1. The publisher is the World Publishing Company (in Singapore). The ISBN is 978-9814273930.

2. See for instance Michael T. Klare, The Race for What’s Left (Henry Holt, 2012). This is one of several kindsof currently notable environmental degradation. The other kinds include: overshoot in the use of renewable re-sources; pollution; unduly fast climate change; troublesome changes in the locations of certain kinds of material

2(e.g. of H O which has, on the one hand, melted from the polar caps and is, on the other hand, flooding Bangla-desh); mass extinction of biological species, and yet also new super bacteria and more virulent viruses capable ofcausing epidemics.

3. In order, for instance, for a force to qualify as having done mechanical work on a physical object, the force musthave caused a displacement of the object. The amount of the displacement is measured in terms of distance. Theamount of the work is equal to the distance times the amount of resistance that the object poses to being displaced.With the same amount of work you can either lift one cup of tea 20 cm straight up or else two such cups 10 cm.

4. The flow of energy radiated here from the Sun in a week is more than the total stock of terrestrial energy (ther-mal energy, fossil fuels etc.).

5. How much energy is there in the aimless molecular stirrings and reboundings which we perceive as heat? The

A Method for Assessing Thermodynamically the Depletion of Nonrenewables

Mark Lindley

Antonio and Alicia Valero, a father-and-daughter pair of professors at the University of Zaragoza’s

Centre of Research for Energy Resources and Consumption, have published recently (2014) a magnum

opus – more than 650 pages long, and with 81 tables and 132 figures – about the ongoing decline in1

worldwide availability of non-renewable, abiotic (i.e. not living) natural resources vital to modern soci-

eties: the fossil fuels and various kinds of minerals. The book has a poetic title, Thanatia: The Destiny of2

the Earth’s Mineral Resources: A Thermodynamic Cradle-to-Cradle Assessment (yes, “cradle-to-cradle”!),

and contains a fascinating and sometimes daunting array of explanations and technical information,

much of which is based on a new theoretical concept (“grave-to-cradle”) which is described thoroughly

and complemented with practical suggestions for addressing the economic problem.

A quick way to get the drift of the theory is via an analogy between the well known concept in phy-

sics of an isolated system in a “dead state” and a salient aspect of the new concept for which the book

is named. Thanatia is an imaginary geological condition in which (along with some other features speci-

fied by the authors) the Earth’s various minerals, though not absent – they have, after all, nowhere

else to go as long as the planet remains coherent – would be distributed quite evenly (no longer con-

centrated in ores or recycling repositories) throughout the land and water. On the other hand, in an

isolated physical system in a “dead state”, all the energy in the system would be distributed evenly

throughout it – with for instance the heat (haphazard zigzag stirrings and reboundings of molecules)

at uniform temperature throughout – and there would thus be a physical equilibrium whereby no work

in the physicist’s sense of the term could take place.3

(The Earth is, thank heavens, not isolated, as plenty of energy is radiated here from the Sun. But4

no minerals are radiated to the Earth.)

“Exergy” is a term in physics, and important in this book, for energy which in a system with dis-

equilibrium yields work if it is “kinetic” or can do so if it is “potential” and is then released. The apple

fell on Newton – that was an historic kinetic event – when the potential mechanical energy of its high

position on the tree was released by the stem breaking; he could then, by eating it, use some of the

potential chemical energy in it. The difference between exergy and the energy that would be present

throughout an isolated system at uniform temperature, pressure and chemical composition is qualita-5

authors mention that “Whilst a calorie is a really small amount of heat, namely that [which is] needed to warm agram of water by one degree centigrade, it is also the kinetic energy of that same mass at 327 km/h! Hence, smallfluctuations in system temperatures result in considerable energy expenditures.” (They mean exergy expenditures.)

6. Herman Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications (Island Press; 1st edition,2004; revised 2nd edition, 2011), Glossary.

tively just as notable as, say, the difference in our emotional life between love and boredom, or the

difference in a market economy between legal tender with and without galloping inflation. (Inflation

isn’t a lack of money, but it affects the quality of money.)

A basic law of physics says that the exergy in an isolated physical system with disequilibrium would

expend itself in the course of time, and the system would thereby approach equilibrium. A well known

term for such self-expenditure of exergy is “increase of entropy”. The authors explain that “the funda-

mental idea” underlying the concept of entropy is that in an isolated system “everything degrades or

becomes dispersed” by and by as the system’s exergy is gradually expended: “sooner or later fluids will

stop flowing, [relatively] warm bodies will get colder, [and] pure substances will become impure.... This

is an experimental fact and constitutes the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” The reason why it is called

a law of thermo- dynamics is that the earliest formulations (in the 19th century) of the principle were

just about the fact that heat is spontaneously transferred from warmer to cooler parts of the system,

and did not say anything about, for instance, substances becoming dispersed and thereby immersed in

“impurities”. In the 1970s, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (who was a sharp economist but not a thermo-

dynamicist) proposed an additional theoretical “law” in regard to dispersion of substances. The Valeros

derive it from the Second Law, and Georgescu-Roegen’s most accomplished former student, Herman

Daly, has likewise held that the Second Law covers the fact that things “left to themselves ... tend to get

mixed up and scattered”. 6

According to the Valeros, “dispersion of raw materials has not been sufficiently considered in eco-

[ ]nomic analyses. It has been ignored as a materials availability loss , and it is viewed [instead] as a pollu-

tion problem, more than anything else.” The purpose of the book is to show, without belittling the pol-

lution problems, how to analyze correctly the materials-availability losses. The Valeros note that nowa-

days,

“technology is employing all [the] elements of the periodic table and their use is growing exponentially.

Yet this fact is barely discussed in conventional ecological discourse that preferably focuses on climate

change, loss of biodiversity, deforestation or ecosystems destruction. Instead, the problem of a future

lack of abiotic resources is ‘readily solved’ [in the writers’ imaginations] with the ideas that the Earth’s

crust is almost unexplored (oceans, the poles, deep underground mines, etc) and that technology ‘will

overcome’ any potential market disruption. The truth however is quite different, with mining companies

telling another story.”

Thanatia is defined as a theoretical, quantitatively formulated model of an “economically dead”

condition of the Earth’s atmosphere, hydrosphere and upper crust, whereby all the fossil fuels would

2have been burned, leading to an increase in atmospheric CO concentration (the authors reckon it

would be some 70% higher than now) and hence in mean global surface and atmospheric temperature

due to the greenhouse effect, and, “all commercially exploitable [mineral] resources [would] have been

consumed and dispersed ” (my italics) throughout the upper crust and hydrosphere. This model provides

a theoretical baseline against which the authors venture quantitative assessments of what would be

required theoretically to restore the minerals from thanatia to useful conditions of concentration (like,

for instance, in economically feasible ores).

