“Entropy” is the name we have given to a specific abstract property of reality, namely, the way in which, over time, interesting things tend to diffuse and cease to be interesting. The usual capitulation of entropy as “disorder” is nearly useless and I ask that you dispense with it for the remainder of the time you spend with me today. This can be made obvious by considering states of minimum and maximum entropy: minimum entropy is something like white noise, the unbelievably hot thermal soup which was the universe shortly after the big bang; maximum entropy is a perfectly still blackness—how is “increase in disorder” an accurate description of this transition? A better way of understanding entropy is as a measure of how spread out the energy in a system is. It so happens that energy is conserved—it is never created nor destroyed. But we usually think of things as consuming energy. You get a bill for the energy you consume every month. On a bigger scale fossil fuels are consumed. And you literally consume food to power your body. But energy is conserved, so energy is never really consumed. It just spreads out.
We use the same word “energy” to refer to two very different types of things. On the one hand you have things like potential energy and chemical energy—energy “stored” somehow, like in a battery. On the other hand you have things like kinetic energy and heat—energy in action. Some energy is useful and some energy is not. As soon as potential energy is converted into kinetic energy, it’s useless to us. The energy stored in a battery is useful; once it is converted into movement and heat it is useless. When we use energy, we don’t consume it exactly, we spread it out. This is entropy increasing. Everything interesting that happens can be understood as a process by which clumped up energy is diffused. So what’s important, then, isn’t energy, it’s entropy. Or rather it’s decreasing entropy that’s important.
This is the problem with the existing formulation of the concept of entropy: it refers to a quantity that increases from an arbitrary minimum to an arbitrary maximum, but it is much easier to think about a quantity that diminishes to zero. It is really much easier to understand entropy in its negative, that is, “negentropy,” the quantity describing the amount of free energy, the clumped-up or potential or useful energy that is always doing work by spreading out and becoming useless. Negentropy is always decreasing; the end state of the interesting universe is the point when negentropy reaches zero. Negentropy is a much easier concept to manipulate than entropy—it’s unfortunate that we have to arrive at this very much positive concept with such an ugly construction, but alas. They did not consult me.
Erwin Schrödinger was the first to use the term “negative entropy” in his book What is Life? (which was shortened to “negentropy” by Léon Brillouin). What is life? A lifeform is a system of locally decreasing entropy. This is in fact what you are: a little eddy flowing aberrantly backwards in the river of the universe, lasting for just a moment, curiously, against the rush of the eons. A cosmic profanity. Also called an engine. You are a cloud of locally decreasing entropy, powered by your spreading out of energy in the surrounding environment. All life and all interesting things exist by opposing the fundamental order of the universe, the so-called “arrow of time” that pushes things to higher entropy, diffusing things, making them useless, uninteresting.
The arrow of time isn’t arbitrary. It’s more or less a logical certitude following from the fundamental properties of the universe. Entropy is our description of the simple fact that systems tend towards states that are more probable. If you put a drop of ink in a glass of water the ink spreads out simply because that is a more likely configuration than the ink existing in a concentrated drop in the water. This plays out in the billions of random interactions between the individual molecules. In other words, entropy is just the statistics of the universe, the cosmic regression to the mean, the degradation of all things to the probabilistic maximum (this trend towards a probabilistic maximum is why we constructed a quantity that increases rather than a fixed quantity that decreases to zero). It’s not a coincidence that entropy is a term in thermodynamics as well as in information theory—it’s literally the same concept. At the probabilistic maximum, the least interesting phenomena occur. At the cosmic scale, this refers to the heat death of the universe.
When I was in Iceland I bought a poetry collection in a stark white hardcover titled Two Lands, One Poet. Subtitle: “The reflections of Stephan G. Stephansson through poetry.” Stephan was a late 19th/early 20th-century Icelandic poet who emigrated to Canada as a teen but wrote almost exclusively in Icelandic for his entire life. The Icelandic language is notoriously difficult to translate into English, so although his poetry has had a major impact on Icelandic literature since his adolescence, it has only been made available to English readers relatively recently. Two Lands, One Poet presents both the original Icelandic and the English translation of quite a few of Stephan G. Stephansson’s poems. Here’s one called “Afterglow”:
Throughout all the ages Matter is with life imbued; Flaming stars in stages Die to be with fire renewed. Creation, growth and heat and flame Eternally are Nature’s aim. Quickens life and passes, Mind and heart complete their play; In the cosmic masses, On some far off New Year’s day Galaxies of frozen suns Will blaze again as they did once. Though the myriad night-eyes Of the blazing skies go blind, Still, some hidden plan lies Deep in the eternal mind, Setting free through time and space Waves of life-imbuing rays. Light of day abating, Glimmers now the afterglow, Only left the waiting! Dark of night is closing now On this head that seeks its ease And hopes that night will bring it peace.
Another thing that happened while in Iceland is we went on a guided hike at Solheimajökull (a glacier in the south-central region of the country). It was quite powerful to stand at the foot of the glacier and see so immediately how the world can change: the large lagoon at the foot of the glacier did not exist ten years ago, and Solheimajökull recedes about 200 feet every year.
