Energy, Complexity and Wealth Maximization

ISBN-13: 9783319808352 / Angielski / Miękka / 2018 / 593 str.

Robert Ayres

Recenzje

"Ayres does a great job in 'explaining energy or entropy to otherwise educated people' ... which was the starting point of this book. He not only illustrates the physical basics of thermodynamics in a very comprehensible way for non-physicists, but also points out the importance of energy for the evolution of mankind. Therefore, (energy) economists as well as people interested in the interdependency between physics, technology and economics will certainly enjoy reading this book." (Daniel Nachtigall, Journal of Economics, Vol. 121, 2017)

Spis treści

Preface.- Glossary of terms.- Glossary of people.- PART I.- CHAPTER 1. A BRIEF HISTORY OF IDEAS: ENERGY, ENTROPY AND EVOLUTION.- 1.1. Aristotle, Descartes, Newton and Leibnitz.- 1.2. Heat: caloric vs phlogiston.- 1.3. The birth of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.- 1.4. Chemistry: from Lavoisier to Gibbs.- 1.5. Electricity and electromagnetism.- 1.6. Geology and Earth science.- 1.7. Darwin and biological evolution.- 1.8. Ecology.- 1.9. Entropy, exergy, order and information.- 1.10. Monism, “energetics” and economics.- CHAPTER 2. THE COSMOS, THE SUN AND THE EARTH.- 2.1. Relativity, quantum mechanics and astronomy.- 2.2 The black hole in physics.- 2.3 Nucleosynthesis: Love among the nucleons.- 2.4. The Sun and solar system.- 2.5. The elements needed to sustain life (and technology).- 2.6. The terra-forming of Earth.- 2.7. The long-term future of Planet Earth.- 2.8 Summary of pre-biotic evolution.- CHAPTER 3. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE.- 3.1. Exogenesis?.- 3.2. The origin of organic monomers.- 3.3. From monomers to polymers.- 3.4. Self-replication of macromolecules (genes).- 3.5. Genetic code: RNA and DNA.- 3.6. Information transfer: the genetic code.- 3.7. Oxygen photosynthesis.- 3.8. The “Great Oxidation” and the “invention” of respiration.- 3.9. Evolution before the Cambrian explosion.- 3.10. The “Cambrian explosion”.- 3.11. Since the asteroid.- 3.12 Down from the trees.- CHAPTER 4. ENERGY, WATER, CLIMATE AND CYCLES.- 4.1. The Earth’s energy (exergy) balance.- 4.2. The hydrological cycle.- 4.3. Ocean currents and atmospheric circulation.- 4.4. Climate change.- 4.5. Bio-geochemical cycles.- 4.6. The carbon-oxygen cycle.- 4.7. The nitrogen cycle.- 4.8. The sulfur cycle.- 4.9. The phosphorus cycle.- 4.10. Thermodynamic dis-equilibrium.- Summary of Part I: From the “Big Bang” to nutrient cycles.- PART II.- CHAPTER 5. ENERGY AND TECHNOLOGY.- 5.1. The enhancement of skin.- 5.2. The taming of fire.- 5.3.Transmission of knowledge: writing and replication.- 5.4. The dawn of civilization and the beginning of agriculture.- 5.5. Agricultural surplus and cities.- 5.6. Slavery and conquest.- 5.7. Money and coinage.- 5.8. Productive technology.- CHAPTER 6. THE NEW WORLD – AND SCIENCE.- 6.1. The discovery of the New World.- 6.2. From charcoal and iron to coal and steel.- 6.3. Gunpowder and cannons.- 6.4. Steam power.- 6.5. Town gas, coal tar, aniline dyes and ammonia synthesis.- 6.6. Petroleum.- 6.7. The internal (infernal) combustion engine.- 6.8. Electrification and communications.- 6.9 Telecommunication and digital technology.- 6.9. The demographic transition: the final disproof of Malthus or a prelude?.- CHAPTER 7. ENERGY, TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE.- 7.1. This time is different.- 7.2. “Peak Oil”.- 7.3. More on fracking: Is it a game changer?.- 7.4. The inevitable decline of the internal combustion engine.- 7.5 On opportunities for energy efficiency gains by systems integration..- 7.6. Renewables for heat and electric power generation.- PART III.- CHAPTER 8. MAINSTREAM ECONOMICS AND ENERGY.- 8.1. Core ideas in economic theory.- 8.2 On credit, collateral, virtual money and banking.- 8.3 On externalities.- 8.4. Economics as social science.- 8.5. Resources and economics.- 8.6.Resource discoveries as technology incubators.- 8.7. On the geology of resources: scarcity again?.- 8.8. The special case of petroleum.- 8.9. The role of resources in standard economic theory.- CHAPTER 9. NEW PERSPECTIVES ON CAPITAL, WORK, AND WEALTH.- 9.1. Active vs passive capital.- 9.2. Exergy, useful work and production functions.- 9.3. Wealth as “condensed” work and useful complexity.- 9.4. Debt: The downside of financial wealth creation.- 9.5. The direct costs of economic growth.- 9.6. More on economic growth: cycles and bubbles.- 9.7. Planetary limits: The downside of material wealth creation.- 9.8. The “circular economy” and the limits to growth.- 9.9. A Trifecta?.- Epilogue.- APPENDIX. ENERGY IN GROWTH THEORY.- A.1. Introduction.- A.2. Growth equations.- A.3. A new variable: Useful work U.- A.4. The choice of production function.- A.5. Statistical analysis of the time series.- A.6. Results.- A.7. Conclusion.- References.

