THERMOECONOMICS: this ought to be obvious but it isn't.....

 


 

'In a time of monsters, understanding energy as the foundation of order separates those who renew from those who decay.

The West Asia crisis does not invalidate fossil fuels overnight, but it exposes the fragility of regimes whose reproduction still depends heavily on geographically concentrated, geopolitically vulnerable and thermodynamically mature energy sources. Declining EROEI in those sources was already a long-term headwind. Geopolitical disruption turns that headwind into a gale.

None of this is deterministic. Societies can still choose renewal. But renewal requires recognising the material reality: energy is not just another input; it is the substance of value. EROEI is not merely an engineering metric; it is the calculus of entropy or negentropy. When returns fall, the system must either find new sources of surplus energy or accept accelerating disorder.

The monsters Gramsci warned about thrive in exactly these moments of interregnum - when the old energetic-institutional settlement is dying and a new one struggles to be born. The current oil and gas shock is one such monster. It did not appear from nowhere. It emerged from the collision of geopolitical tension with an underlying energetic substrate already under strain'.




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