7. The Valeros tactfully refrain from mentioning price fluctuations due to mob psychology rather than to rationalassessments of value. Instead, they say (p.xii) that “if Economics is used to explain ‘value creation’, Thermo-dynamics can describe and quantify the ‘resource destruction’ [in regard to mineral resources] that comes aboutin the creation of that value”. Some relevant but woefully mistaken modern laissez-faire precepts are that theeventual unavailability of any one kind resource can always be dealt with by paying more money for a substituteand that the price system thus communicates to the scientifically ignorant “man on the spot” all the information“beyond the limited but intimate knowledge of the facts of his immediate surroundings” that is needed in orderfor society to make wise decisions. (These phrases are from Friedrich Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”,American Economic Review, XXXV (1945), p.525.)

The assessments are in terms of physical “exergy costs” (although data for monetary costs etc. are

also amply cited). Prices depend on psychology, whereas physical exergy cost in regard to minerals7

depends only on the techniques of mining, processing, using, recovering and/or disposing of them.

Monetary sums are at least latently akin to microeconomic thinking, partly because the quality of social

power in the money in the employer’s pocket depends on the employee wanting to have some of it in

his. The Valeros are making macroeconomic assessments of Humankind’s mutual relation with the abio-

tic content of the outer layers of the planet, which doesn’t care about social power.

They use the noun “grave” to refer metaphorically to thanatia, and they use “cradle” to refer to (1)

the corresponding, not “economically dead” condition nowadays (as there is still nowadays a modi-

cum of naturally concentrated mineral deposits) and (2) an economically equivalent condition after a

recuperation from a dangerous (and perhaps disaster-laden) historical approach to the theoretical

thanatia. Hence the book’s subtitles, “The Destiny of the Earth’s Mineral Resources: A Thermo-

dynamic Cradle-to-Cradle Assessment”.

The following schematic chart (slightly simplified from one in Chapter 4) represents flows of exergy

(except that its “dissipation”, represented by the lowest arrow, is loss of exergy and hence growth of

entropy) in the global economy:

“Use” includes all the uses by consumers. The “Stock in Landfills” block overlaps with “Thanatia” be-

cause in some of that stuff in the landfills, the minerals which had previously been economically useful

are so utterly dispersed that to restore them, by “urban mining”, to a feasible degree of purity and/or

concentration would be unfeasible. The Valeros envisage estimating (a) the exergy costs nowadays of

extracting and processing fuels and minerals, and also (b) the potentially smaller such costs if there

8. What is said here about geological (vs biological and sociological) realities reminds me of what Kenneth Boul-ding said in 1981 (in his book, Evolutionary Economics, p.44) about the solar system: “The only reason why pre-diction is so successful in celestial mechanics is that the evolution of the solar system has ground to a halt in whatis essentially a dynamic equilibrium with stable parameters. Evolutionary systems, however, by their very naturehave unstable parameters.... If, of course, it were possible to predict the change in the parameters, then [this wouldmean that] there would be other parameters [structurally deeper] which were unchanged; but the search for ultim-ately stable parameters in evolutionary systems is futile, for they probably do not exist.”

were wiser and more expert uses of technology (as well as wiser patterns of consumption and re-

cycling). These exergy-cost estimates would presumably be helpful for figuring out the best ways of

slowing down the dissipation and conserving more of the valuable stuff.

The book has 16 main chapters, as follows.

1: “The Depletion of Non-Renewable Abiotic Resources”. This is mainly about how the currently

increasing demand for certain minerals may hinder the development of a “green economy” as proposed

by the U.N. The discussion is rich in geological data and engineering savvy, and contains the equivalent

of a two-hour graduate-level seminar in environmental economics for people who expect windmills,

solar photovoltaics and “bioenergy” to supply consumable energy as plentifully in the 21st century

as fossil fuels did in the 20th. Three facts which leap off the page are that (a) in order for half of the

world’s electric power in 2030 to be generated by windmills of the types that we now have, an amount

of copper equal of that which could be obtained by mining two-fifths of the world’s current economic-

ally exploitable reserves of copper ore would have to be mined just to supply the copper for the motors

in those windmills and the transmission lines from them (Would you call this “green”?); (b) the depend-

ency of new-fangled solar photovoltaics on critical chemical elements is just as drastic; and, apropos

“bioenergy”, (c) the “global supply of phosphates will not meet future demand without drastic changes

within the recycling sector [and] in the application of fertiliser, improvements in food chain produc-

[ ]tion , and alterations to the Western diet”. The authors point out that “Plants and other biota require

[ ]phosphorus to live , with no possibility of replacing it with an alternative.... [T]he amount of biomass

that can be produced is absolutely limited by the phosphorous resources of the planet and mankind’s

capacity to recycle it [i.e. the phosphorus]. Any solution will almost certainly sharply raise future food

prices....”

This can be understood without the Valeros’ theoretical innovation. (Toward the end of the chap-

ter they say a little about why they think the innovation will be useful.) The next two chapters provide

some historical and intellectual background against which they will, in some of the subsequent chap-

ters, survey more thoroughly and in a more long-term context the material facts that have been

sampled in this prologue.

2: “Economic versus Thermodynamic Accounting”. Economics professors who are familiar with

the modern history of their discipline can readily understand a good deal of this chapter. It describes

various concepts which (a) economists, (b) “accountants” (in a broad sense of the word) and (c) sci-

entists have devised for assessing environmental degradation in general and mineral-resource deple-

tion in particular. At the outset the Valeros mention the well-known distinction between “economic

capital” measured in terms of money, “social capital” and material “natural capital”, and describe this

latter idea as “a useful conceptual bridge that can help economists and thermodynamicists to under-

stand each other ... especially in [regard to] quasi-static geological systems as opposed to the more

dynamic biological ones”. Later in the book they will suggest that “natural endowment” would be a8

more valid concept than “natural capital”.

9. According to Harold Barnett and Chandler Morse, Scarcity and Growth: The Economics of Natural ResourceAvailability (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963; p.11), “Advances in fundamental science have made it possi-ble to take advantage of the uniformity of matter/energy – a uniformity that makes it feasible, without preassign-able limit, to escape the quantitative constraints of the earth’s crust.” Daly has perspicaciously detected here“the alchemist’s dream of converting lead into gold”. (See Daly’s brief essay, “Georgescu-Roegen versus Solow/Stiglitz”, in the journal Ecological Economics, 22 (1997), p.263.) V. Kerry Smith has correctly remarked (inScarcity and Growth Reconsidered, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979; p.69) that “it is not the uniformityof matter-energy that makes for usefulness, but precisely the opposite”.

