Beyond The Mordor Economy

Mordor. Image credit: Centives

We are, as Nate Hagens would put it, already in some sort of a “Mordor Economy,” where we spend more and more energy just on getting the next batch of energy and other resources—sacrificing everything we hold dear in the process. Human well being. Nature. Our future. This path we are on, however, is not only unsustainable but puts us on an accelerated trajectory towards a radically simplified world economy. And while many people believe that we can still alter our course—or at least, that we could’ve changed direction 50 years ago—all this was “written” in the laws of physics. The question is thus not “how we stop this from happening” but what is beyond Mount Doom?

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Mount Doom, of course, is not a real mountain but a fictional volcano in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings universe. Inspired by the sight of Stromboli at night and influenced by his own experiences in the industrial Black Country of the English Midlands, Tolkien imagined a land of darkness destroyed by pollution. And while this might sound like a terrifying vision for our future on this planet, volcanoes eventually go dormant and die, giving a chance for Nature to heal her wounds. Doom, in other words, is not a permanent state of affairs.

What’s driving all this is not the wrath of Gods, demanding human sacrifice, but good old physics. Volcanoes, just like our machines, are driven by a huge temperature difference, or put more generally: a steep energy gradient. The larger the difference in heat, electric charge, chemical composition etc. between two objects the greater the bang will be. Volcanoes are powered by the massive heat gradient between Earth’s mantle (a 1000°C (1832°F) near its boundary with the crust), and the atmosphere. This heat, as discovered by 19th century physicists, always flows spontaneously from hotter to colder regions of matter—or 'downhill' in terms of the temperature gradient. This is, in essence, the second law of thermodynamics. Once all that excess energy is “gone” (dissipated), and as the situation stabilizes, volcanic activity stops.

Dissipative Structures

Just like every dynamic change in the Universe, our civilization is driven by the dissipation of energy. You tank gas into your car, the engine burns it—turning its power into motion—then the radiator gets rid of the waste heat. The funny thing is, that eventually all of the energy stored in gasoline ends up as waste heat: friction from tires and brakes, aerodynamic drag, noise, vibration etc. all turns into low grade, useless, mild warmth in the end. You see, by using energy we are not destroying it, we simply harness its capacity to work. We take a concentrated high grade energy source, utilize it to our purpose, then let the rest dissipate as heat.

Consequently, the higher the energy gradient, the higher value it represents. A pot of water at 30°C (86°F) contains a lot of energy, but since the temperature gradient between the pot and room temperature (20°C or 68°F) is very low it is practically useless to us. It cannot turn engines, move objects, or even power a cell phone. The same amount of energy, stored as electricity in a battery, on the other hand, can do a whole range of things for us, and thus is much more valuable. Sunlight serves as another great example. Our central star is a massive fusion reactor with a surface temperature of 5500 °C or 10000°F—it must be a high grade energy source, right? Wrong. The immense heat, light and radiation emanating from it is greatly degraded by the time it reaches Earth’s surface. All we get here is an intermittent flow of mild heat and light; in the tune of 150–300 watts per square meter on an annual average. That’s less than lukewarm water in our example.

Now, compare that to an electric utility scale power plant, tapping into the immense heat gradient generated by burning concentrated, fossilized sunlight in the form of natural gas, or by splitting the atom 24/7. The difference is worlds apart. (And if you take all the conversion losses into account—as we convert sunlight into electricity at a pretty low efficiency still—the contrast is even more striking.) You see, degrading a high grade energy source (i.e. burning natural gas and turning it into electricity and waste heat) is easy. Upgrading low grade sunshine into something more valuable (electricity), on the other hand, is hard, costly, and material intensive. Just think of the massive undertaking of building dams, mines, smelters and six continent supply chains to make solar panel arrays, wind farms or hydro. This is why sunshine is for free, and why you have to pay so much for natural gas or electricity.

Median power densities of fossil fuel, nuclear, and renewable electricity generation (W/m2). Source: ResearchGate

The same value theory is true for raw material and energy resources, too. The more concentrated a metal ore is (compared to the rest of the rock in Earth’s crust), for example, the more valuable it is for our economy. The more dispersed or ‘downgraded’ an ore is, the more energy and technology we need to ‘liberate’ the metal from it—thus the less profitable it is to go after. In a similar vein, those fossil fuel reserves which contain the least impurities (particularly from sulfur), or those which can be found in super-giant fields and require the least energy to extract, are the most valuable for our purposes. Perhaps it goes without saying, that a robust, fast-growing economy needs unfettered access to both high grade energy and high grade raw materials. Take one or both away, and you invariably end up in a Mordor economy, where you spend most of your energy processing low grade inputs or going after ever harder to get energy resources.

