Energy, Entropy, and the Civilisation We Haven’t Built Yet
On New Year’s Eve 1879, Thomas Edison threw a switch at his laboratory in Menlo Park and made a prediction that sounded like arrogance.
“None but the extravagant will burn candles.”
He was right. Within a generation, electric light was so cheap that candles became ceremonial — things you light at dinner to signal occasion, not necessity. Edison didn’t optimise an existing technology. He collapsed the cost of a fundamental service so completely that the previous technology became a luxury affectation.
We need to do that again. This time with energy itself.
Three Conversations That Never Met
For half a century, three separate intellectual traditions have been circling the same problem from different directions. None of them completed the argument.
The first conversation was about limits.
In 1971, the Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen published The Entropy Law and the Economic Process — one of the most important and most ignored books of the twentieth century. His argument was simple and devastating: economics had forgotten physics. Every act of production increases entropy. Materials degrade, mix, disperse. Energy quality declines irreversibly. The economy is not a circular machine. It is a one-way process governed by the second law of thermodynamics.
The limits tradition that followed — from the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth in 1972 through to today’s degrowth movement — drew the logical conclusion: if entropy is the constraint, reduce throughput. Use less. Consume less. Shrink the physical scale of the economy.
The diagnosis was correct. But the prescription became a political dead end.
The second conversation was about substitution.
The circular economy movement, crystallised by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in the 2010s and embedded in European policy shortly after, proposed a different answer: design waste out of the system. Close the loops. Make the economy regenerative by design. Turn the linear flow of extract-make-dispose into a circle.
It was elegant. It was also, in a precise thermodynamic sense, physically impossible in its strongest form.
Entropy does not negotiate. Every cycle of recovery — sorting, cleaning, reprocessing, remanufacturing — costs energy. The more degraded or dispersed the material, the more energy recovery demands. The Circle Economy’s own reports acknowledge that global circularity has only gotten to some 7%, meaning over 92% of materials flow through the economy once and disappear. The reason is not primarily bad policy or poor design. It is the second law. You cannot unmix, unsort, or undegrade for free. Energy is scarce.
The circular economy solved the vision problem — here is what a sustainable material system looks like — without solving the energy problem that makes that vision physically achievable.
The third conversation was about transition.
The clean energy movement, accelerating dramatically through the 2010s and into the 2020s, made a different bet: that solar and wind could replace fossil fuels cheaply enough to decarbonise the global economy. The cost curves proved them right. Solar PV costs fell 90% in a decade. Wind reached grid parity across most of the world. The transition from scarcity to abundance in generation technology happened faster than almost anyone predicted.
But the transition movement framed its own victory too narrowly. It argued for substitution — replace coal with solar, gas with wind — within the same logic of managed scarcity. Efficiency directives. Demand reduction targets. Careful stewardship of a constrained resource: Don’t generate more that we need. Interestingly, the negative energy prices of the early ’20’s in Euorpe were a forebode of abundance… But still, the political imagination of the energy transition was always a cleaner version of what already existed, not a fundamentally different civilisational condition: We can generate more than we need.
To date, none of these three conversations completed the chain. The limits tradition was right about entropy and wrong about abundance as the answer. The circular economy was right about the material vision and silent about its enabling condition. The energy transition was right about the cost curves and too timid about what they actually meant.
The Synthesis
Here is the argument none of them made.
Energy is not a resource. It is literally a flux, giving us the capacity to impose order on a universe that tends toward disorder.
We only capture mere fractions of that flux.
The second law of thermodynamics is not a policy problem. It is the deep physics of why everything is hard. Left alone, systems degrade. Materials mix. Complexity collapses. Every useful thing civilisation does — growing food, building shelter, manufacturing goods, treating illness, communicating across distance — is an act of local entropy reduction. We pay for it in energy.
This means that material scarcity is, at root, an energy problem.
Metallic aluminium does not exist in nature. It has to be stripped from oxide ore using enormous electrical energy. Fresh water does not fall from taps. It has to be moved, cleaned, and in much of the world, separated from salt — which requires energy. Food does not grow without fertiliser synthesis, irrigation, and cold chain logistics — all energy. The circular economy does not run on good intentions. It runs on the energy required to fight entropy in every recovery process, at every stage of every material loop.
The corollary is uncomfortable and important:
There is no material problem that abundant cheap energy cannot dramatically reduce. And there is no circular economy that expensive or insecure energy does not eventually defeat.
The sun delivers more energy to Earth’s surface every hour than human civilisation uses in a year. This has been true throughout history. What changed in the last decade is that we finally built the technology to capture it at a cost that makes abundance physically plausible — not as a future aspiration, but as an engineering choice available now.
Mankind has always covered its fundamental needs — food, warmth, shelter, health, communication — by finding new ways to harness energy. Fire replaced muscle. Steam replaced fire. Electrification replaced steam. Each transition did not just solve the energy problem of its moment. It expanded what was possible for everyone.
Edison understood this. He did not ask how to make candles slightly cheaper. He asked how to make them irrelevant.
The tragedy of the current moment is that we have the technology to make fossil energy irrelevant — not just cleaner, not just cheaper, but structurally unnecessary — and we are managing that technology as a procurement exercise rather than treating it as the civilisational rupture it actually is.
The Question
Europe is writing energy efficiency directives while the physics of solar abundance sits unused at scale.
The circular economy movement is designing beautiful material loops that the economics of expensive energy keep breaking.
The strategic autonomy debate is cataloguing dependencies without naming the master variable that connects them all.
Edison’s prediction came true once because someone decided it should. The question is not whether abundant clean energy is physically possible. The cost curves already answered that.
The question is whether we have the political imagination to build for abundance instead of optimising for scarcity.
None but the extravagant will burn candles.
We could make that true again. For everything.