10. Such precepts are not mainly what business schools teach as “environmental economics”. Some of the lessonsin those schools are, for instance, about how to pollute without paying.

11. The idea of “discounting” when assessing the present negative monetary value of a future cost is that if youknow that the cost at a certain future time will be a certain amount, you could put a smaller amount now in, say,a savings account with a guaranteed annual interest rate, such that the account would yield the full amount by thetime you have to pay.

(a) Economists. After noting the “radical” views of Ludwig von Mises (“It is vain to provide for the

needs of [future] ages the technical abilities of which we cannot even dream”) and Friedrich Hayek

(“[T]he conservationist who urges us to make greater provision for the future is [thereby always] in

fact urging a lesser provision for posterity”), and Harold Hotelling’s “less radical” precept (1931) that

mining companies would inevitably extract non-renewable resources at a rate which would maximize

social well-being indefinitely, the Valeros outline some subsequent opinions of market economists

(from Barnett and Morse 1963 to Krautkraemer 2005) and mention that fluctuation in the price of oil9

in the last fifty years has often been due more to political manipulation than to a new objective finding

as to how much is left in the bucket. They then distinguish between the ideas of “environmental econo-

mists” (such as the “polluter-pays” precept and the application of cost/benefit analysis to economic-

environmental tradeoffs) and those of “ecological economists” such as Georgescu-Roegen (who is10

discussed at some length), Daly, Kenneth Boulding and Kozo Mayumi. These ecological economists are

found to have deeper “transdisciplinary inspirations” and a larger time-horizon in mind (i.e. deeper and

larger than has been characteristic of the environmental economists), but even they have lacked, the

Valeros maintain, “the quantitative instruments to convert economic statements into global vision and

policy” for a “sound management of planetary resources”. (The work of certain other ecological econo-

mists is treated under the “Accountants” and “Scientists” headings.)

(b) “Accountants”. Some of the concepts described here are the SNA (System of National Accounts);

GNP (Gross National Product); EW-MFA (Economy-Wide Material Flow Accounts); NPV (Net Present

Value, i.e. with discounting from supposed future monetary values); the SEEA (System of Environ-11

mental-Economic Accounts; the Valeros praise this for “the way in which the statistics are universally

organised permitting well established procedures for their analysis”, but they also criticize it, partly

because its recommended method of valuation is in terms of imaginary market prices (estimated NPV-

wise) for non-market assets – an accounting technique which harbors implicitly the absurd notion that

“if one could extract and use all present environmental capital and convert it into money it would be

better than having [any] physical assets yet to be exploited”); the “Net Price Method”, “User Cost

Method” and “Hartwick Rule” (all of which fail, in the Valeros’ opinion, to “seriously look at the con-

sequences of production and [indicate] whether it is sustainable on the long term”); Wouter van Die-

ren’s precept of “Environmental Defense Expenditures”; and Roefie Heuting’s concepts of “Prevention

Costs”, “Avoidance Cost”, and “‘indefinitely ’ extending [non-renewable] reserves”. The Valeros discuss

“strong-sustainability” thinking (i.e. thinking about each kind of natural resource in its own right, with-

out assuming a priori that if it is used up, a substitute can replace it), and this prompts them to exam-

ine critically the common-sense notion of “natural capital” and to list some misconceptions hidden in

12. See Bruce Hannon, “The role of input–output analysis of energy and ecologic systems in the early develop-ment of ecological economics – a personal perspective”, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1185(2010) pp.30-38. The account begins as follows: “The idea of combining economics and ecology into a singlediscipline has it roots in the ideas of Robert Costanza in the mid-1970s when he was completing his PhD thesiswith the Energy Research Group ... at the University of Illinois in Urbana....”

13. See Mauro Bonaiuti, ed., From Bioeconomics to Degrowth: Georgescu-Roegen’s “New Economics” in eightessays (Routledge, 2011), p.237.

the analogy with industrial capital. (“Natural endowment” would be, they say, a more suitable term. I

agree.) They warn against supposing that substituting one mineral for another is going to be routinely

feasible in a high-tech era of clever uses for this and that specific mineral resource. They mention that

recycling often requires a lot of exergy (a fact which Chapter 14 will explain in detail). And they point

out the paradoxical fact that since “the overriding mentality [nowadays] is that ecosystems are subject

to irrevocable death whilst minerals are not”, modern society likes to use up, in order to restore local

ecosystems, the non-renewable kind of natural endowment which is the subject of their book, without

trying to use inherently renewable (though evolving) ecosystems to help recover certain non-renewable

mineral resources from degeneration into useless waste.

(c) Scientists. This part of the chapter is a bridge between its earlier parts and the next chapter.

The Valeros say that “ecological footprint” (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996; this concept is based on

reckoning in terms of surface areas of economically and environmentally valuable parts of the globe)

“explains well the demand for the regenerative capacity of biotic systems” but “provides insufficient

information when dealing with abiotic” resources. (Indeed. How could you guess at the value of an

abiotic resource on the basis of square meters? It’s not like a field of wheat.) They are ambivalent about

H.T. Odum’s “emergy analysis”. It is, they find, too inexact (and I agree), even though it “does address

eco-centric problems that other methodologies are unable to”, and “is based on the resources’ [own]

physical characteristics”, and measures “all resources ... with a single unit”, and is therefore useful

(notwithstanding the inexactness) “for ecosystem analysis”. They find that Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek’s

proposed method (1993, 1994) of assessing by weight the “material input per unit of [economic]

service” is a sustainability-indicator which is easy to understand but takes no account of “irreversibili-

ties like material dispersion and depletion”, nor of the costs of dealing with “contamination through

heavy metals, radioactive materials and persistent [noxious] organic compounds”, and thus yields in-

sufficient clues for prioritizing among possible remedial measures. They are likewise ambivalent about

“embodied-energy” analysis (with estimates of how much consumable energy has been consumed in

the course of creating various commodities and delivering them to customers), which Bruce Hannon

in the 1970s had used in drawing up input-output matrices for the U.S. economy (with the numbers

representing amounts of “consumed energy” rather than dollars). They say that this kind of analysis12

often provides valuable insights but is to some extent methodologically weak because it lacks “thermo-

dynamic fundamentals” and therefore lacks good “rules for allocating [the supposed] energy inputs [i.e.

exergy costs] among [the resulting] co-products, by-products and wastes” common in many mines.

