THERMOECONOMICS - a comprehensive look at production: how everything has to be seen as energy.

 'The economic metabolism is a triple circuit; visualise it as a triple helix, perhaps. First, there is the material-energetic loop: energy is captured, deployed, transformed through supply chains into use values (goods, services, machinery, infrastructure etc.), and dissipated in reproduction and consumption - that is, validation. Second is the monetary-financial loop: endogenous credit creates exchange-value claims that mobilise resources today in anticipation of future use-value realisation. These two circuits must remain roughly aligned for the system to reproduce itself without debilitating rupture. A third circuit - information - intersects these and to some extent binds them together. Information itself is an energetic artifact, while also playing a key role in enabling each of the other circuits to work and to interact.

When EROEI degrades - whether from geological depletion, geopolitical disruption, political retardation of enhancements or technological lock-in - the material circuit delivers less surplus energy per unit invested. The system’s capacity to generate new use values contracts. Yet the monetary circuit does not automatically slow. On the contrary, it accelerates.'




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