“It’s the entropy, stupid!”
During the 1992 presidential campaign, James Carville famously pushed the Clinton team to emphasize this catchphrase: “It’s the economy, stupid,” which now enjoys its own Wikipedia entry (of course!).
Thinking bigger-picture, today’s 2026 world would do well to focus on entropy, and how to tame it. Slow the inexorable increase of entropy, and the world’s economy might naturally accelerate. A quick sketch of the logic:1
Rudolph Clausius is credited with introducing the concept of entropy as the amount of molecular disorder in a system—like, say, the Earth and its atmosphere. Any increase in that entropy signifies a reduced utility of that system. A familiar example (not weather-related): You’re shopping for groceries when your toddler stretches out from that grocery-cart perch to knock a glass container off the shelf. Whether the liquid was olive oil or a cleanser, its potential use has vanished in an instant. It’s now a wet cleanup on aisle seven. That waste may change form, but it pretty much remains waste. (That’s part of the reason so many supermarket containers today are plastic, but of course that’s an entropy story for another day.)
In the same way, but less visibly, a gallon of gas in your car may get you from home to work and back again. But once burned, the remaining gasoline byproducts just represent environmental junk—in the air, settling on and alongside the roadway, eventually draining away in rainfall runoff, contributing to those dreary EPA statistics.
Living organisms, whether amoebas or more complicated critters like you and me, are in the business of improving their own internal order (reducing their entropy) at the expense of the order in the environment. (That’s the baby trading a half-pint of milk for a wet nappy.) As we lose our ability to lower our internal entropy, we die. Perhaps you thought, following Thomas Carlyle, that “economics is the dismal science?” Economics can’t hold a candle to entropy. Sooner or later, the skin of our planet will lose its ability to sustain life. Now that’s doom and gloom.
We see proof every day that eight people, let alone eight billion, can’t agree universally on anything. But most of us would agree that if our planet is indeed losing its ability to sustain life, later is better than sooner.
How are things trending in 2026? Here are four perspectives.
Renewable energy versus fossil fuels. How we get our energy matters. Suppose we need a gigawatt of electrical power. Fossil fuel generation produces 90% of its emissions from the ongoing combustion over its lifetime. By contrast, photovoltaics incur almost all their emissions costs during their manufacture and from the extraction of the raw materials used in their manufacture. Their operating emissions are negligible. Bottom line: Per gigawatt, life-cycle carbon emissions (a proxy for entropy) from burning gas or coal are 10–20 times greater than that sourced from photovoltaics. A clear choice.
Misinformation and disinformation. Distortions of reality play a role similar to entropy in information theory. The greater the information “noise,” the more difficult the task of extracting “signal.” And the weaker the signal (the more dilute the information content)—the closer it is to business as usual, the more it lacks unusualness—the more work is required to extract it. The social implications? This means that as you and I struggle to innovate and build a better world, our efforts are compromised by the current polarization of politics, the increased politicization of “information,” the harnessing of AI to generate false information, and other trends. Our work becomes less productive, more stressful, and exhausting.
Warfare. Warfare is entropy production carried to its purest extreme—the increase of entropy as an end to itself. Fossil fuels have carried a high environmental cost even when harnessed to useful tasks. But indiscriminate, explosive combustion of fossil fuels accompanied by wholesale destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure and loss of life is tragic on every level. And that’s before we get to the persistent bitterness and enmity that will besmirch the future long after the open combat’s end.
NCAR and the geosciences. From the context it’s clear that the dismembering of NCAR and the associated collateral damage has an entropy cost. Given the state of the world, this may seem like a small thing. But the implications are substantial. NCAR science helps us navigate crucial decisions like: Renewables vs. fossil fuels? Evidence-based dialog and debate on natural resource and environmental matters versus misinformation and disinformation? Continued dialog and negotiation to protect a common prosperity and defuse conflict versus wage war?
But perhaps that’s just me. So as a reality check, I asked my iPhone’s ChatBox: what is the entropy increase resulting from dismembering of NCAR versus maintaining it?
ChatBox responded (as reproduced here, verbatim):
To analyze the entropy increase resulting from the dismembering of a complex system like the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) compared to maintaining it, we need to consider a few factors:
1. Entropy in Thermodynamics and Information Theory: Entropy measures the degree of disorder or randomness in a system. In thermodynamic terms, dismembering or dismantling a system typically leads to an increase in entropy due to the loss of structured organization and the spreading out of energy and matter.
2. Dismembering NCAR: Dismembering NCAR would likely include dividing its functionalities, resources, and research activities. This disintegration would lead to loss of synergy and collaboration among different departments and projects, causing an increase in disorder and inefficiency. The entropy increase in this scenario would be significant as interactions and cooperative behaviors would be lost.
3. Maintaining NCAR: In contrast, maintaining NCAR allows for organized collaboration, continuity in research, and better resource allocation. The system maintains a lower entropy state due to order and structured processes that facilitate efficient functioning.
4. Quantifying Entropy Change: Quantifying the change in entropy would require detailed data, including energy transfers, the amount of resources involved, and the specific organizational and operational structure of NCAR. In practical terms, it would involve modeling comparisons of both scenarios to derive entropy calculations.
In summary, the dismembering of NCAR would result in a significant increase in entropy due to loss of order and efficiency, whereas maintaining NCAR would sustain a lower entropy state through organized operations and cooperative research activities.
I’m thinking ChatBox has understated the case a bit. The next post should add some more flesh to the bones.
- This is a perspective, not a physics lesson. Asking your forgiveness at the outset for some oversimplification in this post. ↩︎
