Economía y termodinámica

Podemos elegir entre dos futuros. 

En uno, nos aferramos al crecimiento hasta que llegue la singularidad y los precios, las cadenas de suministro y los sistemas políticos se desmoronen simultáneamente. 

En el otro, comenzamos ahora a redirigir el capital hacia el mantenimiento, reducir la dependencia energética, reconstruir la resiliencia local y reestructurar las economías en torno a la suficiencia en lugar de la expansión. 

El segundo camino no es cómodo. Requiere desmantelar supuestos que han regido la política económica durante dos siglos. Pero es el único camino que no termina en el colapso. 

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more The Thermodynamic Endgame of Industrial Civilization The physics of inflation, the logic of transition, and the policies that might save us The Minority Report Apr 21   READ IN APP   A new preprint by atmospheric physicist Timothy Garrett and mathematician Matheus Grasselli asks a deceptively simple question: will climate change cause inflation? Their answer rewrites the terms of the entire economic debate. The Minority Report Publication is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Upgrade to paid Not because direct climate damages to GDP are catastrophic in themselves. By their own calculations, even aggressive warming scenarios add less than 0.3% per year to global inflation through direct damage channels. That number is almost negligible. Central bankers would not lose sleep over it. The real finding is far more disturbing. Garrett and Grasselli show that inflation is not a monetary phenomenon that central banks control with interest rates. It is a thermodynamic property of civilization itself. It emerges from the physical gap between what civilization needs to maintain its existing infrastructure and what it can actually produce as new output. When that gap closes, when all productive capacity is consumed by maintenance and repair, inflation does not creep upward. It detonates. The mechanics The paper rests on a concept the authors call “Wealth.” This is not wealth as we colloquially understand it: bank accounts, stock portfolios, real estate. It is the entire historical accumulation of everything civilization has ever produced and still depends on. The alphabet. Roads. The number system. Neural networks in our brains that remember the taste of bread. Every building, every pipeline, every institutional procedure, every piece of shared knowledge. All of it. This distinction matters because it changes what economic activity actually is. In conventional economics, GDP measures new production. In Garrett and Grasselli’s framework, most economic activity is not creation. It is maintenance. It is the energy and labor required to prevent the accumulated Wealth of civilization from decaying. Roads must be repaved. Buildings must be heated. Knowledge must be taught to each new generation. The question is how much productive capacity remains after all that maintenance is done. This Wealth, they show, scales with remarkable precision to global energy consumption. For fifty years, from 1970 to 2019, the ratio between historically cumulative economic output and primary energy use has remained effectively constant, even as energy consumption nearly tripled. This is not a correlation. It is a scaling law. Civilization is a physical system that runs on energy, and its size grows at the same rate whether you measure it in inflation-adjusted currency or in watts. The economy, in this framework, does two things simultaneously. It builds new things at rate β. And it watches old things decay at rate γ. Real economic growth is the difference: η = β − γ. Right now, β is roughly thirty times larger than γ. The system is comfortable. Growth absorbs the losses easily. But climate change, resource depletion, and cascading infrastructure failure are all pushing γ upward. Every wildfire. Every flooded city. Every crumbling bridge. Every failed harvest. Each redirects economic activity from expansion to repair. Here is where the mathematics turn violent. Think of a household that earns a fixed salary. Every month, some of that salary goes to fixing things: the roof, the plumbing, the car. The rest is disposable income. Now imagine the house starts aging faster. The boiler breaks. The roof leaks. Termites arrive. Each month, a larger share of the salary goes to repairs. Disposable income shrinks, but the household still functions. Then one month, repairs consume the entire salary. There is no disposable income at all. The next thing that breaks cannot be fixed. And here is the critical part: the household does not simply go broke. It enters a death spiral. Every unfixed problem accelerates the decay of everything else. The leaking roof rots the walls. The rotting walls crack the foundation. Repair costs do not just exceed income. They accelerate away from it. That is the singularity. Not a gradual squeeze. A moment where the system crosses a threshold and the math goes vertical. Mathematically: inflation equals the rate of change of the ratio γ/β, divided by the remaining gap between them. As γ approaches β, that denominator shrinks toward zero. Inflation approaches infinity. The authors calculate that if γ/β increases by just 1% per year from current values, hyperinflation