Originally it was called “global warming,” but this name did not serve well, and it was replaced by “climate change.” But this is also a misnomer. You’ll see people referring to the “triple challenge of climate change,” trying to convey the broad range of problems that are all interrelated, of which climate change itself is just one. A better name might be “thermodynamic reckoning:” the essence of the problem is that we must figure out how better to budget the negentropy afforded to us by the sun.
Though the myriad night-eyes / Of the blazing skies go blind
90% of stars that will ever exist have already died. The cosmic age in which humanity exists is the afterglow of the glimmers of the early universe, the comprehensive field of thermal soup. From this soup, stars were formed, and planets. Earth was, for a while, extremely hot, and then it cooled down enough for interesting things to happen on its surface, while the thermodynamics continued to rage just underneath. Interesting things, like dinosaurs, were happening on earth for millions of years before humanity came along, and these things have remained relatively interesting in the form of fossil fuels.
The industrial revolution could be understood as the discovery and subsequent harnessing of a negentropic inheritance lying under the earth’s crust, and the years since a drunken rampage spending this wealth and causing havoc all the while. Sooner or later there will be a thermodynamic reckoning: either on our own accord (reckoning as in accounting) or the earth’s (reckoning as in settling up). The problem is, how can we exist on earth in a responsible way, a thermodynamically responsible way? How can we be a thriving society for a truly long time? The negentropic inheritance will run out eventually, and we will need to rely on other sources of funding soon.
A lot of rhetoric around climate change will appeal to emotion, asking people to think about how we can live in harmony with the earth, and things like that. That is all fine and good but at bottom what we’re dealing with is a sort of financial issue. We are simply going to run out of thermodynamic wealth and we are going to have to figure out how to support ourselves. Once the inheritance runs out, we’re going to have to live on a budget. We’re going to have to confront the reality that our existence here is thermodynamically expensive and we’re going to have to be fiscally responsible.
In his very brief and excellent essay “Paradice,” Eliot Weinberger describes Iceland as “[an] unlikely Utopia [which] is the happy accident of a history and a geography that cannot be duplicated, or even emulated, elsewhere.” From this he concludes that it is “the most perfect society on earth, one from which the rest of the world has nothing to learn.”
Iceland is unique in that it sits upon a thermodynamic bounty of renewable energy. The country has more or less been able to build a sustainable economy from the beginning. It is now leading the charge on realizing carbon capture, turning carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into rocks underground. At the same time, Iceland is experiencing rapid population growth (in 2021, fifteen times that of the United States)—not to mention tourism growth—so the country will have to figure out how to scale its infrastructure to support this. And it is particularly vulnerable to the affects emissions of the rest of the world: Iceland’s energy mostly comes from hydroelectric power driven by the negentropic cycle of its glaciers, and as they melt they change the landscapes of the country and threaten all of its infrastructure. It is predicted that without intervention all the glaciers in Iceland will be gone in 100-200 years.
Two Lands, One Poet presents as an epigraph a translated quote from a New Year’s Eve address made by Stephan G. Stephansson in 1891.
We, the partners and companions, here and now, the family of this countryside, have been assigned the task of turning the wilderness that was here before into a civilized community, of developing this little piece of land, which is suitable for something more than wild animals. And we must receive our wages from our own hands by becoming ourselves better and more useful individuals and in the hope that the following generation will become a bit more prosperous for it... If I cared to be remembered as an Icelander, I would prefer to be mentioned as one who had turned unpromising soil into choice land, rather than a man who had by mere coincidence rambled into some booming fatland and managed to survive there. I do not thank you for living in Rome, but for building it up.
(I will say it for all to hear. I am a man who has by mere coincidence rambled into some booming fatland and managed to survive here.)
Stephan may have been talking about his adopted home of Alberta or his original home of Iceland, but it doesn’t entirely matter. He’s describing a universal burden of humanity: how do we “develop this little piece of land into something which is suitable for something more than wild animals”?
In discussions of thermodynamic reckoning it is crucial to consider developing countries. In most of the world, climate change is a much less pressing concern than climbing out of abject poverty. Very important and good progress in the poorest countries means increasing emissions drastically, because affecting the environment is necessary for human life, especially when organized into cities, and especially when luxuries like meat, roads, and plastic are included.
This means that the wealthiest and most developed countries like the US need to shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden if progress is going to be made on climate change. We can’t just work on making our own infrastructure more sustainable and ask that the rest of the world does the same (this would be rather rude anyway because it was our leveraging of emitting technologies that brought us to where we are now in the first place).
While I was talking to our guide atop Solheimajökull, she said that we all just need to work on reducing our emissions, and for her that meant cutting back on flying, which is very sad because she loves to travel.