Georgescu-Roegen had, on the basis of his own regard for thermodynamic fundamentals, criticized

the concept of “embodied energy” more sharply than the Valeros do. I see two interesting analogies13

here. One of them is with W. S. Jevons’s famous rejection (1871) of the classical economists’ “labour

theory” of economic value. Labour and “embodied energy” are, alike, aspects of the history of the com-

modity up to the moment when it is ready for sale to consumers, whereas (a) Jevons pointed out that

its market value routinely depends on how much people are thereupon willing to pay for it (regardless

14. William Stanley Jevons, Theory of Political Economy (1871 and several later editions; my reference here is tothe 1931 edition), p.164: “[L]abour once spent has no influence on the future value of any article.”

15. Different writers have offered somewhat different definitions of “virtual water”. The definition best suited tomy point here is in A.Y. Hoekstra and A.K. Chapagain, “Water Footprints of Nations: Water Use by People as aFunction of their Consumption Pattern”, Water Resources Management, vol.21 (2007), pp.35-48): “the volumeof freshwater used to produce the product, measured at the place where the product was actually produced”.

16. The concept of “Pigouvian taxes” was first set out in 1920 in A.C. Pigou’s The Economics of Welfare. TheOrganization for Economic Co-operation and Development defines them as “tax[es levied on an agent causingan environmental externality (environmental damage) as an incentive to avert or mitigate such damage.”

of how much labour may have gone into producing and delivering it), and (b) the Valeros will estimate14

losses of the “thermodynamic rarity” of mineral resources on the basis of assessing how much exergy

would theoretically thereafter have to be spent to recover them from thanatia. The other analogy that

I have in mind is between the concepts of “embodied energy” and “virtual water” (i.e., water used to

produce a commodity which may or may not then actually contain it): In each case a qualitative quali-15

fier should be recognized as being crucial to the argument, since the “energy” is really exergy and the

water is practically always freshwater.

(Given that the Valeros see, just as clearly as Georgescu-Roegen had seen it, a lack of “thermo-

dynamic fundamentals” in the concept of embodied energy, why do they say that it often provides

valuable insights? The answer has to do, I think, with the fact that retail consumers shouldn’t have to

study exergy etc. in order to make environment-friendly microeconomic choices. For that kind of pur-

pose a thermodynamically inexact concept such as “embodied energy” will suffice. What the Valeros

are trying to provide, however, is a more exact kind of guide for engineers and the like. They don’t go

into political science, but I imagine that if they did, they would mention Pigouvian taxes. )16

After discussing in this chapter several additional ways of assessing environmental impact, the

Valeros prepare the reader for the next chapter by introducing the concept of “thermoeconomics”,

the basic precept of which is that the role of exergy in our material activities ought to be understood

not only by means of the Second Law but also in terms of such criteria as the “efficiency” and “benefits”

(health-wise, for instance) of the various mechanisms for capturing and utilizing exergy to make com-

modities and perform other services.

(If this basic precept of thermoeconomics is worth applying to all our material activities, why should

it be especially pertinent to our uses of abiotic natural resources? The answer lies in Alfred Lotka’s dis-

tinction (1945) between endosomatic and exosomatic instruments. “Endosomatic” is a tag for things

inside the body of a given creature; “exosomatic” refers to things outside it. A bird’s wings, beak and

feet are endosomatic; a beavers’ dam and a [wo]man’s gun are exosomatic. We humans have, however,

far more exosomatic instruments than other creatures do. Whereas all creatures with skeletons need

calcium phosphate endosomatically for their bones, we humans also need calcium carbonate (lime-

stone) exosomatically for building stones and cement; we need calcium sulfate (gypsum) for plaster;

etc. Whereas all red-blooded animals need iron endosomatically in order not to become anemic, we

modern humans also need it exosomatically for steel. And so on; the examples are legion.)

The latter part of this chapter and the entire next one are philosophically the most interesting parts

of the book. In order to serve up a taste of the philosophy (and, in particular, the concept of “quality”

as a characteristic which can be found in our lives and in the inanimate world) let me mention first that

in physics, the word “system” is a term (i.e. a word with a standard technical meaning) for any given or

imagined portion of the universe that has been chosen for studying the physical changes which take

place within the system in response to varying conditions (that is, it doesn’t have to be something

which would be described in common-sense talk as “systematic”; it can be anything physical, big or

small, that a physicist wants to study); the properties of a given “system” are said to be either “exten-

sive” or “intensive”; and, its “extensive” properties include its total energy as well as its mass and vol-

ume, whereas the intensive properties (i.e. properties which can be estimated quantitatively without

having first got estimates of the extensive ones) include the system’s temperature(s), level(s) of pres-

sure, and chemical composition. The Valeros’ theory depends on the fact that the system’s intensive

properties can each be converted into exergy; but they appreciate also the fact that the qualitative

aspect of a system’s energy which determines what proportion of it is exergy (i.e. to what extent the

energy can perform work) is hardly the system’s only quality that is likely to be important to us. They

point out that a certain morsel of food “could to some appear repugnant, whilst to others [it might be

of] extraordinary [value,] but regardless of opinion it will always maintain the same exergy value”, and

that a work of art will have aesthetic as well as physical qualities, and the former will of course have a

lot to do with its value. They decline, therefore, to “put forward exergy as a physical measure of the

value of things as an alternative to their market price”.

In regard to Humankind’s uses of minerals and fuels the Valeros are seeking to define and identify

(and here I will italicize some of their words that imply quality) “the true efficiency [exergy-wise, and

therefore macroeconomically in the long term] of processes in a given system, once the desired flows

[of goods] to be produced are identified”. They want to show how to increase the true efficiency.

3: “From Thermodynamics to Economics and Ecology”. This chapter is about some aspects of

thermodynamics which are relevant to macroeconomic assessments of all kinds of environmental

degradation. It starts out with detailed accounts of the laws of thermodynamics, of the concepts of

exergy and irreversibility, and of thermoeconomics. Then it gives, in preparation for the next chapter,

an introductory account of “physical geonomics”, which is an application of thermodynamics that the

Valeros have devised in order to be able to make their quantitative “evaluation[s] of mineral resources

from a Second Law perspective”. Exactly how they would do this for each kind of mineral is explained

later in the book; Chapters 5 and 6 will meanwhile provide an introductory account of all the valuable

abiotic stuff that is currently accessible to mining companies etc., or which may become accessible in

future if inventors devise new ways to get and use it (and if civilization is not meanwhile destroyed).

4: “Physical Geonomics: A Cradle-Grave-Cradle Approach for Mineral Depletion Assessment”. The

key idea here is to consider, in assessing quantitatively Humankind’s current and likely future relation to

minerals, not just how much pollution etc. is caused by mining and by industrial uses of minerals, and

how much exergy will sooner or later have to be expended to prevent the pollution from rendering us

very sickly or even extinct, but also how much exergy would theoretically be needed to return each eco-

nomically valuable kind of mineral from an utterly dispersed, “crepuscular” condition of thanatia to a

condition of a certain degree of “rarity” thermodynamically equivalent to what it was when the stuff

was in the mines where Humankind found or will have found it. This latter amount of exergy is equal

to the natural “bonus” of having minerals concentrated in the ores in the mines rather than being dis-

persed evenly throughout the Earth’s crust.

