IS THE ENTROPY LAW RELEVANT TO THE ECONOMICS OF NATURAL-RESOURCE SCARCITY

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly have argued that the entropy law imposes an absolute resource scarcity which cannot be overcome with technological change, exploration, or substitution. On the contrary this paper argues that their critique is fundamentally flawed. The pessimistic scenario requires a concept of materials entropy which is highly problematic. Materials entropy cannot be defined independently of technology and it is impossible to aggregate over different types of materials to meaningfully talk about available versus unavailable matter in the aggregate. Failing a concept of materials entropy the critique fails since the earth is not closed with respect to energy. © 1991.