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Historical Materialism , volume 13:1 (117–152) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 Also available online – www.brill.nl 1 Fermi 1956, p. 30; Van Ness 1983, p. 54. Paul Burkett Entropy in Ecological Economics: A Marxist Intervention Introduction One of the liveliest debates in ecological economics concerns the significance of the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the entropy law. This article critically surveys this debate and develops a Marxist perspective on the economy-entropy relationship. E n t ro p y i s a m e a s u re o f t h e t o t a l d i s o rd e r, randomness or chaos in a system: increased entropy implies greater disorder. The second law says that the entropy of an isolated thermodynamic system is strictly non-decreasing, that is, that energy is only transformed from more ordered to less ordered forms. Heat, for example, can only dissipate: it will not flow spontaneously from a cold to a hot object or area in an isolated system. 1 If one interprets the orderliness of energy as a measure of its availability or usefulness to humans, then the entropy law implies that all energy transformations
Historical Materialism – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 2005
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