This chapter culminates in a set of three graphs in each of which the curve looks as though it were

plotting commodity price (on the vertical axis) against market demand (on the horizontal axis), but

actually the difference in height between any two points on the curve represents an amount of exergy

which has somehow been expended on work (in the physicist’s sense of the term) causing a certain

batch of a certain mineral to have a certain degree of “thermodynamic rarity”, while the resulting eco-

nomic quality of the ore – the “ore grade” – is plotted horizontally in the graph. Of particular interest

Care the situations (a) in the dire crepuscular conditions of thanatia (x ), which are, however, infinitely

better than before the cosmic Big Bang (we would need an infinitely tall graph to chart the situation

17. The “mining” consists of extracting ore from the deposit and transporting it (inside and outside of the mine).The ensuing “beneficiation” would characteristically consist of crushing and grinding the ore and then separatingthe sought-after stuff (by such techniques as flotation, magnetization, sieving, washing etc.) from other stuff in theground-up ore. (That other stuff is called "gangue".) The resulting valuable stuff then transported to a treatmentplant, where metallurgical treatment would consist of "smelting" (chemical reduction of metallic oxide to obtain(unpurified) metal(s) and then "refining" the metal(s), e.g. by electrochemistry or carbochemistry, to whateverdegree of chemical purity the manufacturer requires.

18. There is no “arrow of time” from left to right in these graphs. Instead, the points further to the right representhigher grades of economic quality in the stuff at a certain stage (indicated by the subscript to “x”) of the process.

Mbefore that), and then (b) in an ore which is more or less feasible for mining (x ), and then (c) “post-

Bbeneficiation” (x ), which is economically better than before the beneficiation but is still prior to the17

refined mineral’s use in manufacturing to make commodities such as houses, airplanes, hair dryers,

diet-supplement pills etc. The first

of the three graphs, which can be

taken as being about a momentary

situation in regard to a certain mine

and a certain mineral taken from it,

includes a note to the effect that

while the difference in “thermo-

dynamic rarity” between the stuff

theoretically in thanatia and actually

in the mine is a “natural bonus”

(since our heritage from Nature in-

cludes the existence of this batch of

ore suitable for mining), the subse-

quent difference between the ore (a)

in the mine and (b) after extraction,

beneficiation, etc. is the “mine-to-

market cost” (reckoned here in

terms of exergy):

The second graph indicates that

the mining process itself diminishes

the “natural bonus”, since more exergy

has to be expended to dig deeper (or

M1 M2whatever). In this graph, x and x

represent earlier and subsequent con-

ditions, given a certain mine and a

certain set of techniques for mining

it and processing the stuff:18

But what if better techniques could

be devised and applied, such that (a)

the mine would yield more from the

same Human-administered amount of

exergy, and (b) the processing became

likewise more efficient exergy-wise? In

that case, we would have a new curve, Ore grade

in which each distance rightwards would be at a lower height:

19. Appendix B in the book provides, for economists and other readers who may not have had college-level educa-tion in chemistry or geology, the equivalent of undergrad-level lectures on the minerals and the chemical elementsand their characteristic economic uses.

20. Topsoil is not included in this survey, as it is teeming with worms, insects, plant roots and microorganisms –hardly abiotic; and, the moisture in the topsoil (which amounts to a tiny portion of the hydrosphere, but is ofcourse vital for the plants on the land) is not included in the hydrospheric reckoning.

(And yet there would be, of course, a steadily increasing “mine-to-market cost” to be charted on this

new curve as time goes by; and the mine would eventually be exhausted, and the “natural bonus”

thereby lost.)

* * *

The next four chapters make up a section of the book which is entitled “Over the Rainbow: From

Cradle to Grave”. It goes into detail about the chemical and mineral makeup of the Earth’s abiotic stuff,

about the global distribution of the various substances, and about how they are taken from the natural

endowment to Industry en route to their consumption and toward the theoretical thanatia. These chap-

ters are like handbooks inasmuch as they include 29 tables (as well as 30 figures), some of them several

pages long; but virtually all the data is in one way or another needed to help provide a reasonably solid

basis for the important (though somewhat speculative) assessments set out in Chapter 13.

5: “The Geochemistry of the Earth” and 6: “The Resources of the Earth”. These chapters review

the planet’s geological and geochemical characteristics, focusing especially on the quantity and quality

of the useful mineral resources. Chapter 5 is equivalent to a graduate-level lecture on geology and19

account of the make-up of our abiotic natural endowments in terms of all the important kinds of min-20

erals and of 77 chemical elements which are potentially available for extraction and use. It describes

the composition of the various layers of the atmosphere, of the hydrosphere (i.e. the various forms of

2H O, including the atmospheric water vapour, the renewable freshwater resources, the ice caps, ice15

21. N.A. Grigor’ev, “Average composition of the upper continental crust and dimensions of the maximum con-centration of chemical elements...” (in Russian), Uralian Geological Journal, III (2007), pp.3-21.

22. Nancy E. Carpenter, Chemistry of Sustainable Energy (Boca Raton (Florida, USA), CRC Press; 2014).

23. I put this word in quotation marks in order to avoid implying that Humankind is not part of Nature.

sheets and glaciers, and the 97% of the hydrosphere which is salt water) and of the continental crust,

with detailed attention to the chemical and particularly the mineralogical composition of the upper

part of the crust. (99% of this upper part can be accounted for in terms of eight chemical elements. The

other elements are “rare”.) The history of the methods of making such estimates is described in some

detail. The Valeros regard the findings of N.A. Grigor’ev (2007) as being a significant improvement21

upon those available in the compilations published by Wedepohl (1995), McLennan (2001) and Rudnick

and Gao (2004).

Chapter 6 is mostly about the various possible resources of consumable energy: “nuclear”, geo-

thermal (i.e. from heat radiating ultimately from the innermost parts of the Earth to the surface), tidal,

hydroelectric, from windmills, and more or less directly from solar radiation, as well as from burning

various kinds fossil fuels and of biomass. Remarkably detailed data are set out, for instance in regard

to ores, petroleum etc. of various different qualities. The reason why is perfectly obvious when it comes

to fuels: the higher the quality, the less is needed to provide this or that amount of consumable energy.

