Humanity is at a critical juncture. We are being torn apart by wars, pandemics, geopolitical rivalries, and ecological upheaval. The time has come to make important choices that could have a profound impact on the future of human civilization. Based on his research, which combines political biophysics with a critique of capitalism, Erald Kolasi addresses the fundamental challenges we face and offers a new blueprint for understanding and solving them.
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Modern civilization is too energy-intensive and inefficient. We consume vast amounts of energy and resources from the natural world, we convert some of that energy for useful tasks like mechanical work and electricity, and then we dump the vast majority of the energy we consumed back to the natural world in highly useless and degraded forms. We’re dumping so much of this useless energy into nature that even the best natural sinks are having a hard time absorbing and assimilating all the junk we’re tossing, leading to greater levels of chaos and thermodynamic instability throughout the biosphere, in the forms of rapid global warming, mass extinctions, ocean acidification, dead zones, severe droughts, epidemics, and other dangerous phenomena. If we continue down this path, we risk triggering major ecological tipping points that could cause massive, sudden, and irreversible changes throughout large parts of the biosphere, potentially threatening the survival of planetary civilization itself.
The entropic amplification of the biosphere
From a biophysical perspective, capitalism has transformed modern civilization into a hyper-dissipative entroplex, an energy-intensive megamachine dumping massive amounts of gases, liquids, and solid waste into our natural environments – over 50 gigatons of greenhouse gases every year, roughly 2 billion metric tons of solid waste every year, about 380 billion cubic meters of wastewater every year. Entropy measures the dispersal and distribution of energy in the world, and one of the most important laws of thermodynamics tells us that the total entropy of the universe is rising, as energy changes from more concentrated forms to less concentrated forms that gradually deplete nature’s capacity to generate useful mechanical energy. In our little corner, here on planet Earth, living organisms have evolved ever more intricate methods of harvesting energy over the eons, using it to reorganize their internal biology and surrounding environments, and throwing the resulting waste back into the natural world. Some physicists have even speculated that life arises in the universe precisely as a way of creating additional entropy, given how efficient living organisms have become at dissipating energy to external natural sinks.
Our current economic regime has taken this entropic zeal to a new level. Capitalism is by far the most devastating system that any life form in the history of the planet has created for ramping up the entropy of our collective biosphere, to the point where it’s worth thinking of it as a quasi-catastrophic shock, akin to massive volcanoes going off simultaneously or a group of small asteroids colliding with the planet. The biggest effect of this spasmic energetic release has been the degradation of the planetary ecosphere to a more chaotic state. The capitalist order of human civilization is producing increasing disorder in the broader biosphere, and this growing imbalance, if allowed to continue, will inevitably cripple the stability of global civilization itself.
The huge energy losses of our modern economies have become an energy reservoir for other dynamical systems in nature, such as viruses, bacteria, hurricanes, storms, wildfires, and algae blooms, among others. Paradoxically, the ‘useless’ energy that human civilization dumps into the natural world powers the formation of other physical systems, and these systems collectively are forming a new ecological order that will be incompatible with the necessary conditions for the survival of global civilization. It remains uncertain how long we can sustain such an energy-intensive path, but there is no doubt that the fantasy of endless growth and easy profits cannot continue. Our main goal should be to chart a new path that will allow humanity to thrive within the natural constraints and parameters of the planetary biosphere.
Scarcity and stability
In popular discourse, resource scarcity is often identified as the central problem of all economics. The basic argument is that we have infinite desires but limited resources, and since we cannot have everything we want, we must necessarily devise a system to distribute goods and resources: Enter the market economy with its prices and wages, which are supposed to act as gatekeepers to the storehouse of economic nirvana. This feel-good story has some major flaws, but here I want to focus on perhaps the most fundamental one. If ecological instabilities in the biosphere make it difficult for modern civilization to keep collecting and extracting energy from nature, then civilization is susceptible to collapse even though plenty of energy and resources remain available for consumption.
We should reconceptualize the central problem of economics as being not scarcity, but stability in the flow of goods and resources, and especially the stability of the planetary biosphere, which is the primary energy reservoir for global civilization after the sun itself. Of course, scarcity can also threaten the stability of an economic system. If we run out of critical natural resources for industrial civilization, we’re in trouble. But the point is that it does not always represent the central threat, and that’s especially the case right now.
The fundamental problem of economics revolves around how to ensure that our economic systems remain stable and sustainable against the external perturbations of nature. Any major shock to the aggregate energy flows of the biosphere could easily trigger induced scarcities by simply making it more difficult to extract natural resources that are already plentiful. For example, the rapid acceleration of global warming is a thermodynamic shock caused by vast emissions of greenhouse gases, and this planetary-level shock has severely destabilized the global hydrological cycle (among others), amplifying severe droughts and flooding events that are collectively applying enormous pressure on global trade and agriculture, from coffee production in Brazil to cocoa production in West Africa. Biospheric flow shocks can thus induce scarcities in natural resources, either by destroying existing resource stocks or by making it more difficult for civilization to extract them. One of the most extreme examples of this principle was the asteroid that struck planet Earth roughly 65 million years ago. The fallout from the collision rapidly altered the chemical composition of the planet’s atmosphere, blocking out sunlight, sabotaging plant growth, and finally triggering the extinction of the terrestrial dinosaurs.
In the environmental movement, overshoot and resource depletion have traditionally been major concerns, and for good reason. It’s becoming increasingly harder to extract or develop critical natural resources, like oil, sand, rubber, and uranium. Overshoot is the idea that if we harvest and extract resources at a faster rate than nature can replenish them, then eventually we’ll run out of the basic building blocks necessary to power civilization, leading to perennial worries about peak oil, peak phosphorus, peak anything. Fossil fuels are the canonical example, as we’re extracting them at much faster rates than the natural world can regenerate them.
