Capitalism can’t overcome the laws of physics

You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. That should be a commonplace idea. And that inevitably means facing up to the necessity of putting an end to capitalism in favor of an economic system of rationality, sustainability and equity for all the world’s peoples.

It can’t be said too many times that the concept of “green capitalism” is a chimera. Unfortunately, belief in that chimera is not limited to the world’s center-left political parties; it extends to the world’s Green parties. Various “Green New Deal” programs have been floated in recent years, generally revolving around a massive buildout of renewable-energy infrastructure and strengthening the social safety net. On their own, there is no rational argument that such programs, should they materialize, would not provide some benefits. But how transformative are such programs?

Here is where “green capitalism” rapidly falls apart. Liberal assertions that a transition to a green economy will be virtually cost-free are unrealistic. The costs of a transition to a greener economy are much less than the costs will be of continuing business as usual — how much will a three-meter rise in the sea level and massive disruptions to agriculture cost? — but the need to transition millions of employees to new employment, retrofit or replace transportation systems, adjust to new trade patterns and have access to less energy shouldn’t be minimized. And the infrastructure to build solar panels, windmills and all else will use large amounts of resources, including toxic “rare earth” minerals. Renewable energy, although vital if we are to have a future, isn’t a shortcut to reversing global warming.

The power of nature prevails (photo by Hans Kreder)

A fundamental problem is that capitalism is dependent on consumerism. Household consumption (all the things that people buy for personal use from toothbrushes to automobiles) constitutes 60 to 70 percent of a typical advanced capitalist economy’s gross domestic product; it is because of this dependency that so much money and effort is put into advertising and marketing, creating “needs” we didn’t know we had, and the pervasiveness of “planned obsolescence.” Consumerism and over-consumption are not “cultural” or the result of personal characteristics — they are a natural consequence of capitalism and built into the system. Problems like global warming and other aspects of the world environmental crisis can only be solved on a global level through democratic control of the economy, not by individual consumer choices or by national governments. 

Two statistics that provide perspective on the high cost of new and improved: About 40 percent of U.S. landfill waste is discarded packaging and the cost of packaging constitutes 10 percent to 40 percent of a product’s retail price. No rational system would propagate such waste, but capitalism is not rational; the endless pursuit of profit for a small number of people at the expense of everybody else and indifference to environmental cost are the natural consequences. “Green capitalism” is “doomed from the start” because maximizing profit and environmentalism are broadly in conflict; the occasional time when they might be in harmony are rare exceptions and temporary, wrote Richard Smith in his 2014 paper “Green capitalism: the god that failed.” This is because the managers of corporations are answerable to private owners and shareholders, not to society. Profit maximization trumps all else under capitalism and thereby sets the limits to ecological reform.

What has just been discussed is serious enough. But what if the impossibility of capitalism continuing for the foreseeable future is not only its inherent contradictions and destructive tendencies, as discussed above, but also due to physical limits? Endless growth, and a system that needs endless growth to survive, is not only impossible due to the finite nature of natural resources, the repression and exploitation that fuels it eventually reaching a point of explosion, and the inability to expand because the entire globe is now encompassed by it. It is also impossible in the long run because 100 percent recycling and conservation is a physical impossibility.

Laws of thermodynamics versus limitless expansion

An interesting paper just published in the Real-World Economics Review, “How entropy drives us towards degrowth,” lays this out in six succinct pages. Written by Crelis Rammelt, a professor of environmental geography and international development studies at the University of Amsterdam, the author concludes that global capitalism “annihilates its own habitat” and “devours the equivalent of an entire Mount Everest’s worth of resources every 20 months.” 

That’s a whole lot of resources! The number of months will be fewer in the future because, structurally, capitalism must expand. This is the dynamic of the system that is often obscured. The rigors of competition force all capitalists to reduce costs and find new customers to successfully compete; failure to do so means going out of business. With all competitors forced into this endless treadmill, the entire system is dependent on expansion and the creation of new markets. Now that capitalism has conquered virtually every space on Earth, there can be no more geographic expansion. Thus the pressure of competition only becomes more acute, as does the need to extract more natural resources, which will inevitably be more difficult and expensive to obtain as easily reached materials are exhausted.

Thus, Dr. Rammelt wrote, the search for short-term fixes intensifies. “This system demands continued accumulation of capital and falters when hindered in this process,” he wrote. “The typical response to the ecological crisis is therefore not to restrict economic growth but to pin all hope on efficiency, circularity, dematerialization, decarbonization, and other profit-driven green innovations within capitalism. In this exposition, I argue that this hope is false because entropy always looms. Entropy serves as a physical measure of disorder, and we observe its inexorable increase all around us: everything decays, rots, disintegrates, and falls into disorder.”