This is where we need to tie back to the laws of Nature, briefly. In physics terms, a concentrated, pure metal ore has a lower entropy, or disorderliness to it. Similarly, a highly concentrated energy resource, capable of producing fuels with a high energy gradient, can also be described as having a low level of entropy. Problem is, even if energy or matter cannot be created or destroyed—only changed in form—every material and energy transformation increases entropy, i.e. it increases waste. And this is where we arrive at the most important implication of the second law of thermodynamics: namely, that the entropy of any given system tends to rise over time as it spontaneously drifts toward a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. In other words, everything, the Universe included, drifts towards a dead state, where all the high energy gradients and concentrated materials will have been dissipated. Left to its own devices, everything ends up in this sorry state: your hot coffee eventually cools down to room temperature, the metal tools you left in the shed turn into rust. Degradation, or in other words: a rise in entropy, is the natural order of things.

In nature—powered by the Sun’s gentle, low grade waste heat—this process literally takes ages. Rock weathering, plate tectonics, biological epochs are all happening on timescales measured in millions of years. Compared to this, complex societies writ large are true entropy-accelerating machines. From ancient civilizations downgrading the very soil which gave them energy in the form of food, to us, modern humans, burning fossil fuels to power our globalized world economy, technology use has always propelled us towards ever higher levels of entropy, at an ever accelerating pace. And while we managed to decrease the disorderliness (or entropy) of small sections of the world we called gardens and cities, we have always created a much bigger mess in the grand scheme of things. The results—progress, prosperity, works of art, wealth etc.—were temporary at best, while the damage dealt to the environment took, and will take, orders of magnitude longer to heal. If that’s even possible at this point.

In this sense, moving towards electrification via wind and solar represents nothing but another giant leap towards a dead state through an even faster degradation of “our” resource base. Deforesting an entire mountain, then blowing it up and smashing it into fine dust by using fossil fuels to make a few pounds of copper, nickel, silver etc. is not progress.¹ It’s an acceleration of disorderliness on a planetary scale, only to turn a little sunshine into electricity for a decade or two. And then what? What will we do when we have degraded all the rich ore bodies worth going after, and all easy-to-get fossil fuels to power it all? What comes after 65% of our solar panels fail prematurely, as the adhesive film holding them together degrades under heat and moisture, causing a significant power loss? Sure, we could argue that this or that technology increases entropy to a higher or lower extent, but will this really matter in the end when, as the result of all these activities, we run out of all viable resources, freshwater reservoirs get depleted and contaminated, and the air and soil get polluted beyond measure?

What economists casually call ‘externalities’ are nothing but manifestations of the second law of thermodynamics; a direct, physical consequence of technology use—not something we can choose to avoid.

We cannot win against entropy, yet we keep pretending otherwise. Just take a look at the sorry state of our copper resources, a key ingredient when it comes to electrification. We went after the easiest to get, highest value portion first, and now we are left with nothing but a bunch of rapidly depleting mines digging up ever lower grade ores. From a thermodynamic perspective recycling, often proposed as a “solution” to depletion, is just another material transformation, inevitably increasing entropy. It, too—just like mining—comes at the cost of an increased pollution load on the environment from the release of toxic fumes, contaminated waste water, and the use of a tremendous amount of high grade energy. It, too, taps into a limited resource: the amount of stuff already in circulation, which could only shrink with every round of recycling… Even with a world class 90% recycle rate for literally every single critical material, we would be squandering our vast amount of wealth in a couple of centuries at best. (In practice we would be running out of hard to recover critical metals much sooner than that.) And this raises the question: which one will we run out of first, the high grade energy needed to do recycling, or the material left to be recycled…? So, while recycling can and will slow down the degradation of our one-time material inheritance, it will never be able to stop it, nor alter our overall trajectory… Let alone reduce the rate with which we increase entropy.