arrives in the 2060s. At 10% per year, it arrives in the 2030s. The economy, as they put it, dies slowly and then suddenly. The trap Here is the part that should terrify every policymaker alive. The inflation singularity does not require the economy to collapse. It requires only that growth stalls. When energy consumption flatlines, for any reason, including successful climate policy, the growth rate η approaches zero. At that point, all nominal output is absorbed by maintenance. Real production does not stop, but it becomes impossible to measure because prices are exploding. The distinction between nominal and real economic activity dissolves. This means that conventional climate policy faces a paradox. Stabilize emissions, stabilize energy use, stabilize GDP in real terms, and you may still trigger an inflationary crisis. The physics does not care about your intentions. It cares about throughput. What about efficiency and renewables? The obvious objection is that technological progress could decouple Wealth from energy. Solar panels are getting cheaper. LED bulbs use a fraction of the energy of incandescent ones. Could we not simply maintain civilization with less energy? Garrett and Grasselli’s data suggest otherwise. Despite fifty years of efficiency gains, the Wealth-energy ratio has remained constant. Efficiency improvements do not reduce total energy demand. They enable the system to grow, which creates new maintenance obligations, which consume the savings. This is Jevons’ paradox operating at civilizational scale. It does not mean efficiency is pointless. It means efficiency alone cannot prevent the singularity. So the question is not whether the growth era ends. It is ending. The question is whether we can engineer a transition that prevents the singularity from arriving as a violent shock. The transition: how output, profit, and maintenance can scale down together The construction industry offers the clearest illustration of how this transition could work in practice. In the current system, profit in construction flows overwhelmingly toward new development. Greenfield projects create asset value from scratch. The margins are high. A developer buys land, builds apartments, sells them at a markup that reflects both construction cost and speculative land value. Capital accumulates rapidly. The entire financial architecture (mortgages, property funds, pension investments) is structured around this expansion logic. Renovation work, by contrast, sits at the margins. It is constrained by existing structure. Materials are harder to source. Labor is more specialized. Margins are thinner. Capital flows away from it naturally because returns are lower. Now consider what happens when you acknowledge a hard biophysical truth: Denmark has enough buildings. New housing completions fell 27% in 2024. Vacancy rates sit below 2% in Copenhagen, which is tight, but the constraint is distribution and quality, not absolute quantity. The country does not need more square meters. It needs existing square meters to work better, for more people, with less energy. Here is the critical insight that connects this to the Garrett-Grasselli framework. If you shift the construction industry from expansion to renovation, three things happen simultaneously. First, total output declines. Deep renovation generates less economic throughput than new construction. Fewer raw materials are extracted. Less concrete is poured. Less land is developed. The absolute volume of economic activity in the sector shrinks. This is not a bug. It is the point. Lower throughput means lower energy demand, which is exactly what the biophysical constraint requires. Second, profit rates decline but they do not disappear. Renovation margins are thinner, but the work is steady, recurring, and less exposed to speculative property cycles. A fifteen-year retrofit cycle for every building in Denmark creates a permanent, predictable revenue stream. It is less spectacular than a property boom, but far more resilient. Capital still accumulates. It just accumulates slower. Third, and this is the key, the maintenance burden also declines. Every deep renovation extends the functional life of a building by decades. Thermal upgrades reduce ongoing energy costs. Structural reinforcement prevents future repair emergencies. The decay rate γ for that portion of civilization’s Wealth actually drops. You are not just redirecting economic activity from growth to maintenance. You are reducing how much maintenance the system requires in the first place. This is how you keep the ratio between growth and decay from converging. You do not try to maintain β at its current level. You let it decline. But you simultaneously reduce γ through smarter, more durable maintenance. If both rates fall proportionally, the gap between them stays open. The singularity recedes. The same logic applies beyond buildings. Take agriculture. Industrial farming is a high-β, high-γ system. It produces enormous throughput. But it does so by mining the soil. Every harvest extracts nutrients. Every application of synthetic fertilizer degrades soil biology. Every season of monoculture compacts the earth and kills the microbial networks that hold it together. The soil decays. The system requires more and more energy input just to maintain the