An excellent recent textbook by Nancy Carpenter describes in detail the theoretical chemical as-22

pects of various industrial methods of producing consumable energy, and she is clearly attentive to the

fact that even if a certain method may appear to be inherently sustainable, the materials needed to use

the method may be too readily exhaustible. The Valeros go into far more detail about this latter point.

7: “An Introduction to Mining and Metallurgy” and 8: “Metallurgy of Key Minerals”. Chapter 7

describes the main physical processes, costs exergy-wise, and environmental impacts of the mining and

metallurgical industries (exploration, extraction, smelting, refining), and also the reclamation, rehabili-

tation and post-closure treatment of mines. This serves as an introduction to a set of more specific and

detailed analytical descriptions, in Chapter 8, of the processes in regard to each of a dozen different

demetallurgical categories (iron and steel; aluminium; copper; copper-related metals; nickel and cobalt;

etc.) and to each of several subcategories within some of these categories.

* * *

Having thus discussed taking stuff from “Nature” to Industry en route to the theoretical “grave”23

of thanatia, the Valeros devote Chapters 9-12 to a theoretical reversion “from grave to cradle”, a

reversion which they also tag metaphorically as “down the rainbow”, i.e. back to a useful degree of

concentration. Their quantitative study of such theoretical reversions will provide data for a compre-

hensive set of provisional assessments, in Chapter 13, of how fast the natural endowments of the non-

fuel minerals – their economically feasible natural concentrations in the Earth’s upper crust – could well

be exhausted in the next ten or twenty decades.

(Chapters 14-16 will then suggest how to develop and adopt more efficient ways of extracting, pro-

cessing, using and recycling nonrenewable abiotic resources. To cultivate “a rational management” –

rational for Humankind – of mineral resources would be, the Valeros say, like “tying the rainbows”: re-

routing the stuff away from the last part of its journey to thanatia. These Spanish-style poetic touches

carry messages of admonition and of hope.)

24. See apropos Kozo Mayumi, “The_Notion_of_Substitution...”, at www.academia.edu/12516509/The_No-tion_of_Substitution_Reconsidered_Economical_Biophysical_Epistemological (downloaded 27 May 2015).

25. M. King Hubbert, Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels (Houston 1956), p.10 (and p.22), and Energy Re-sources: A Report to the Committee on Natural Resources of the National Academy of Sciences – NationalResearch Council (Washington 1962), p.73.

9: “Thermodynamics of Mineral Resources”. This is about which particular thermodynamic con-

cepts are useful for exergy-cost assessments of mineral formation, separation, scarcity and mining,

and for exergy-calculations in regard to the resulting fuel and non-fuel minerals.

10: “Thanatia and the Crepuscular Earth Model”. This is about how to assess quantitatively the

theoretical baseline for exergy-assessments of mineral resources. It includes accounts of how much of

each kind of the various mineral resources (defined in terms of their differing chemical compositions,

which are described in detail) would exist in thanatia.

11: “The Exergy of the Earth and its Mineral Resources”. This chapter provides definitions and dis-

cussions of enthalpy and of Gibbs “free” energy. These mathematically formulated concepts of physics

– closely related to, but not the same as, exergy – are of use in the next chapter.

12: “The Exergy Replacement Costs of Mineral Wealth”. This is about how the replacement costs of

depleted mineral resources compare, exergy-wise, with the current consumable-energy costs of mining

and metallurgical processing. “Replacement” here means recovery, not “substitution”. (You may recall24

my having mentioned that Chapter 1 includes a remark to the effect that “plants and other biota re-

quire phosphorus to live” and that there is “no possibility of replacing it with an alternative”, i.e. of

substituting something else for it.) Phosphorous is not the only such indispensable stuff.

A notable fact brought out in this chapter is that while more than 60% of the physical exergy costs

attributable to the total worldwide production (as of 2008) of the main non-fuel mineral commodities

had been in the form of fossil fuels being burnt up in order to get the stuff, some 33% of the exergy

costs was in the form of a resulting loss of the bonus of having the minerals concentrated in feasible

ores instead of being spread thin in a crepuscular “worldwide landfill”. (The Valeros haven’t used this

phrase, but it seems to me suitable.) No wonder recycling will be discussed at length in Chapter 14.

13: “The Exergy Evolution of Mineral Wealth”. This is to my mind an especially impressive chapter.

Back in Chapter 2 the difference between “quasi-static” – i.e. non-renewable – resources and the “more

dynamic biological” systems has been mentioned. A well-established way of making predictions in re-

gard to the rates of extraction and (hence) exhaustion of the non-renewables is by means of “Hubbert

curves”. Hubbert was a geophysicist in Texas who devised the following kind of graph and used it to

make a remarkably accurate prediction that “peak production” (i.e. the historically fastest overall

annual rate of production) from oil wells within the USA would occur in 1970:25

The area under the curve represents the stock. The height of the curve at any given moment (time is

plotted from left to right) represents the rate of its extraction at that moment. The left half of the curve

represents an historical progression from a gradual start-up to a kind of feeding frenzy as the curve ap-

proaches the “peak production” phase, some halfway through its historical course. For any given real

stock, data must be available (if this method of prediction is to work) for a fair amount of the left half of

the curve (which will therefore be less smooth than in the idealized version); the method entails using

on the one hand an estimate of the total natural stock and on the other hand a presumption, based on

some historical observations which Hubbert had made, that after half of it has been used, the rate of

extraction will slow down pretty much in reverse to the way it had sped up.

Chapter 13 includes more than 70 Hubbert curves (as well as dozens of other graphic figures) pro-

viding easy-to-read assessments of when the “peak-production” years for each of the various kinds of

useful minerals are likely to have occurred.

Some words of caution are called for. If the estimate of the feasibly available natural stock is too

hopeful, then the peak-production moment will come sooner, and vice versa if feasible ores prove to be

more bountiful than expected. If the estimate is to be made in terms of exergy costs, then good data in

regard to the history of the ore grades is also very desirable; and yet only patchy data are at hand for

the assessments in regard to some of the minerals; and so, many of the Valeros’ Hubbert curves repre-

sent merely provisional assessments. (They acknowledge this and discuss various ramifications of the

uncertainties.) But the method is informative even so, because if the stock that is feasibly available

from natural endowment is really twice as big as estimated, then the rightward shift of the peak-

production moment is a matter of only some 35 years.

The chapter culminates in a set of five graphs, on each of which several Hubbert curves are placed.

The first and last of this set are shown below. (Note that the amounts represented by the heights of the

curves in the first graph are far greater than in the second one. All the stuff for which data are plotted

in the second graph is merely part of what is covered by the hardly perceptible curve labeled “Rest of

minerals” in the first graph.)

