Kunstler: Doomer Extraordinaire

January 5, 2010 by limako

I've enjoyed reading James Howard Kunstler, since his book Geography of No-where. His blog, Clusterfuck Nation, offers a continuous stream of invective over the unwillingness of our society at every level to deal seriously with the challenges that confront us. But his current post has finally gone too far for me. He says:

The religion of the Futility Economy is Techno-Triumphalism, which is the belief that an endless sequence of magic tricks performed by shaman scientists can defeat the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which rules the universe -- which true scientists ought to know cannot be defeated.

This is just silly. By this measure, life itself is impossible, so we should all just lay down and die. The essence of life is that we can trick the second law, by using enzymes and organization, to keep entropy at bay for a while. Yes, in the end, entropy will win and the universe will run out of energy. But, for a while, life is possible. Let's not lose sight of that.