The Entropy Law and the Sustainability of a Living Planet

An urgent issue that mankind faces is energy transition, the shift away from fossil-based systems of energy production and consumption required for both biological survival and economic production. Energy is a conserved quantity, so we’ll never run out of energy that the mission of the energy transition is the search for a sustainable supply of free energy, the conceptual centerpiece of thermodynamics. The orthodox version of thermodynamics is referred to as energy physics, which is undergirded by the dual foundations of free energy, the concept, and the conversion doctrine of free energy. While free energy dissipates continuously and spontaneously, it is the conversion doctrine that infers the tenet of “a continuous and irrevocable qualitative degradation of free into bound energy.” Free energy consumption is the cause of our energy problem, but the “irrevocable degradation of free energy” has led us astray in framing the energy problem as well as searching for its solution. Two previous papers proposed a new theoretical system, Unified Classical Thermodynamics (UCT), defined by rejecting the conversion doctrine of energy physics. This paper, the third of the trilogy, focuses on the real rationale behind rejecting the conversion doctrine: with the doctrine as the core of the conceptual foundation of energy physics, the conceptual foundation precludes energy physics from carrying out its theory-development based on its methodological foundation, conceptual differentiation. UCT is thus identified to be a theoretical system erected on a new cornerstone with dual foundations, both conceptual (entropic) and methodological (differentiation)—on which we can investigate the sustainability of a WHOLE system keeping the WHOLE planetary system, as well as individual organisms and economic units, far from equilibrium.