Einstein said the laws of thermodynamics would never be overturned. Today's climate policies act as if they already have.
First published in Substack.
Humanity did not enter the climate crisis because we lacked warnings. We entered it because we ignored the laws that govern everything from the birth of stars to the metabolism of cells. Politicians like to talk about fighting climate change as if it were a debate, a public-relations contest, or an engineering challenge that can be postponed until the next election cycle. But global warming is not waiting for quarterly earnings reports or political mood swings. It obeys laws--thermodynamic laws--that are as universal and unforgiving as gravity.
And there aren't just three of them.
In 1922, Alfred J. Lotka extended classical thermodynamics into the realm of biology with what became known as the Maximum Power Principle: organisms that capture and use the most available energy from their environment will dominate. This was not a metaphor. It was physics applied to life. Three decades later, H.T. Odum--building on Lotka and Darwin--proposed a Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: systems that maximize useful power win the evolutionary race. Odum continued expanding this framework across his career: in 1996 he articulated a Fifth Law describing the universe as a hierarchy of self-organizing energy flows; and in 2001 a Sixth Law showing that material cycles are coupled to energy degradation, with each transformation step concentrating materials but reducing total flow.
These extensions do not replace the First or Second Law. They illuminate how life and civilization obey them. And Einstein, who rarely spoke in absolutes, made a striking concession: thermodynamics, he said, was the one branch of physics he believed would never be overturned.
Yet here we are--watching Western political leaders behave as though the Second Law is optional and the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth are negotiable.
The Fantasy of Decarbonized Oil
Consider the soaring rhetoric around low-carbon or decarbonized oil. The very phrase is a linguistic hallucination. Oil is carbon. We burn it. The emissions are released at the tailpipe, not the wellhead. No amount of marketing can change the chemistry.
But governments and industry continue selling the public the idea that carbon capture and storage (CCS) can turn a carbon-based fuel into a low-carbon commodity. The myth persists because it is politically convenient: it promises climate action without economic disruption, technological progress without systemic change, and decarbonization without the discomfort of transition.
The reality is far more prosaic.
Most CCS projects worldwide do not capture emissions from oil combustion--they process methane streams or are coupled to enhanced oil recovery, which itself increases fossil fuel production. More importantly, CCS has not been demonstrated at scale as a reliable climate solution. It is expensive, it is thermodynamically inefficient, and it depends heavily on government subsidies the public rarely sees or understands.
The Pathways Plus system trumpeted in Canada's new memorandum of understanding is a case in point. Promoted as the world's largest carbon capture, utilization, and storage project, it comes with a staggering $16.5-billion price tag for the shared CO pipeline and storage network alone. That does not include the individual capture units each company must purchase and maintain.
And what does this massive investment buy us? A reduction of 10 to 20 percent of a barrel's full life-cycle emissions--at best. At worst, the reductions cost so much per tonne that no genuine market for decarbonized oil exists outside government-subsidy frameworks.
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