The arrow of time

Ore bodies and fossil fuel deposits all took an immense amount of time, energy and raw materials to form, which can only be grasped on a truly geological timescale. It took the destruction of continents and the life and deaths of billions of living organisms over eons to have what we have today—something, which could only be characterized as the biggest one time bonanza in the history of a planet. The industrial revolution and the great acceleration of humanity was solely made possible by tapping into this one time inheritance of mineral treasures and the thousands of exajoules of energy stored as fossilized sunlight: coal, oil and gas. Now, that we start to see what it means to run out of the easy-to-get (low entropy) portion of Earth’s riches, and entered what could be best described as a “Mordor economy”, the question poses itself: what’s next?

In order to visualize the connection between resource and energy grades, and to gain insight as to what might follow, take a look at the graph above. This is our playing field. Now, let’s divide the chart into four distinct segments and see what realms the various combination of resources and energy availability result in.

1. “The Pristine Land” (lots of high grade minerals, but low grade energy resources). Imagine a true promise land, with (mostly) intact nature, gold nuggets lying around in shallow riverbeds, with the prime energy resource being the Sun alone. No one has thought of, or has the means, to burn fossil fuels or access even higher grade fuels to convert minerals into metal tools. Humanity has thrived in this place for hundreds of thousands of years, using only truly renewable natural materials and energy like wood, and only a minimal amount of non-renewable mineral resources (flint stones, obsidian). As an ideal example, the state of the North American continent before colonization comes to mind here. Pollution and environmental degradation is low.

2. “The Industrial Miracle” (lots of high grade minerals, combined with abundant high grade energy resources). This is the ideal place to build a high tech, high energy civilization, with humanity building cities, visiting the Moon and potentially other planets. Energy is coming from a dense and seemingly unlimited source. Raw materials are abundant, easy to get and easy to process. Economic growth, population, technology use and human development are all on an exponential trajectory. Pollution is low and localized initially, but growing fast.

3. “The Mordor Economy” (depleted low grade minerals, but still enough high grade energy resources to process those). All the easy to get, easy to process raw materials are gone. What remains provides less and less materials per unit of mineral mined. The availability of high grade energy is high, but it has stopped growing. The rapidly worsening energy return on investment (EROI) have started to cannibalize the net energy available for society. Humanity desperately tries to turn everything into energy and into more raw materials, sacrificing the last protected nature reserves, the seabed, even some of its cities, in order to continue with economic growth. Pollution is high, and is still growing exponentially. Wars are waged to control / destroy / limit energy and material flows. Sounds familiar?

4. “The Empty Quarter” (fully degraded mineral and energy base). Welcome to the Rub-al-Khali desert, the last and most depleted quadrant of the chart. There are no more cheap and easy to get resources, no more ‘free’ high density energy. Nothing but a tormented landscape, and the waste heat emanating from our central star, trapped by a heavily polluted atmosphere. Nature begins to recover, but continues to suffer from the many scars left behind by industrial economies.

Take note also of the “Arrow of Time”, depicted as a pale blue arrow pointing from high grade materials and energy towards an ever increasing disorderliness and degradation (entropy). This is the natural inclination of this little playing field we have here, the direction where things tend to gravitate towards with time. Should civilization be abandoned and left to rot, all pure metals would corrode and pulverize into dust. All energy would dissipate and be turned into waste heat. This is the normal flow of things, which we are fighting tooth and nail to reverse. By doing so, however, we are just accelerating this trend, as you will see below. Now, if you plot the past 600 years of our species’ history — and western industrial civilization in particular — on the chart above, you will notice something reminiscent of a distinct pattern. (Note, that this is the point where our little scientific hypothesis needs to be injected with real life data. Based on first principles thinking though, and on the second law of thermodynamics, I have a strong hunch that we should be seeing something like this in the picture below. With that said, at this point I think it’s more important to understand the basic concept, than to get lost in the weeds discussing how exactly entropy or the level of degradation should be measured.)

1450 AD: Western Civilization (confined largely to the European continent back then) had already used up its best mineral resources and metal ores. Yet, there were still quite many good-enough gold and other mines operating on the continent: all powered by human and animal labor alone. Western civilization’s primary energy source was the Sun, providing the heat and light to grow crops, feed the workers and their draft animals. Wind, also generated by the gentle heat released by our central star, is used to mill seeds into flour, and to move ships across the sea. Although the land was far from being in a pristine condition, it was still in a way better shape than today.

