Technology is commonly seen as the defining engine of modernity and, for millions, almost as an article of faith. In this secular theology, progress is the gospel, innovation the sacrament, and technological advance the miracle expected to solve problems from climate change and disease to poverty and resource scarcity.
The expansion of technological, economic and material growth over the last 200 years is the greatest in human history. The problem is that growth adds complexity, and complexity requires energy to build, maintain and replace. Technology may increase efficiency, but those gains aren’t free. There is a physical cost that money cannot eliminate.
I use entropy fee(opens in new tab) as shorthand for the unavoidable physical cost of creating and maintaining organized complexity: continuous inputs of usable energy and materials accompanied by their inevitable degradation and dispersion.
What is entropy(opens in new tab)? The word is used frequently and understood poorly. At its simplest, entropy describes how concentrated or spread out energy and matter are, and the number of ways they can be arranged.
Consider the three boxes below. In box 1, the particles are concentrated on one side. There are relatively few ways to arrange them while keeping them concentrated, so this is a low-entropy state. Remove the dashed-line barrier and the particles spread and mix, as in box 2. Eventually they become dispersed throughout the container, as in box 3. There are vastly more ways for the particles to be dispersed than concentrated, so the dispersed state is overwhelmingly more probable. That is the basic idea behind entropy: systems tend to move toward states that can exist in vastly more ways.
The important point is that nothing has disappeared. The particles are still there, just as energy remains present when entropy increases. What changes is its concentration and its capacity to do useful work. A hot cup of coffee cools because its concentrated thermal energy spreads into the surrounding room. The energy is conserved, but once the coffee and room reach the same temperature, that energy can no longer do the same useful work. Entropy is the price of every real energy transformation.
This principle applies directly to the fossil fuels that power modern civilization.
Figure 1. What is entropy? Source: Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Click on the image to enlarge.
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Today, virtually every aspect of daily life—from food and shelter to travel and communication—depends on a continuous flow of concentrated energy and electricity to sustain the metabolism of modern civilization. About 80% of that primary energy still comes from fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are concentrated stores of chemical free energy with an extraordinary capacity to do useful work. When we burn them, some of that energy is converted into mechanical work or electricity, while the rest is ultimately dispersed as heat. The fuel itself is transformed largely into CO₂ and water and dispersed into the environment.
Energy is conserved, but its capacity to do useful work declines as entropy increases. That’s the physical-world version of the progression from box 1 to box 3 in Figure 1.
Entropy therefore describes a fundamental tendency from concentration toward dispersion. Civilization runs in the opposite direction locally. We concentrate ores into metals, assemble materials into machines and buildings, move supply chains across continents, and organize matter into increasingly elaborate technological systems. None of this violates the second law of thermodynamics because maintaining that local order requires a continuous flow of usable energy while producing still more entropy elsewhere.
Technology is embedded in every part of this process. It allows us to extract energy, concentrate it, convert it into useful work, reduce losses and deliver more power where and when we want it.
Technology does not float independently above civilization as invention, innovation or creativity. It is embedded in civilization’s physical metabolism. The device gets smaller, the transaction faster and the human effort lower—but the supporting network often becomes larger and more complex.
Technology compresses what we see while accelerating the energy and material throughput we don’t see.
That’s the trap. Complexity itself has a maintenance cost—the entropy fee. Technology cannot free us from this cycle because it both enables and depends on continuous energy and material throughput. Entropy and complexity are therefore embedded in growth.
Technological solutions to resource and environmental constraints often add new components, infrastructure and dependencies that must themselves be built, powered, maintained and eventually replaced. When those dependencies encounter limits of their own, further technological solutions are required. Complexity compounds upon complexity, increasing the system’s maintenance burden and consuming a growing share of the usable energy and resources that might otherwise be available for additional growth.
Technology can move the bottleneck. It cannot make the cost of complexity disappear.
Figure 2 illustrates the dilemma. World energy supply continues to rise, but its percentage rate of growth has fallen substantially from past levels. This does not mean that energy itself is becoming scarce. Most of the predicament is scale: as the system gets larger, maintaining the same percentage growth rate requires ever-larger annual additions of energy supply.
Figure 2. World Primary Energy Supply Is Rising—but Growth is Falling. Expanded fossil and non-fossil energy have uplifted declining supply growth over the last decade but not near past levels. Source: Our World in Data. Click on the image to enlarge.
