the guy by the door …

Bill McKibben was the first to make me aware that the importance of access to a vast store of low entropy carbon, is often undersold in describing the rise of capitalism. Normally, the Protestant ethic and/or Yankee ingenuity is center stage. The primeval ferns, having slowly but relentlessly done work against the second law of thermodynamics for millions of years, are just stage dressing. Fossil fuels look like lifeless ooze and/or rocks, but it has one essential property due to the action of life – the ability to progress to lower entropy state. This biogeological piggy bank has made a huge contribution to the rise of capitalism. Unfortunately, it has led to enormous as yet unaccounted costs of production.² One of these mega-externalities is the release of Carbon Dioxide and the consequent global warming. The crisis over ownership of low entropy carbon, predicted in the early ’70’s¹, is well upon us. The Carbon Wars of Acquisition are here, but are we facing Carbon Wars of Ejection – social dislocation due to global warming? You might check in with Bill McKibben.

This is Head of the Charles weekend and the Yard is posted with security regulations. Among them that access to the Houses, which includes Adams, will be restricted. I would be remiss, if I did not point out that Harvard’s Law Enforcement Community would like non-Harvard people to be the guest of a Harvard student. There will be other chances to see him. And I will be reporting on my trip to the First Annual:

IFG Teach-in: Confronting the Global Triple Crisis – Climate Change, Peak Oil, Global Resource Depletion & Extinction

¹James Ridgeway, The Last Play: The Struggle to Monopolize the World’s Energy Resources, Mentor/New American Library 1974.

²It has also had deleterious effects on economic theory by encouraging the erroneous assumption that the human econosphere is unbounded. It is potentially unbounded in an astrophysical sense, but there is a very large investment barrier presented by the gravitational well of the earth that makes states outside it effectively inaccessible on a time scale comparable to the global warming crisis.