Forget the Flame to Reduce CO2 Emissions

Just as a living organism continually needs food to maintain itself, an economy consumes energy to do work and keep things going. That consumption comes with the cost of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, though. So, how can we use energy to keep the economy alive without burning out the planet in the process?

In a paper in PLOS ONE, University of Utah professor of atmospheric sciences Tim Garrett, with mathematician Matheus Grasselli of McMaster University and economist Stephen Keen of University College London, reports that current world energy consumption is tied to unchangeable past economic production. And the way out of an ever-increasing rate of carbon emissions may not necessarily be ever-increasing energy efficiency–in fact, it may be the opposite.

Thermoeconomics

This study marks the beginning of the collaboration between Garrett, Grasselli, and Keen. They’re now working to connect the results of this study with a full model for the economy, including a systematic investigation of the role of matter and energy in production. Garrett is an atmospheric scientist. But he recognizes that atmospheric phenomena, including rising carbon dioxide levels and climate change, are tied to human economic activity. “Since we model the earth system as a physical system,” he says, “I wondered whether we could model economic systems in a similar way.”

He’s not alone in thinking of economic systems in terms of physical laws. There’s a field of study, in fact, called thermoeconomics. Just as thermodynamics describes how heat and entropy (disorder) flow through physical systems, thermoeconomics explores how matter, energy, entropy, and information flow through human systems.

Future work

Many of these studies looked at correlations between energy consumption and current production, or gross domestic product. Garrett took a different approach; his concept of an economic system begins with the centuries-old idea of a heat engine. A heat engine consumes energy at high temperatures to do work and emits waste heat. But it only consumes. It doesn’t grow.

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