Photosynthesis in action (photo by Rcaravit)

Energy changes form but does not disappear, he notes, but the second law of thermodynamics states that thermal energy (heat) flows from the hotter body or location to the cooler. In parallel with this law of entropy, energy flows from a place of high concentration (such as a battery) to a place of low concentration (such as a toy), thus resulting in a loss of energy for the battery. Entropy also shows itself in the degradation of everyday objects: food spoilage, metal erosion and clothing wear and tear. Something external has to provide supplemental energy to keep a system from complete degradation. For the Earth’s natural system, that external is the Sun. “The biosphere taps into solar power to perform ‘useful work,’ namely concentrating dispersed energy and matter into” new forms. “A healthy and well-functioning biosphere thus stands as the only force on Earth capable of counterbalancing the rise in entropy.”

Nature, however, cannot regenerate without limits. Although new food sources are created, sufficient for a natural biosphere and the life that inhabits it, “the metabolism of the destructive beast called capitalism expands too fast for the biosphere to keep up.” The metabolism of capitalism outstrips the ability of nature to regenerate itself. (Humanity is using nature 1.7 times faster than Earth’s biocapacity can regenerate). “Ecosystems have evolved over millions of years to optimize energy consumption in ecological food webs and to delay and reduce entropy through biodiversity,” Dr. Rammelt wrote. “Tragically, growth-oriented economies do the exact opposite by pushing against this natural order and increasing entropy at a devastating rate.”

It’s a physical world no matter what we wish

Substituting one-crop monocultures for more varied agriculture, irrigation, more intensive use of fertilizers and finally genetically engineering crops are among the ways that capitalism attempts to evade limits. But soil degradation, the creation of dust bowls, chopping down forests and pollution persist and become more dangerous. “Capitalism, in its pursuit of relentless growth, damages the very biosphere it relies on to mitigate its entropy-amplifying activities.” It is not a physical possibility to overcome environmental stresses by becoming more efficient or devising more ways to recycle more. Nature has its limits, Dr. Rammelt writes:

“Can we not combat entropy through frugal and circular production? The typical response to the ecological crisis isn’t to slow down growth but to rely on dematerialization and circularity. However, ‘green capitalism’ cannot maintain itself, let alone grow, by merely reusing its own waste and byproducts. Just as monkeys require fresh bananas from the forest and can’t survive on their own feces, production systems require new input of low-entropy matter and energy to function. The same goes for a forest that depends on solar energy from space and can’t survive solely on falling leaves. Shifting to biomass as a raw material for production also won’t save green growth as it will intensify pressure on land, water, and soil.”

At first glance, the fact that the global economy recovers less than 10 percent of waste materials and retains only 28 percent of global primary energy consumption after conversion would seem to indicate a vast potential for improvements in the efficiency of resource usage. But a closed system that loses nothing is simply impossible, because not everything is recyclable and because transmission losses are inevitable:

“[E]ven though we are far from achieving 100% circularity and efficiency, the laws of nature will always obstruct us from attaining such a goal. To counteract all unavoidable losses and inefficiencies, we require a constant influx of fresh, low-entropy matter and energy. This requirement holds true for circular economies and other green growth models as well. The encouraging news is that the biosphere can convert certain types and quantities of waste back into raw materials. However, we should not anticipate the biosphere to sustain this service at the same accelerating pace at which our economies increase entropy.”

Socialism or Barbarism? (Image by Michael Coghlan via Flickr)

That humanity can dominate nature “is an illusion.” The laws of thermodynamics remain in place. “Consequently, a growth-centered capitalist economy finds itself trapped in futile attempts to completely decouple itself from nature — aiming for a 100% circular, service-oriented and zero-waste existence. This obsession stems from an incapacity to imagine an economy that does not grow, where both the quantity and quality of its metabolism remain within secure ecological and planetary boundaries.”

Therefore, the conclusion is inescapable that an economy that requires continual growth must reach a physical limit; reaching such a limit is nothing less than global environmental collapse. Dr. Rammelt advocates a “radically different pathway”: degrowth. He defines degrowth as “a socio-economic transformation aimed at reducing and redistributing material and energy flows, with the goal of respecting planetary boundaries and promoting social justice.” Although he does not give a name to a post-capitalist system other than one of “degrowth,” such a sustainable system would have to be one that not only stays within the planet’s physical limits but provides enough for everybody. The material basis for everybody to have enough to eat and a place to live comfortably already exists; such a distribution is impossible under capitalism, where, again, production is performed for a small number of people to accumulate massive amounts of money with little left for everybody else.