1650 AD: Following the arrival of settlers and conquistadors onto the shores of the Americas, a new pristine land of wealth and resources was opened up for exploitation. This new discovery increased the overall (average) quality of mineral and other natural resources by a considerable amount, and thereby ushered in a previously unprecedented expansion of western civilization.

1850 AD: Using steam engines and locomotives humanity has finally found a way to harness the dense energy of fossilized, concentrated sunshine: coal. The industrial revolution, ushered in by the flow of high quality resources and a need to mechanize production, saw the rise of factories, still mills and rail, powered by abundant, high grade heat from the dirtiest of fossil fuels. The new energy resource has opened up new prospects for mining, and so The Industrial Miracle began.

1950 AD: With the power of oil, an even more dense and pure fuel than coal, and thanks to its low cost of extraction (taking up only 1–3% of the total energy produced), economic growth and scientific development accelerated to its highest pace in recorded history. Newer and newer oil and other mineral deposits were discovered, giving rise to a brief, two decade era of abundance, witnessing the wide spread adaption of jet planes, nuclear reactors, TV sets and more. Even the sky wasn’t a limit anymore.

2025 AD: Although oil production was still growing, more and more of its energy had to be recycled into drilling new, ever faster depleting wells. Energy cannibalism has started to show its teeth: taking away an ever growing share of non-oil energy production to produce essential fuels like diesel. Mineral resources have become increasingly depleted: most mines producing metal ores (other than bauxite and iron ore) are now forced to process ore grades well below 5% — and in some cases below 1% — further exacerbating energy and resource cannibalism. Meanwhile all this frantic digging and burning, releasing a tremendous amount of pollution, has pushed the Earth-system even further out of balance. Humanity is clearly on an unsustainable track. The question poses itself: where to now from here? What future awaits? The Mordor Economy? The Empty Quarter? Or is there a way back to the promise land of low entropy energy and materials?

Future Trajectories

Let’s review three future scenarios then, and see what are the chances of them coming true. What would it take to break away from our current, unsustainable trajectory? What would be the consequences of doing so? Is there a price to pay? But first, before we do that, let me remind you of an important detail. There is no place for a stable equilibrium, or “steady state” on this map for a mineral based civilization. No matter how slow we burn them, or how many times we try to recycle everything, all dense high quality metal resources are destined to slowly turn into dust. According to the second law of thermodynamics every material and energy conversion comes at a cost, and at each and every round at least a small fraction of material and energy is lost, forever. Remember, we are on a heavily tilted playing field with a strong inclination towards the Empty Quarter. So far only life based (biological) solutions stood the test of time, and managed to escape their fate. The reason is simple: there are plenty of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen atoms in the world—the essential building blocks of all living organisms—as well as mild sunshine to keep them circulating. Anything more than biological life requires high heat, and rare metals; neither of which are as abundant as we would like them to be. With that in mind, let’s see where we are headed, and what potential futures are in store for us.

1. Our current trajectory. Our civilization is still powered by oil. Without it, there would be no agriculture, mining, or long distance transport, as all of these activities require a dense, low entropy fuel. (Heavy batteries, or hydrogen simply do not cut it.) The depletion of easy-to-get oil resources, however, points towards an overall increase in entropy (degradation) for our energy resources. Combined with the same effect from mining minerals, on our current trajectory, we are clearly headed towards “The Empty Quarter.” Should we get there, it would lead to a gradual collapse of modern technologies, and with it, our entire way of life. “Renewables” are facing the same problem: both fossil fuels and mined minerals are essential to their making — both of which are soon to be on the decline. Not to mention the fact, that we hope to mine highly degraded resources with a super degraded source of energy (sunlight). How does that two add up?