O autorze

Professor Ayres holds a PhD in Mathematical Physics from Kings College, University of London, a MSc in Physics from the University of Maryland and a BA, BSc from the University of Chicago. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Economics and Political Science and of Technology and Operations Management at INSEAD, the international graduate business school.

He joined INSEAD in 1992, becoming the first Novartis Chair of Management and the Environment, as well as the founder of CMER, Center for the Management of Environmental Resources. He directed CMER from 1992-2000. Since retirement he has been a visiting professor at Chalmers Institute of Technology in Sweden (where he was also a King's Professor) and Institute Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria, He remains active, producing publications on topics ranging from Industrial Metabolisms and Industrial Ecology, through Environmental Policy and Environmental Economics, to Energy. Professor Ayres is the author or coauthor of 21 books, most recently including The Economic Growth Engine (2009, with Benjamin Warr), Crossing the Energy Divide (2009, with Edward Ayres) and The Bubble Economy (2014).

Blurb

This book is about the mechanisms of wealth creation, or what we like to think of as evolutionary “progress”. For the modern economy, natural wealth consists of complex physical structures of condensed (“frozen”) energy – mass - maintained in the earth’s crust far from thermodynamic equilibrium. However, we usually perceive wealth as created when mutation or “invention” – a change agent - introduces something different, and fitter, and usually after some part of the natural wealth of the planet has been exploited in an episode of “creative destruction”. Selection out of the resulting diversity is determined by survival in a competitive environment, whether a planet, a habitat, or a market. While human wealth is associated with money and what it can buy, it is ultimately based on natural wealth, both as materials transformed into useful artifacts, and how those artifacts, activated by energy, can create and transmit useful information. Humans have learned how to transform natural wealth into other forms. Can the new immaterial wealth of information and ideas, which makes up the so-called knowledge economy, replace depleted natural wealth? This seemingly simple question is the grand challenge of the 21st century.

In this book, you will learn about the three key requirements for wealth creation, and how this process acts at all scales from elementary particles to biological organisms to the human economy according to physical laws. At the planetary level, continuing life on Earth depends on “entropy minimization” or the “circular economy”. In the human economy, however, the massive circular flow of goods and services between producers and consumers is not a perpetual motion machine; it has been dependent for the past 150 years on energy inputs from a finite storage of fossil fuels. Knowledge and natural capital, particularly energy, will interact to power the human wealth engine in the future as it has in the past. Will it sputter or continue along the path of evolutionary progress that we have come to expect?