Entropy and the Fallacy of Environmental Offsets

It is popular in the media to bandy about the concept of environmental offsets as a partial remedy to the emission of global heating greenhouse gases. The concept is fundamentally in error. It entails half-truths that disregard the phenomenal absolute increase values of pollution increases versus an ideal zero addition of pollutants state.

Value theory in economics tends to be abstract and shaped rather like a math formula while real physics are deleted as a sort of externality. Because economic business methods are the basic anthropocene era driver of human acceleration of global heating and because government is not at all competent at ecological economic theory defective models for remediation tend to use standard economic evaluative criteria. I will clarify that a little.

One may balance solve an algebra formula or a credit-deficit report with abstract numerical additions and subtractions where appropriate-hence the idea of offsets arises to 'solve' the quantification issues of greenhouse gas emissions and global heating scalar field issues. Physics and the process of entropy is not like that. While it is possible to quantify many cosmological parameters not all of the processes are reversible. The increase of entropy global and Universally is one such irreversible process.

Entropy is the increase of disorganization. Entropy is the process of a high energy state reaching the lowest possible energy state universally. Boyle's law of the equal distribution of gas particles is an illustration of entropy. If the world started with an overall energy rating of 100, entropy decreases that rating overtime as if it were a battery running down that cannot be recharged.

As a practical matter, energy locked into the form of matter (remember Einstein's formula noting the convertibility of energy and mass- e=mc2) breaks down over time and becomes eventually dust and after that, over eons of Universal time, nothing more than isolated particles floating in space (although some theorize a black hole destiny, Hawking said Black holes leak out energy given enough time, yet with no place to go beside the black hole they ought to return to the black hole. Even so that may not go on forever since gravity costs energy and needs to be paid for with entropy increase. So what is less organized than a black hole when gravity dies is beyond me. I don't think that a black hole would have the sort of field imbalance after gravity switched off that is hypothesized for starting the phase changing big bang , hyper-inflation and stellar-synthesis producing elements and life).

When entropy is added to the world through industrialization, mining, logging etc it cannot be reversed. Because of the extreme ratio of energy to mass the conversion of mass into fabrications can go on for quite some time without turning the planet into dust unless in the fusion or peer planetary collision field) so there is no immediate need to panic about the irreversible increasing entropy. Even so it is the case that the ecosphere stasis has an irreversible track itself because of time and complexity. It is ironic that the increase of complexity in some manufactures such as automobiles and housing have brought the destruction of natural products that required billions of years of evolution-13.3 billion for production. Human intellectual development at the front tends to be mass produced religiously by billions of consumers. Unfortunately the avant guard of human intellectualism tends historically to be like that of naïve kids building fires in a dry barn filled with hay.

There is a need for change in value theory encompassing rational comprehension of the dissimilarity between the physics of the ecosphere as well as the inert mass of the planet and solar system and standard economic formulai. One cannot just offset the addition of greenhouse gases on one side of an ideal global warming equation by subtracting from another. The physics ecosphere equation is worse than a Möbius band with more than one side with twists; it misrepresents the physical relations of entropy and the phenomenal changes; irreversible changes, of human misdirected evolution.

God has a purpose for an evolving world and social reality that is as predetermined as the law of entropy. Life locally grows against the general trend of disorganization, as did the complex increase of elements follow the nuclear fusion destruction of stars, while the Universal quantity of energy remains the same. Only forms of energy and mass ultimately change to the lowest, simplest state possible-energy isn't ever destroyed, and neither are human souls.

Human souls are accountable to God at the day of Judgment. In the meantime physical forms of life are accountable to the laws of entropy and human misdirected evolution. Human also has the capacity to direct evolution in positive directions locally. Even so there is inevitably a coefficient of entropy increasing. The clever thing is to maximize the increase of life inclusive of the entire ecosphere while minimizing the rate of entropy increase overall.