26. Let us recall here that radical shortages of nonrenewable abiotic resources comprise only one aspect of loom-ing environmental degradation, and that some of the other aspects may be of more urgent significance. The effectsof climate change are likely, IMHO, to cause agricultural havoc already in this century. Newfangled epidemicsdue to superbacteria etc. will meanwhile draw immediate attention. The timescale of the effects, dangerous toHumankind, of diminishing biological diversity may be comparable to that of the diminishing natural endowmentof mineral resources: a well-qualified Canadian ecologist has estimated (Peter F. Sale, Our Dying Planet: An Eco-logist's View of the Crisis We Face (University of California Press, 2011; p.233) that by the end of this century,“Most larger species (coyote size and up), other than those directly cultivated by humans, are likely to be extinctor to exist only as threatened populations.... Environmental goods and services [needed by humankind] will bemuch reduced simply because of the loss of diversity of organisms. With the increased homogeneity and overallreduced diversity, there will be a much greater risk of pandemics that severely impact particular species and createmassive change in ecosystem composition as a result. The risk of a species extinction that has major ramificationsthrough the ecosystem will become ever greater as diversity falls, and our own population will be precariouslydependent on just a few species to sustain its vast size.... [Probably] it could be a sustainable world for a time,as long as we engaged in a fair amount of environmental engineering to help it along until it neared the pointof final collapse.”

The general take-away message is that all the peaks will probably have occurred before the next

century and that a great number of shortages will become drastic before the end of it. 26

However, the Valeros’ purpose is not just to sound an alarm about looming shortages of nonrenew-

able abiotic resources but also to outline a well-designed basis for mitigating the effect of the short-

ages. The next three chapters are about that. The following graph shows what percentages of the

estimated original natural endowments (i.e. as of the birth of modern industry) of ores for 42 eco-

nomically important non-fuel mineral commodities had been exhausted as of 2008:

27. Tailings are ground-up waste from mineral processing operations. Slags are waste from metal smelting.

28. The term “exosomatic” means “outside the body of the organism” (in this case human). See p.@.

14: “Recycling Solutions”. Some of the points covered in this chapter are that the only way to elim-

inate extraction from natural endowment would be to increase recycling and reduce demand until the

latter no longer exceeds the former; that this is not going to happen very soon in regard to strategic

metals (the recycling of which has seldom amounted to as much as half of the fast-increasing demand

in modern times); that even so, to recover economically valuable chemicals from tailings, slags and27

post-consumption waste is beginning already to gain importance as the ore-grades of natural deposits

continue to decline and as extraction from this or that kind of waste tends therefore to become cost-

effective; that dispersion should therefore be assessed as the replacement cost from thanatia not just

to traditional mines (as described in Chapter 12) but also to potentially useful “technospheric” waste;

that while we cannot improve the levels of concentration of valuable minerals in natural-endowment

sources, we can – by means not only of technology but also of lifestyle-alteration – improve the levels

of concentration in various kinds of “anthropogenic mines”, while also improving the techniques of

anthropogenic-mine as well as natural-mine beneficiation and metallurgy; that all forms of recovery

from technospheric waste are subject, however, to the Second Law, and the waste from a consumed

recyclate is likely to contain more entropy than the recyclate had contained; and yet that there is none-

theless a “huge potential” for material and energy savings – and for reducing pollutant emissions. The

Valeros call for “a holistic view of life-cycles [of consumable minerals] and recycling chains”, for “further

research in process and in end-of-life recovery, eco-efficient design [and] disassembly”, for “systematic

[ ] [ ]account of [exergy] losses , ... a new way of promoting and managing material streams , ... and an eco-

nomic paradigm shift”.

15: “The Challenge of Resource Depletion”. This chapter discusses (in a somewhat rambling way, it

seems to me) why mineral resources are being poorly managed. It identifies accurately (in my opinion)

some big defects in the neo-classical economic theory which has focused so much on material social

exchanges that it has neglected environmental “externalities” and has incorrectly taken as for granted

that everything in our natural exosomatic endowments can be substituted for. The Valeros call for a28

paradigm shift whereby (a) since “money is not an absolute and universal magnitude, as it is subject to

both inflation and monetary revaluation...”, “the unit of measure employed for [natural-]resource use

[ ][would] be physically [rather than monetarily] based , and in this respect Thermodynamics must play

a prime role”, (b) economists and the politicians whom they guide would realize that “the substitution

[ ]of materials, unlike that of money or [sources of consumable] energy , is limited and case-specific”, and

(c) long-term thinking would become embedded in economic theory.

16: “The Principles of Resource Efficiency”. This chapter is rich in engineer-type professional chat

and sets out 12 basic “principles”, together with an ample number of corollaries to them, which the

Valeros propose that businessmen as well as engineers adopt in striving toward “sustainable resource

management”. The text includes many references to other authors’ similar proposals. The references in

Chapter 2 to writings by other authors were part and parcel of an historical narrative (complemented by

criticisms and critical appreciations) and I therefore mentioned some of them; but here I will just give a

précis of some of the ideas:

• To take seriously the Second Law (i.e. that even though energy is, as the First Law tells us, never lost,

every expenditure of exergy entails some irreversible loss of exergy). Since the various processes for

obtaining purified materials from mixtures of materials cost gobs of exergy, two of the corollaries for

industrial engineers are “do not mix, purify, clean, heat, cool, pressurise or depressurise more than

strictly necessary” and “segregate polluting flows; do not mix them”.

• To think about replacement costs and to reckon that the greater the cost of replacing a resource, i.e.

the greater its rarity (exergy-wise), the more it should be preserved.

• To attend to the difference between efficacy (getting things done) and efficiency (getting them done

without wasting resources). One of the corollaries is that getting things done faster in industry “means

more heat, more chemicals, more water, more effluents, more solid waste and special hardware re-

quirements. Consider time as a resource that ultimately saves more resources.”

• To design products to last and to be easily repaired, and then extend their viability through upgrades

and careful maintenance. Two of the corollaries are to “upgrade [factory] systems through replacing

obsolete components, instead of replacing the system in its entirety” and to “personalise possessions”

as this may augment their endurance.

• To repair things efficiently and to reuse them with due revisions when appropriate.

• To exercise “intelligent control” for maintaining, in the economy, the required quality of purified min-

erals with as little expense of exergy as possible. Two of the corollaries are: “know your process and

invest in appropriate equipment in order to know it all the better” and “predict the accident, don’t just

react to it”.

• Since the storing and transmitting of electricity as well as of heat (i.e. of a temperature higher than

that of the surroundings], costs a lot of exergy, to “instantaneously couple” supply and demand of

consumable energy, and avoid unnecessary distances of transmission. One of the corollaries is:

“Undertake intensive research in [better methods of] energy storage.”

