(hat tip to Lee) As San Francisco swelters under a rare heatwave, I come across this interesting little polemic against air conditioners.  -

As a device explicitly designed to outrun the Second Law of Thermodynamics, an air-conditioner vividly illustrates the inevitable destruction caused by all economic activity, a process first described by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the godfather of ecological economics.

Georgescu-Roegen wrote in his 1971 book "The Entropy Law and the Economic Process" that despite the neat, closed-loop flow charts depicted in textbooks, the economic process "is not circular but unidirectional. As far as this facet alone is concerned, the economic process consists of a continuous transformation of low entropy into high entropy, that is, into irrevocable waste."

Georgescu-Roegen went on to demonstrate the futility of growth-dependent economic systems, showing that in human societies, "production" is a phantom, that economic activity can be represented by just two factors: consumption of resources -- concentrated energy, useful materials and our ecological life-support system -- and elimination of useless or less useful wastes. When all is said and done, he argued, an economy's only product is nonmaterial "enjoyment of life," which can be banked only in the form of memories.

As it creates fleeting enjoyment through a state of low entropy (in this case, an island of coolness in a sea of heat) but only by increasing entropy at an even faster rate elsewhere (by using up fuels and materials and releasing useless wastes), air conditioning is a poster child for the inevitable decay that, according to Georgescu-Roegen, is a defining characteristic of economic growth.

Get it?  Growth = Decay.   Submission to entropy is the only natural human destiny.  And classical economics is flawed for fighting it and stooping to provide that oh-so-evil "enjoyment of life" (note the scarequotes).  We should just give up - starting with our air conditioners - and let Gaia have its way with us

I do give this particular thread of far-left thought credit for carrying the argument to its logical ends.  As I noted earlier when talking about an enemy of a different sort, such a clear articulation of the process they're fighting against and a binary difference of opinion about whether its outcome is Good or Bad clarifies battle lines dramatically.

The author's postscript to this little piece of nihilist propaganda is practically it's own caricature & leaves us salivating for more -

This story is the first in a two-part series on how air-conditioning has changed society. Next week: How air-conditioning may have helped elect George W. Bush.

Good God.   When will the madness end.