Once again, Rosa Luxemburg’s thesis that either socialism or barbarism is our future stares us in the face.

14 comments on “Capitalism can’t overcome the laws of physics

  1. notabilia says:

    Luxembourg’s thesis does stare humanity in the face, but it should be noted for the factual record that Luxembourg’s own fate was decidedly in the ledger of the barbarism of state torture and murder.

  2. Carol Lipton says:

    Excellent piece, Pete. Back in 2010, I heard a replay of a workshop from Left Forum on WBAI, on the subject of why green capitalism is a chimera. It cited several memorable examples, including the fact that all of the natural sweetener companies are subsidiaries of Diamond Sugar, which covers about 70% of the market, and is responsible for the deforestation of Borneo. If you have not already heard the broadcast, I highly recommend it.

  3. Carol Lipton says:

    Also, did you read “Entropy” by Jeremy Rifkin? I knew him when I lived in DC. He also wrote “Beyond Beef” and “Algeny”.

    • I have not read the book. But it seems to be among the earliest to make arguments about the unsustainability of capitalism, given that it was written in 1980. A Wikipedia article on the book states, “The authors argue that technological nations are wasting resources such as fossil fuels and minerals at an increasing rate, which if unchecked will lead to the destruction of civilization, which has happened before on a smaller scale to past societies. The authors also argue that the societies wasting resources are exploiting the ‘Third World’, now called ‘developing nations’. The wasting of resources is a parallel to wasting energy in the laws of thermodynamics.” That wastefulness has only accelerated since.

  4. ZNetwork Submissions says:

    Dear Pete,

    Many thanks for the article. It was posted here earlier today: https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/capitalism-cant-overcome-the-laws-of-physics/

    all the best, Fintan ZNetwork

  5. Ted Dace says:

    Fascinating article. Thank you. I wonder if entropy can also help explain the neoliberal turn in the 1970s. If entropy manifests in the degradation of everyday objects like food and metal and clothing, on a larger scale it shows up in the degradation of cities, universities, roads, airports, etc. The postwar period, running roughly from 1945 to 1970, witnessed a huge buildup of private and public infrastructure that not only has been decaying ever since but necessitates complex and expensive bureaucracies to administer. I think this played a role in the economic stagnation or “stagflation” of the 70s. For years the standard view on the left has been to blame the greed of capitalists for the neoliberal turn, but I think there’s a physical basis to it as well. To get the economy “moving” again it was necessary to divert the circulation of money — the economic equivalent of energy — from basic needs to investment, meaning less help for the poor and more tax breaks for the rich. As long as we have a high-entropy monopoly capitalist system, progressive reforms will eventually trigger regressive reaction. The only way out, long term, is human-scale decentralized socialism.

    • Greetings, Ted. Regardless of how much responsibility we would assign to decaying infrastructure — an intriguing idea meriting careful consideration but the limitations of Keynesianism and the unwillingness of capitalists to continue tolerating it when stagnation came in the 1970s remains in my view the primary cause of the turn toward neoliberalism — human-scale decentralized socialism is surely humanity’s way out long term.

    • dschwartman says:

      I agree with the argument that green capital by itself cannot be relied on to save us from climate catastrophes much worse than we now witness, i.e., breaching the 1.5 deg C warming target. Nevertheless, the robust creation of renewable energy supplies must continue under capitalism until an ecosocialist system is achieved, but coupled with the near future termination of fossil fuel consumption. And yes, I agree that green capital is likewise the driver in this renewable energy transition of very unwelcome extractivist assaults on communities especially in the global South.

      This article draws from Rammelt’s paper which makes many of the same arguments as Robert Biel’s book, “The Entropy of Capitalism” (2012) which should have been cited. But this discussion of the relevancy of  the entropy concept fails to confront the most critical issue, the quality and quantity of energy needed for human civilization. This is a common feature of Degrowth discourse, which relies on the fallacious “law of entropy” of Georgescu-Roegen, the founder of ecological economics.  The Earth’s surface is open to energy transfer to and from space, but is effectively closed to mass transfer. Hence the use of fossil fuels and nuclear fission power to drive the economy can be transcended in our open Earth system by sufficient creation of a high-efficiency collection of the solar flux to Earth. Global solar power will then pay its ‘‘entropic debt’’ to space as non-incremental waste heat, without driving us to tipping points towards catastrophic climate change, while facilitating recycling and industrial ecologies phasing out extractivism. There are significant future opportunities to limit mining in this transition, namely recycling the huge supplies of metals now embedded in the fossil fuel and military infrastructures, substituting common elements for rare ones (e.g., batteries using sodium instead of lithium, iron/air etc.), enhancing public transit instead of relying on manufacturing hundreds of millions of electric cars and as the renewable energy supplies grow globally using this energy to recycle.