• To be alert to the fact that since each physical system on Earth is part of a greater system, all the

systems are somehow connected. One of the corollaries is: “The industry and urban system must be

[regarded as] part of the natural system. The [deliberate] connections must be multiple and ongoing,

not discrete, aggressive and/or ill-considered."

• To be aware that the malfunctioning of a subsystem is likely to render the broader system inefficient

(but also that the proper functioning of a subsystem doesn’t ensure proper functioning of the broader

system!). One of the corollaries is to “design flexible and resilient systems”.

• To feel that all waste symbolises defeat in the design of some system in the economy and/or in its

connection with other systems. Here the Valeros mention that in the biological world, “one organism’s

waste is another one’s feedstock”. Two of the corollaries are: “Embrace Biomimicry in product design”

and “Energy must come from renewable sources (as should the materials used to generate it).”

• For society at large, to evolve toward paying a larger share of money for goods and services that cost,

directly or indirectly, a lot of exergy, and hence toward paying relatively less for those that cost less

exergy. (The Valeros mention, as a notable example of imbalance between monetary and exergy costs,

the fact that in the entire process of creating a residence, the deed-signing entails “the highest financial

expenditure per unit of energy effort”.)

17: “Epilogue”. Some of the theoretical points restated in this chapter are that exergy can serve as

a “universal measure” for resource accounting, that the concept of decreasing degrees of “thermo-

dynamic rarity” (reckoned in terms of exergy) can be used to indicate the hidden but eventually real

depletion-costs of producing industrially useful minerals, that “cradle-to-grave” technologies constitute

only half of the theoretical “material cycle” for each industrially useful chemical element, and that the

concept of thanatia provides a baseline for calculating the other half, i.e. for assessing “depletion” in

terms of grave-to-cradle exergy costs. It would be sane to use up the fossil fuels sparingly (as they can-

not be recycled) and to recycle efficiently the other ingredients of the Earth’s natural endowment of

mineral resources, realizing that for them as well, an actual grave-to-cradle process would take too long

– millions of years – to be of use to Humankind.

There are five appendices (labeled “A”, “B”, etc.):

A: Discussion of which kinds of materials, and how much of each, are used up in “green tech-

nologies” (electric and hybrid vehicles; flourescent and LED lighting; newfangled information and

communication technologies).

B: Descriptions of seven main groups of minerals in our natural endowment (the silica minerals, the

feldspars, the pyroxenes, and the amphibole, olivine, mica and chlorite groups) and of the geochemistry

and various industrial uses 77 of commonly produced minerals (from “Aluminium” to “Zirconium”).

C: Detailed description and discussion of the parts of the U.N.'s internationally accepted System of

Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) that are directly relevant to the subject of the book: i.e. the

“asset accounts” for mineral and energy resources.

D: “Additional Data and Calculation Procedures.” The topics of the data and/or calculation pro-

cedures are: “standard redox potentials” (i.e. how much voltage is needed to cause certain industrially

desirable chemical reactions with minerals to take place); how much exergy is needed (it is a lot) for

communition (i.e. to reduce chunks of various kinds of ore to small particles by cutting, grinding, vibra-

ting etc.); the estimates published by (a) Rudnick and Gao in 2004 and (b) Grigor’ev (2007) of how much

of this and that chemical element is in the Earth’s upper crust; Australian fossil-fuel production; and

worldwide fuel production.

E: An account of a philosophical interview in November 1991 with Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. His

reason for advocating “conservation” was that “with conservation we gain time, and in gaining time

we make it more probable for a [new] Prometheus to arrive – if it is to arrive; we don’t know what is

to come next.”

* * *

29. Cited in Alan O. Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek: A Biography (2001), p.273. Friedman went on to say, “If you’realways going back to your internal, self-evident truths, how do people [i.e. economic theorists] stand on one an-other’s shoulders? And the fact is that fifty, sixty years after von Mises issued his capital theory – which is what’sinvolved in Hayek’s capital theory – so-called Austrian economists still stick by it. There hasn’t been an iota ofprogress.... If you and I disagree about whether some proposition or statement is correct, how do we resolve thatdisagree ment?... We [would] have [on the basis of allegedly self-evident truths] no way to resolve it except byfighting, by saying you’re wrong and I’m right.”

30. Robert Solow, “The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics”, The American EconomicReview, LXIV/2 (1974), p.1.

31. The term “social metabolism” came into use in the late 19th century as a translation of the German term Stoff-wechsel. It is a misleading translation, since (a) only organisms have metabolisms and (b) societies are not reallyorganisms. A phrase conveying correctly the meaning of Stoffwechsel is “transformative exchanges of matter”.

32. Sudhir Anand and Amartya Sen, Sustainable Human Development: Concepts and Priorities (U.N. HumanDevelopment Report Office, 1994; 2nd edition, 1996), p.11.

I can see two main problems in regard to the reception and usefulness of this book. (1) It is full of

data which will soon be outdated. An occasionally renewed online version should be published for a

decent subscription price. An ancillary advantage of this other way of publishing would be to allow for

refinements (as well as updatings) in the presentation. (2) Meanwhile, however, it is clear to me that

nearly all economics professors are, alas, too ignorant about science and technology to understand the

theory and reckoning which the book offers. Perhaps some of them would, even if they could under-

stand the argument, belittle the Valeros’ projections somewhat as Robert Solow in the 1970s belittled

the projections prepared at MIT for the Club of Rome. Many of those dismissive professors would be

implicitly content with von Mises’s and Hayek’s precept (let me cite here Milton Friedman’s description

of it) to “base economics on propositions that are self-evident ... because they are about human beings,

and we’re human beings. So we have an internal source of final knowledge....” Their intellectual level29

would match that of Solow’s famous declaration that “The world has been exhausting its exhaustible

resources since the first cave-man chipped a flint, and I imagine the process will go on for a long, long

time.” (So why worry?)30

The ecological economists do worry, but even they, by and large, don’t know enough about the

relevant aspects of chemistry, engineering and industrial production to understand a great deal of what

the book says. An abridged and simplified edition for them might be worthwhile. It might help their suc-

cessors who will have studied scientific topics at graduate-school level (which 21st-century ecological

economists ought anyway, IMHO, to do) upgrade the level of discourse in the field and bring it well be-

yond rudimentary concepts like “throughput”, “social metabolism” and “happy planet”. It could also,31

with luck, prompt attentive welfare economists to deconstruct the tragically misleading postulate of

“sustainable human development” – endorsed by Amartya Sen and promoted by the United Nations in

the 1990s – that “The fact of substitutability (in both production and consumption) implies that what

we are [morally] obligated to leave behind [for children and future humans] is a generalized capacity to

create well-being, not any particular thing or any particular resource.”32