same yields. γ rises with every cycle. Regenerative agriculture inverts this. Output per hectare drops initially. β falls. But the soil itself begins to recover. Organic matter accumulates. Microbial networks rebuild. Water retention improves. The land requires less intervention each year, not more. γ does not just stabilize. It actually declines. A farm that builds soil health is reducing the maintenance burden of its own productive base. Less throughput, but a system that holds itself together rather than one that consumes itself. The rule is simple. If maintaining what you produce costs more energy than producing it saved, you are feeding the singularity. Industrial farming feeds it. Fast fashion feeds it. Speculative construction feeds it. Every system that creates things designed to break, deplete, or be discarded is adding to the pile of stuff civilization must maintain while subtracting from its capacity to do so. The only transition that works is one where each thing we produce reduces the total cost of keeping civilization intact. The numbers on a quarterly report will call this decline. The physics calls it survival. The examples in construction and agriculture proves the concept. But the logic must extend to every sector. And that requires political intervention at a scale no modern government has yet attempted. The policies we actually need Markets will not voluntarily redirect capital toward lower-margin maintenance work. The profit motive, left unchecked, will continue to chase expansion until expansion becomes physically impossible, at which point the singularity arrives as a shock rather than a managed transition. Avoiding that shock requires policy on six fronts. The first three follow directly from the thermodynamic model. The last three are my reading of what institutional changes would be needed to implement them. Others may prefer different institutional mechanisms while accepting the same physical constraints. 1. Sufficiency mandates across all sectors. The foundational policy shift is from “how much can we produce?” to “how much do we actually need?” This is not austerity. It is the recognition that beyond a certain threshold, additional production does not increase well-being. It only increases the maintenance burden on civilization. In practice, this means setting legal caps on material throughput by sector. Maximum embodied energy per new product. Maximum resource extraction rates indexed to regeneration capacity. Mandatory lifecycle analysis before any new infrastructure project is approved. The goal is to make overproduction structurally impossible, not merely unfashionable. Every unnecessary unit of production adds to γ without adding to well-being. Sufficiency mandates cut γ at the source. This is not without precedent. Environmental regulation has always imposed limits on production when externalities demanded it. The difference is scope: sufficiency mandates extend this logic from pollution control to the total volume of material throughput. The political difficulty is immense. But the alternative, allowing throughput to rise until the singularity forces a far more violent contraction, is worse by every measure. 2. Energy descent planning as national strategy. No government on earth currently plans for declining energy availability. Every national energy strategy assumes future growth in supply, whether from renewables, nuclear, or fossil fuels. This is incoherent with the biophysical reality Garrett and Grasselli describe. If civilization’s energy throughput must eventually decline, then every institution needs a plan for operating with less. Energy descent planning means publishing binding national pathways for reduced primary energy consumption over twenty- and fifty-year horizons. It means redesigning transport networks for lower energy demand, not electrifying every car, but reducing the need to travel. It means planning cities for proximity rather than mobility. It means restructuring industrial policy around durability and repairability rather than volume. The political challenge is that energy descent sounds like deprivation. It is not. Most energy consumed in wealthy nations is wasted on oversized vehicles, inefficient buildings, unnecessary freight, planned obsolescence. Cutting waste does not reduce well-being. It increases it, by redirecting resources toward things that actually matter: healthcare, education, housing quality, public space, ecological restoration. Countries that begin this planning now will transition on their own terms. Countries that delay will have the transition imposed on them by price chaos. 3. Relocalisation of essential systems. Global supply chains are civilization’s most energy-intensive maintenance cost. Every container ship, every intercontinental flight, every refrigerated truck crossing a continent represents energy spent not on production but on circulation. The longer the supply chain, the higher the maintenance burden. Relocalisation means rebuilding the capacity to meet essential needs (food, energy, basic materials, healthcare) at the regional and local level. Community-supported agriculture. Municipal energy cooperatives. Regional manufacturing hubs for essential goods. This is not autarky or isolationism. International trade continues for goods that cannot be produced locally. But the baseline, the non-negotiable foundation of daily life, becomes local. This dramatically reduces the energy required to maintain civilization’s basic functions, which directly lowers γ and widens the gap that prevents the singularity. It also builds resilience. A community that feeds itself locally does not experience a food crisis when a shipping lane closes. A city with its own energy cooperative does not experience blackouts when global gas markets spike. Relocalisation is simultaneously a climate adaptation strategy, an inflation hedge, and a democratic project. 