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Since fossil fuels account for so much of civilization’s energy throughput, wouldn’t replacing them with renewable energy reduce the entropy fee? Theoretically, yes. Solar PV, wind and hydro tap continuously renewed natural energy flows and can produce electricity without the thermal conversion losses inherent in combustion. That is an important thermodynamic advantage.
But there is a catch. Solar and wind are relatively diffuse and variable energy flows. Harvesting, concentrating and delivering them at the scale and reliability of a civilization built around dense, storable fossil fuels requires extensive physical infrastructure spread across space—generation, transmission, storage, backup and control systems, along with the mining, processing and manufacturing needed to build them.
Figure 3. Fossil fuels still provide about 80% of society’s energy. Diffuse and variable renewable flows have struggled to scale in a civilization built around dense, stable fuels. Source: Our World in Data. Click on the image to enlarge.
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The entropy fee does not disappear; its location and form change. With fossil fuels, much of the penalty occurs continuously during extraction and combustion as concentrated chemical energy is converted into useful work, waste heat and dispersed combustion products. With renewable systems, more of the physical cost is embodied upfront in the infrastructure required to collect and concentrate diffuse natural energy flows, with continuing costs for balancing, storage, transmission, maintenance, replacement and recycling.
Renewable energy therefore offers a better thermodynamic input, but it does not free civilization from the entropy fee. Nature supplies the low-entropy flow; civilization must build and continually maintain the complex machinery required to capture it at useful scale. And renewables mostly supply electricity, not the entire energy system. Replacing fossil fuels therefore means not only scaling renewable power but transforming the much larger system of transportation, industry, heat and materials that still depends directly on fuels.
Now let’s put technology, energy and the entropy fee into historical context, from the Industrial Revolution to the present.
Vaclav Smil describes the period from about 1870 to 1914 as the Age of Invention.(opens in new tab) Many of the technologies that shaped modern civilization—including electricity, the internal combustion engine, telecommunications, modern chemical industries and new materials—were developed during those decades.
Much of twentieth-century technological progress involved refining, combining and scaling these foundations. After World War II, gas turbines, nuclear power, synthetic materials, fertilizers and microelectronics contributed to the Great Acceleration(opens in new tab)—an unprecedented expansion of economic throughput and technological complexity.
Figure 4 adds the energy dimension. These two great phases of technological transformation were accompanied by two great fossil-energy pulses. The first accompanied the creation of the modern technological system; the second, its massive postwar scaling. Energy and technology co-evolved: new energy sources expanded what technology could do, while new technologies accelerated our ability to extract energy, transform materials, move goods and people, and do more things faster.
Energy growth has experienced subsequent surges but has never returned to the sustained growth rates of the Great Acceleration. Meanwhile, the technological complexity accumulated over the past two centuries must be maintained. Infrastructure wears out, machines must be replaced, and increasingly elaborate networks must be coordinated. Before energy can support additional growth, some of it must simply keep the civilization we have already built functioning.
Figure 4. Modern technological growth was accompanied by two great fossil-energy pulses. Source: Our World in Data. Click on the image to enlarge.
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That is the complexity trap. Growth adds technology and infrastructure; technology adds complexity; and complexity requires continuing flows of energy and materials to maintain it. Efficiency can reduce the cost of particular tasks, but it cannot eliminate the physical cost of maintaining the larger system. More complexity means more to build, coordinate, repair and replace.
The result resembles the Red Queen effect at civilization scale: “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” An increasing share of society’s effort must simply maintain the organized complexity it has already created.
This is not a mistake or a catastrophe, nor is it simply the result of bad policy or too many regulations. It is a physical consequence of maintaining a complex civilization of more than eight billion people. Technology is not an abstraction. It is organized matter doing useful work, and organized matter has a physical cost.
That makes this less a problem to be solved than a predicament to understand.
By the same author:
The Geology of Climate Change
The Iran War Phase Shift: Energy Shock,
Rising Complexity, and the End of the Old Growth Regime
The Long Way Home:
Carbon, Climate, and the Limits of Control
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Art Berman is Director of Labyrinth Consulting Services, Sugar Land, Texas, and a world-renowned energy consultant with expertise based on over 40 years of experience working as a petroleum geologist. Visit his website, Shattering Energy Myths: One Fact at a Time, and learn more about Art here.
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