But it’s even sadder than that. This idea, that your individual behaviors are the cause of climate change, or at least that you are morally obligated to change your behaviors to address climate change, is a narrative largely perpetuated by a massive propaganda campaign by oil and gas giant BP. This narrative has done untold damage. It’s made people like our guide feel guilty for satisfying her very good and pure desire to see the world. It’s made many other people feel guilty for just existing or convinced them that it is morally wrong to have kids. Where it’s failed to make people feel guilty, it’s made them angry, and rightfully so. If it weren’t for the individual responsibility narrative, it would be a lot easier to get people across the political spectrum on the same page about climate change. It’s also tied up a lot of political progress aimed at climate change in nearly useless measures, like banning plastic straws and banning plastic bags at grocery stores, that only serve to frustrate one half of the population and deceive the other half that progress is being made.
According to the Founder’s Pledge, avoiding one transatlantic flight makes about the same impact on the climate as donating $20 to the most effective climate change charities (they note that there is at least a 100x difference in impact between the most effective and the least effective charities). Which means that by donating $100 every year, you could take four transatlantic flights and still come up carbon negative.
I don’t know what my guide’s personal situation is. It could be that because of her circumstances, cutting down on flying is actually the best thing that she can personally do to address climate change. And of course, the best thing you could do would be to donate as much money as possible and avoid flying altogether—helping the environment by way of donation doesn’t actually “offset” the damage you do by engaging in activities like flying and using plastic straws. It’s just that the impact of those activities is so incredibly minor compared to the potential impact of your money.
The overwhelming majority of climate change challenges are technological, infrastructural, and political. This is very unfortunate for the average individual because it means that there is very little you can actually do to address these challenges. Any behavior change you can make won’t make much of a difference if the infrastructure that supports all of your behavior doesn’t change along with you—for example, driving an electric car is good, but if the electricity that powers your car still comes from coal, we haven’t really solved anything. You can vote for representatives that take climate change seriously and work to improve our policies, but even if elected your representative could lose the election in the following cycle, and all of the policy change they initiated could be completely reverted.
Even individual donations, though more effective than behavior changes, are dwarfed by institutional philanthropy.
Climate change as a cause for individual philanthropy is not viewed particularly favorably by the Effective Altruism community. In addition to the reasons above, there’s a couple EA-specific reasons for this. Climate change is not exactly neglected the way that other causes which can have greater and more immediate impact are: for example, Vitamin A supplementation—decidedly unsexy. Donating to climate change probably wouldn’t do any more good than funding Vitamin A supplementation, but because of my emotional response to environmental issues (and an absolute lack of an emotional connection to Vitamin A) and general cultural conditioning, it seems more important. You can also compare climate change to other issues like nuclear safety and pandemic preparedness that actually have to potential to literally extinguish humanity and end all potential for human life. Despite what you may have heard, thermodynamic reckoning will not come as an apocalypse. The risk associated with climate change is relatively tame compared to some other threats.
But there are counterpoints to all of these points.
While it’s true that individual philanthropy is dwarfed by institutional spending, the existence of funds like the Founder’s Pledge Climate Change Fund mitigates this problem by pooling contributions from individual donors to come up with institutional scale money.
And although climate change is not neglected generally, a lot of funding is tied up in completely ineffective measures. As a generally popular cause, it doesn’t experience the rigorous strain of effectiveness as the causes blessed by the EA movement. There is still a lot of room for individual donors to have considerable impact by focusing on the most effective interventions that are in the greatest need of funding. There are plenty of effective interventions that are bottlenecked primarily by funding, like carbon capture.
Climate change as a cause presents a sort of middle ground between long-term thinking and proven tractability: while climate change almost certainly won’t extinguish humanity, we actually know how to work on it, and it will certainly affect the well-being of all humans that follow us. There isn’t much value in ensuring the long-term survival of humanity if survival means existing in a gaseous hellscape that just wants to kill you. Or put another way, you can affect serious long-term change by ensuring right now that the earth will be a nice place to live for future generations (we can set aside some thermodynamic money for our kids before we die). Furthermore, compared to other existential causes that are ordained by the EA community, climate change is much more tractable. Compare, for instance, climate change to the most popular longtermist cause, AI safety: it has yet to prove itself to be tractable at all. There is a lot of money going to it and nothing to show that progress is being made. But progress is very clearly being made on climate change.
All this is to say that the question of whether you should give your money to the thermodynamic reckoning is quite complicated, and I think it’s fair to say that everyone will come up with a different personal answer. If you’ve already decided to part with some of your income and you’re wondering whether climate change is a worthy cause for your money, it’s going to depend on the value you ascribe to alleviating suffering right now vs. mitigating existential risk vs. funding tractable solutions.
But if you’ve already identified climate change as something that is important to you and you want to know how you can have the most impact, the answer is most likely donations. You can have orders of magnitude more impact in the thermodynamic reckoning by parting with a portion of your income than you can by making any behavior change. For whatever its worth: yesterday my wife, Grace, and I jointly signed the Giving What We Can Pledge to donate 10% of our lifetime income, and we’ve allocated 25% of our recurring donations to the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund.