enthalpy

Thursday, June 22, 2006


The tyranny of air conditioning. To say it's not a huge cultural impact on the 20th century would be naive. Is it the biggest culprits in America's energy addiction? I don't think so, but I'm a bit biased. This guy is off his nut:
As a device explicitly designed to outrun the Second Law of Thermodynamics, an air-conditioner vividly illustrates the inevitable destruction caused by all economic activity, a process first described by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the godfather of ecological economics.

Georgescu-Roegen wrote in his 1971 book "The Entropy Law and the Economic Process" that despite the neat, closed-loop flow charts depicted in textbooks, the economic process "is not circular but unidirectional. As far as this facet alone is concerned, the economic process consists of a continuous transformation of low entropy into high entropy, that is, into irrevocable waste."
Hey guess what other device takes useful energy and produces worthless waste heat? Everything in the fucking universe! That's right, breathing oxidizes the useful energy of your blood and creates waste heat that's contributing to the eventual heat death of the planet. Sooner if you're just playing X-box, you worthless sack of shit.

A/C is the primary cause for the explosion in population of the "sun belt" in the last 30 years, and without it, the gulf coast from Brownsville to Miami would be a ghost town.

Who knows what the answer is going to be. I'd like to read this book, though. Maybe I'll check out my air-conditioned library and see if they have a copy.



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