2. “The Mordor Economy.” Now, we are on fantasy land, and not only by name. There are a number of rather unlikely things which must come to pass in order to avoid the sorry state of our affairs described above. First, we would need to extend oil production to gain some time—somehow sidestepping the exponential increase in the energy cost of their extraction (Delannoy et al. 2021)—let’s say by finding another super giant oil field… Again, I don’t believe that this is a realistic possibility… But hey, we are Frodo and Co., and we are about to bring the ring home! In the meantime someone, somewhere would have to find another low cost, high density energy source. (And no, hydrogen will not cut it as it takes much more energy to create than that it returns to the economy.) Should we somehow still manage to do that, and had the oil till that solution is scaled up to global proportions, then we could go on mining ever poorer, and poorer, and poorer, and poorer resources... Till we dig up the entire planet 3 miles deep and run out of arable land, or simply kill the biosphere and call it a day. Then we will be stuck on a overly warm, desolate rock flying in space. Once again, “The Mordor Economy” has no stable equilibrium. It will keep shifting towards an ever greater and greater destruction as even the poorest resources get depleted; ultimately compromising energy production itself, needed to maintain the entire activity. Remember: there is no mining without energy, and there is no energy without mining. On a finite planet, sooner or later something got to give.

3. Energy miracle. OK, we need to think big. In order to turn this rather unimpressive trajectory around, we must find a truly super dense, ultra low entropy energy source in abundance… Oh, and we also need to couple it with a propulsion technology capable of carrying ultra-large space ships across the solar system. (Just as a reference, a space mission flying three people to the Moon burned as much energy as it was released by a small nuclear bomb.) Only then will we become able to escape the planet, and do mining and increasing entropy on other planets like Mars, building space cities, and all the rest. Our current technology based on rocket fuel is simply incapable to do that: hurtling cargo ships capable to move thousands of people, or ten thousand tons of ore across space is simply above and beyond our current technical realm of possibilities. And again, we need something fast, as net energy from oil is just about to peak this decade, and mineral resources are also depleting fast. Again, there can be something out there that I’m currently not aware of, but so far I haven’t seen anything remotely close to what’s needed. (And no, fusion will not cut it.)

If you are like me, you might ask: was there any other way? Could we have somehow sidestepped entropy? What if we never started an industrial revolution? Well, without the widespread adaption of coal, we would had to cut down all the forests in Europe, farmed and tilled all the land and extracted every resource we could lay our hands on till now. Without the discovery of the Americas, and the invention of steam engines, Western civilization would have crumbled, and would have found itself in The Empty Quarter a long time ago. Following the arrow of time and the inclination of the playing field, we would’ve already performed an elegant “sidestep” from quadrant #1 directly to #4. For a historical reference look no further than the (once) Fertile Crescent (aka Middle-East or West Asia), and see with your own eyes what thousands of years of civilization did to it, even with animal and human muscle power alone. So no, slow burn is not a solution to entropy. As the late eighteenth century French writer François-René de Chateaubriand wrote well before the invention of the steam engine:

“Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow them.”

OK, this civilization is toast, but what will come after this one is over? How will future humans fit into this model? What could come about a thousand or ten thousand years down the line? Ironically, what I see as a clear path forward is: acceptance. Coming into terms with the fact the that the time frame to build a mineral based civilization is limited, and if it cannot escape the planet to start an interstellar empire in time, then it is “doomed” to return to normalcy. Meaning: living within the boundaries of a single planet, and entirely off of a flow of renewable resources (wood, grains, fruits, animals etc.) There is simply no other way. Once even the memory of this high tech civilization is gone, and those who survive its fall has returned to a lifestyle not seen since the Neolithic age, only then can the slow regeneration of Earth’s resource base begin. Following the large wave of extinction we have so carelessly started, and once the climate has found its new equilibrium (hopefully still within a habitable range), life may start to heal and recover. New species and ecosystems may emerge. Volcanoes, plate tectonics may create and bring new ore bodies close to the surface, which our distant ancestors (or another “clever” species) would be able to mine… Will they make the same mistake as we did, and restart this circle of destruction? Only time will tell.

Until next time,

B

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1. In order to make a golden ring weighing 5 grams, for example, the mine producing the precious metal has to dig up and haul 5,000,000 grams (or 5 tons!) of ore to the surface. (For reference: imagine a pile of stones the size of a pick-up truck.) Then these rocks must be crushed into a fine dust, and mixed with a similar amount of water and aggressive chemicals to leach out those 5 grams of gold. So, in order to get that little piece of low entropy material on your finger, the industry had to produce and leave behind a tailing the size of a garden pool full of toxic chemicals and finely ground rocks… Not to mention the plumes of diesel smoke and CO2 mixed into the atmosphere, or the energy needed to deliver that gold to a smelter, getting it melted and shaped into a ring. Humans, as a result, have become a prime geological force, producing and deposing 24 times more sediment from mining alone than all of the major rivers, combined.