      These opportunities reinforce the need for a renewable energy transition increasingly informed by an ecosocialist agenda, especially. global demilitarization, social governance. For in-depth discussion of this subject see our book “The Earth is Not for Sale” (https://www.theearthisnotforsale.org) and my articles in Climate and Capitalism (https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/01/08/an-ecosocialist-strategy-that-can-still-make-1-5-possible/https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/01/05/a-critique-of-degrowth/).

      • Greetings, David. Thought-provoking responses are always welcome here. As to your statement that “the robust creation of renewable energy supplies must continue under capitalism until an ecosocialist system is achieved, but coupled with the near future termination of fossil fuel consumption,” I am in full agreement. If we wait until capitalism is overcome, it will be much too late.

        But there is a reason that fossil fuels have long been used — they are more efficient than any other source of energy. At present levels of technology, solar, wind and other renewables can’t provide the “bang for the buck” that fossil fuels can. I would certainly argue that renewables efficiency is going to get better, perhaps much better, and I do believe the currently significant problem of battery storage will eventually be solved.

        But does that mean there will be as much energy available as is currently with fossil fuels? I have considerable doubts that will be achieved. It seems to me that humanity will have to do with less energy available than currently. I don’t suggest that is necessarily a problem, but it does require adjustments for those of us in the Global North. And, regardless, we obviously need to end the burning of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Harvesting massive amounts of solar energy from facilities in orbit and beaming it down sounds enticing, but whether that is feasible in the reasonably near future is very much open to question.

        • Clark says:

          “Harvesting massive amounts of solar energy from facilities in orbit and beaming it down sounds enticing, but whether that is feasible…”

          It’s probably feasible, but it’s a potential multi gigawatt death ray scorching to dust to everything in its path if its tracking fails or it gets subverted. So let’s not build any, and let’s definitely stop Elon Musk building any.

          (Grief the JavaScript on this comment form is invasive!)

  6. Mikey says:

    A brilliant synthesis. Insightful as to the actual nature of capitalism, a form of thinking that violently forced itself onto the people of this world. Irrational, aggressive, even homicidal in its methods to enforce compliance. Inherently deceptive, and, proud of it. Any story that will create profits will be exploited regardless of the futility, absurdity and pervasive harms. Intentionally creating poverty, planetary destruction and suffering are not important issues. Irrational and extremely dangerous. Forcefully insistent that only capitalism’s interpretation and control are valid. Narcissistic and anti-social as well. “Profit making must autocratically rule,” they say.

    Capitalists call this freedom and progress. The rest of us know this is a lie and an abomination of human possibility. Celebrating ‘destiny’ as the exploitation of all people and this world, this economic religion’s imposed exceptionalism commands a ‘sacred’ mythology of anti-democratic and militarized compulsion populated with equations, strange words of privilege and coercive power, and vast institutions to technocratically enforce capitalism’s decrees according to the ‘sacred’ words of monetarism, economics and market aggression. We are administered – programmed units, compelled to meet the linguistic and traditional processes of an arbitrary and irrational superstition – great and massive buildings house the storm troopers of economics delivering compulsion as freedom. Many of them are highly educated to compliantly perform the operations and functions of the sovereign but antiquated ideology. Their powerful, life-consuming reward is income arbitrarily decided by an elite imperium, disembodied and unfindable cognitions, without democratic foundation. Zip, zilch, nada. Yet the machine rolls on.

    Thanks for this wonderful piece of writing that demonstrates there is intelligent life on earth, regardless of conservatives and liberals devious mainstream domination and irrational, reality media drama-babble. Solving our planetary crisis, an issue which does not truly exist for modern capitalism, is the noblest of enterprises; truly productive in the most momentous and comprehensive meaning possible! Truth can protect and free billions and their children’s children’s children. Capitalism will not allow this truth to reign.

    Figure it out friends or remain enveloped in a fairy tale where billions are born and die believing fictions that intentionally distribute harms and sufferings according to……. no moral, just, democratic or necessary reasons. The elusive dark spectre of Homo economicus remains our nihilistic, psychotic, and obsessive shadow requiring light – rationality, compassion and wisdom for freedom and human well being to arise………….. democratic socialism.

    Congrats Pete – a real gem. May its glitter awaken!

    • Well said, Mikey! Allow me to say that you have summed up the irrational ideology of capitalism in a most marvelous manner.

      I can only hope enough people can be convinced in enough time.

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