E DTR = E HH
6.1 Concluding Discussion
CHAPTER 6
6 Conclusion, Policy Implications and Future Research
It is indeed a disease of the mind to throw away a coat or a piece of furniture while it can still perform its specific service. To get a "new"
car every year and to refashion the house every other is a bioeconomic crime (NGR, 1975 p378)
examine the frontiers of sustainability in a manner that it may not be termed “snake oil”. Quoting the desperation of Mayumi (2009), in his article “Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen:His Bieconomics Approach to development and Change”, which is very pertinent here “As the last student of Georgescu-Roegen, I do hope that this article will trigger a more systematic investigation of his work and a fruitful discussion on this truly profound thinker.” Literature review revealed that while there is no dearth of research on “Shanon's Information Entropy” and carbon emission in city case studies, but there are studies few and far between in case of thermodynamic entropy and city systems or their linkage with global warming. There have been some studies on Anthropogenic Heat Flux (AHF) such as by Flanner (2009), Ming Cai et al (2003) Bennewitz (2007) who have raised concern over serious lack of accommodation of anthropogenic heat in the current climate change models. In conclusion, it can be said that just as the standard economists are not accommodative of ecological economic theories and premises, so is the case with thermal pollution which appears to be a very weak candidate in comparison with CO2
emissions!
6.1.1 Development Paradox and Re-emergence of NGR
The revolutionary science based on The Entropy Law and Economic Process by NGR appears to be getting into prominence since the last decade and a half after being virtually dormant for nearly thirty years. His criticism of NCE on growth and development seem to be justified in today's world of impending environmental cataclysm. NGR's treatment of the economic process in the light of the impeccable 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics, especially his criticism of NCE production function, scarcity and substitution, pollution and waste which were examined in some detail in Chapter 2, were well founded, have stood the test of time and have become relevant today. His theories are foundational to the new interdisciplinary science of ecological economics.
Based on these concepts, a theoretical framework for the research study was developed, which
depicts the economic process as a sub system of the large earth system (thermodynamically a closed and non equilibrium system which must throw away all the energy it receives from the sun, else it would get hotter and hotter), which in turn is a part of the larger sun-earth-space universe. This has been developed taking the systems approach and applying the laws of thermodynamics on economic process, an approach which NGR vigorously advocated and criticized the NCE for following classical mechanical predictive, reversible and unrealistic models to economic processes. Though there is no rebuttal of application of the thermodynamic laws to economic processes, and whatever criticisms were there, except for the 4th Law of Thermodynamics by NGR, in the past now seem to have settled down. However, there remains a gap as to the actual manner of application of these laws to the economic thought because of which various approaches have emerged ranging from metaphors, analogues to highly arithmomorphic treatments, the main reason being the difficulties of application of entropy and its estimation in real world processes. These issues have been dealt at some length in Chapter 3.
We have entered an era of high consumption of energy and also are moving towards urbanization with high standards of living, characterized by high resource use, and now serious questions on the sustainability of the existing economies are being raised world wide, while at the same time rising CO2 in the atmosphere, global warming, frequent economic meltdowns and resource crisis such as peak oil and peak phosphorus have pushed countries to rethink on their economic agenda. As the North is moving towards degrowth, but the South is yet to agree on any such agenda as there is need for “development” in these countries. These issues have been dealt with in Chapter 4, and a growth and development paradox, coupled with the complexities of rebound effect with Jevons' paradox superimposed, has clearly emerged in the study. While sustainable development was found to be the most oft repeated catchword with as many as 37 definitions in literature, NGR considered it a snake oil. Even Daly was critical about the definitions of
sustainable development. NGR predicted, applying the entropy law that even zero growth is unsustainable (unless we go back to “berry picking economy” according to NGR). It is the entropy law that has brought to the fore the biophysical limits of source and sink, which is foundational in understanding sustainability and climate change. While NGR predicted in 1975 about the impending “thermal pollution” that would prove a “more crucial obstacle” and further emphasized on “continuous accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which could cause green house effect heating of the globe” (NGR, 1975, p 358), the concern of mankind today, after 45 years, about the threat of 20 C rise in global surface temperature is a fast turning into a reality. The IPCC (2007, 2014) today and the CoP are seized of the matter, and all Business As Usual (BAU) economic pathways are under revision. We have lost precious 45 years in realizing that the entropy law still remains unbeatable, and that our economic processes are not beyond it.
6.1.2 The Case Study and Its Significance
With this backdrop, the theoretical framework, developed in Chapter 2, was further refined in Chapter 4 with a “new process” approach of NGR which is a low entropy process. In order to test the basic principle of the framework that all development processes are function of various economic processes which in turn are functions of a large number of physical and chemical processes, which NGR called elementary processes, and further that the framework links economic process and development process to QoL and well being, a case study of urbanization was formulated for Guwahati city and 4 sectors namely electricity, fossil fuels, buildings and AFOLU were studied from the waste heat and CO2 emission perspective. The Thesis through the case study brings to fore the “thermal pollution” due to economic process which is comprised of waste heat and CO2 emission.
It was found from the case study of Guwahati city that development process, which was seen in terms of population growth, built up area growth, electricity, fossil fuel consumption and impact of development on the city ecosystems namely forest, wetlands and agriculture, that the growth of the city has resulted in increase of energy consumption, increase in entropy and CO2
emissions and accompanied reduction in the ecosystem. Guwahati city shows an upward trend in QoL which is indicated by rise in per capita power from 23 W in 2001 to 117W in 2015, which is a five fold increase in 15 years time span. The city is also seem to be adding 1.8 million m2 of built up space annually (2010-2015), and growing at the rate 6.7 sq km per year. At the same time the CO2 emissions have gone up from 4 MtCO2 in 2010 to 6 MtCO2 in 2015, and entropy generation has also gone up from 81 TJK-1 in 2010 to 113 TJK-1 in 2015. The city is seen to use on average in last 6 years (2010-2015) about 50420 TJ of energy, of which 42841 TJ dissipates as waste heat and CO2, giving an efficiency of 15% to the city metabolism. Sector wise finding are given in Chapter 5 at the end of each of the sectoral studies. The policy implications emerging out of the case study are discussed Section 6.2 of this Chapter.