Dynamic energy flows and biogeochemical cycles
But it would be wrong to see nature as just a collection of material stocks that we acquire by drilling and digging, like oil, lithium, coal, uranium, and so on. The planetary biosphere is also full of dynamic energy flows and biogeochemical cycles. For example, the hydrological cycle moves water around terrestrial, atmospheric, and oceanic environments. The nitrogen cycle transports nitrogen around the planetary biosphere, providing a critical ingredient for plant growth and global agriculture. There are many others. These flows and cycles are absolutely vital for the survival of life and are strongly implicated in the stability of the biosphere.
The vast amounts of waste and useless energy that we’re dumping into the natural world are scrambling and destabilizing many of the dominant cycles and flows throughout the biosphere. And when these critical energy flows are rapidly altered or interrupted, they can have multiple complex and harmful effects on civilization. They can cause massive supply shocks when they disrupt industrial production and international trade. They can reduce our capacity to extract existing stocks of natural resources. They can sabotage agricultural production. They can destabilize societies and pressure people to flee as refugees to other countries. They can cause massive flooding that cripples cities and communities. They can cause economic downturns, recessions, and depressions. The list goes on and on.
Even if we had enough easily recoverable natural resources to last global civilization millions of years at current levels of consumption, we would still be experiencing a massive ecological crisis in the short run, because the vast quantities of waste energy and materials that we’re throwing into the biosphere are absolutely crippling the vital energy flows and cycles that civilization needs to continue operating.
The valence of humanity and the biosphere
To ensure the success and survival of civilization in this millennium, we need a new collective relationship with the natural world. In my book “The Physics of Capitalism” (2025), I introduce a new worldview, which I call valerism, that’s meant to function as a comprehensive political and economic order for managing our industrialized global civilization. The term valerism comes from the words valence and regeneration, where valence in this context means economic and ecological stability, and regeneration means the revival and resurrection of biomes and ecosystems that have been disrupted or partially destroyed under capitalism.
For planetary civilization, valence represents the central goal: the protection of macroeconomic and macroenergetic stability in the face of chaotic natural instabilities. Ensuring global stability in this context means several things.
First, stability means implementing managed fluctuations in energy use, resource consumption, and waste generation around a dynamic equilibrium. For example, I recommend that all countries set a maximum cap on their average daily per capita energy use over a year at roughly 60,000 kilocalories, which is a number that’s meant to put some downward pressure on the current global average of 50,000 kilocalories while tightening the distribution of energy consumption figures across the world to ensure that excessive energy use among large nations or regions doesn’t extend to surrounding areas through network effects and industrial agglomeration. Second, stability means operating within critical planetary boundaries to avoid destabilizing the dominant energy flows and cycles of the biosphere. Third, stability means promoting a healthy ecological footprint, so that we don’t use vastly more land than necessary to keep civilization going. And fourth, in a more economic sense, stability means universality, or establishing universal programs to ensure the collective well-being of society, such as universal employment, universal childcare, universal healthcare, universal public education, and so on. To support this vision, I unveil four fundamental design and organizational principles for the valerist order, which are intended to mutually reinforce one another and therefore require joint implementation: stabilization, socialization, modularization, and localization. I’ve talked about the first one already, so let me cover the other three.
Socialization, modularization, and localization
For socialization, we would bring more economic resources under democratic and collective control, either through local cooperatives or state-level nationalizations for energy-intensive and other critical industries or sectors. The main goals here are to ensure effective large-scale social coordination for future energy transitions, since capitalists will not pursue aggressive investments that yield little short-term profitability, and to further promote economic stability for the working classes. For modularization, we would create a modular industrial society built on the principles of reusability, interchangeability, and pre-fabrication.
Modularization would be universal in the sense that it would affect and encompass the economic system end-to-end, from the organization of industrial manufacturing to end-use consumption and waste management. Universal modularization would not just reduce waste, a rather timid goal in the current circular economy rhetoric, it would also fundamentally change the nature of technological development by restricting the scope of customization in industrial production and end-use consumption, which would then result in highly streamlined and efficient production methods for stabilized cycles of technological development.
For localization, we would encourage more domestic and localized production and distribution, to avoid some of the harmful effects associated with the material-intensive nature of international trade and the global value chains of modern capitalism. The increased localization of industrial manufacturing and logistical distribution is good economics, as it would further immunize societies from global supply shocks and help to promote full employment, and it’s good for the environment as well, as it would reduce wasteful energy losses flowing to the biosphere.
In addition to these core principles, I propose the creation of a more inclusive international system for managing the global ecological commons, to ensure that the kinds of problems we’re facing now don’t arise again anytime soon. It’s naïve to believe that our current global ecological problems can be resolved through local planning and coordination alone. There must be some level of top-down control and oversight in addition to bottom-up organization. These two scales of political power don’t have to stand in opposition to each other, which is how their relationship is often portrayed. By the late 17th century, Japan was facing a severe deforestation crisis that threatened to topple its social and political system. The Tokugawa government responded aggressively by imposing quotas on logging and implementing a whole range of other policies designed to stabilize the Japanese economy. By the 19th century, Japan’s forest had regrown, and the country avoided what would otherwise have been a devastating collapse.
If we’re going to overcome the enormous challenges ahead of us in this millennium, we need effective political coordination at local and global scales. Future generations will judge us harshly if we fail to seize this exceptional moment in history. The impending convergence of crises, from the economic to the ecological, demands nothing less from us than to implement a new vision for our social order.