4. Restructuring ownership to align incentives with maintenance. This is where the essay moves from thermodynamic necessity to institutional preference. The physics demands that capital flow toward maintenance. How ownership is restructured to achieve that is a political choice. Private capital optimizes for return on investment. In a growth economy, this works tolerably well because expansion generates returns. In a maintenance economy, it fails. Maintenance work is steady, essential, and low-margin. It does not attract venture capital or private equity. It does not generate the returns that pension funds require under current mandates. This means the ownership structures that govern essential infrastructure must change. Municipal and cooperative ownership of housing, energy, water, and transport infrastructure aligns incentives with long-term maintenance rather than short-term extraction. Worker cooperatives in maintenance-heavy industries distribute returns more broadly and reinvest in quality rather than growth. Community land trusts remove land from speculative markets entirely. None of this eliminates profit. It redirects profit toward the work that actually sustains civilization, and away from the speculative expansion that accelerates the singularity. 5. Progressive taxation on wealth concentration and speculative capital. In a world where total throughput is declining, concentrated wealth becomes a direct accelerant of the singularity. Concentrated capital chases high returns, which means it flows toward expansion, speculation, and luxury consumption, all of which increase γ without contributing to maintenance. Meanwhile, the shared infrastructure that everyone depends on (roads, hospitals, water systems, energy grids) deteriorates because maintenance is not profitable enough to attract private investment. Progressive wealth taxation, financial transaction taxes, and the elimination of tax havens are not redistributive luxuries. They are thermodynamic necessities. Every dollar redirected from speculative accumulation toward shared infrastructure maintenance widens the gap between β and γ. Every dollar left in offshore accounts narrows it. The math is indifferent to ideology. 6. Managed debt restructuring and monetary reform. Debt is a claim on future growth. Every bond, every mortgage, every sovereign debt instrument assumes that future economic output will be larger than today’s. In a world where growth is ending, this assumption becomes mathematically false. Accumulated debt becomes unpayable, not because of policy failure, but because the physical basis for repayment no longer exists. Managed debt restructuring (sovereign debt forgiveness, mortgage principal reduction, jubilee mechanisms) is not a radical proposal in this context. It is an inevitability. The only question is whether it happens through deliberate policy or through the chaotic default cascades that accompany hyperinflation. Monetary reform must accompany this: the creation of money systems that do not require perpetual growth to function. Mutual credit systems, time banks, public banking, and sovereign money creation all offer partial models. None is sufficient alone. But the current debt-based monetary architecture is incompatible with a post-growth world. Every unit of currency created as interest-bearing debt demands future growth to service. When that growth stops, the currency itself becomes an engine of crisis. The honest conclusion Garrett and Grasselli have written a paper about inflation. But what they have actually described is the thermodynamic endgame of industrial civilization. Growth is ending not as a political choice but as a physical inevitability. The economic signature of that ending is inflation, first gradual, then vertical. We cannot avoid this entirely. But we can choose between two futures. In one, we cling to growth until the singularity arrives, and prices, supply chains, and political systems shatter simultaneously. In the other, we begin now to redirect capital toward maintenance, reduce energy dependence, rebuild local resilience, and restructure economies around sufficiency rather than expansion. The second path is not comfortable. It requires dismantling assumptions that have governed economic policy for two centuries. But it is the only path that does not end in collapse. The growth era is over. The question is what we build, or rather, what we maintain, in its place. Source: Garrett, T. J. and Grasselli, M. R.: Acceleration by climate change of global economic inflation, EGUsphere [preprint],https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-1304, 2026. The Minority Report Publication is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.