (with some variation)

@urlyman @SusiArnott

...and good cause.

@urlyman We do that - but that's the domain of modelling for prediction, an inductive-deductive process ("rule inference"-"rule based rule application").

Bacteria don't do that.

Jonathan Schofield Dec 21

@tg9541 modelling helps. But they’re not the whole piece. We have had pretty damn good climate models for at least 4 decades. They’ve barely shifted us

Jonathan Schofield Dec 21

@tg9541 on the issue of bacteria, Nate points out:

“estimates suggest that bacteria living in deep rock may make up 20% or more of all life on earth. Are they doing Maximum Power Principle? Or something else. Some of the most successful species are sessile.”

https://overcast.fm/+BTumUml6tU

Behavioral Thermodynamics Part 1: Beyond the 4th Law? — The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

In this week’s Frankly, Nate takes thermodynamics out of the physics classroom, utilizing its principles to explain the invisible forces behind growth, competition, and complexity in our world. Competing life systems build organization out of chaos in order to maximize power usage today, even if it potentially undermines survival tomorrow. Within our energetic reality of finite and destabilizing fossil fuels, this tendency towards instant power accelerates us towards planetary overshoot. Nate poses a question in response to this tendency: What happens when a species becomes conscious of the self-fulfilling drive to maximize energy flow? He suggests a “fifth law” of thermodynamics, which explains that a self-aware species might evolve to consciously prioritize future security over short-term gains. This “law” serves as a hopeful and mind-expanding invitation to rethink efficiency, progress, and wisdom in the world we experience today. What invisible energy gradients steer your daily habits and decisions?…

@urlyman Stable environments & very low metabolic rate - a dissipative process made possible by a complex self-reproducing enzyme system. The agent is life itself - through natural selection. Deep food chains are a completely different thing. There, animals are agent.

Jonathan Schofield Dec 21

@tg9541 fair and good point.

On the other hand, we need all the allegories and thought experiments we can muster to shift us away from our Seneca cliff

@urlyman We're apes on intellectual steroids, but still apes. Rationality doesn't lead as away from the cliff - it made us climb higher so that the fall is deeper.