The Law of Unintended Consequences

The Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy

The Law of Conservation of Energy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but can change its form.

The total quantity of matter and energy available in the universe is a fixed amount and never any more or less.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

The law of unintended consequences is an adage or idiom that warns that an intervention in a complex system invariably creates unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes.

When I was in the 6th or 7th grade, sometime around 1962 or 1963, I began to wonder what happened to all the smoke that came from burning fossil fuels - car exhausts, factory smokestacks, that sort of thing. I knew that smoke was toxic. I mean, after all, I knew that breathing tail pipe emissions could be deadly. It seemed to me like it would just accumulate in the atmosphere until it finally got so thick it would kill us all. It didn't seem like it would go anywhere.

I remember going into the kitchen and asking my mother about it. She said that, yes, it did accumulate in the atmosphere, but the atmosphere was so huge and the amount of smoke was so small that it would never matter. For many years that satisfied my concern.

Of course, she was wrong, but so was just about everyone else. Most of us were looking at it from the perspective of just what was happening at the time, not considering how the population of the planet would grow, and how the burning of fossil fuels would escalate dramatically, and few of us ordinary people imagined that growth and escalation would happen so fast that it would become a major, possibly world-ending issue in our lifetimes. We didn't really think it through and, frankly, it was convenient for us to not think it through. At least, convenient in a short-term sense.

I am concerned now that we may not be thinking through "clean" energy sources all the way to their long-term logical conclusions.

Which brings me back to the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy. There is a sum total of all the energy and matter in the universe, and it never gets any bigger. It can change forms, even changing from energy to matter and back again, but it never goes away, and no more ever gets added.

Which is another way of saying that all energy goes somewhere. It doesn't just exist for a time and then go away, wasted or lost if it isn't used. It goes somewhere. And, wherever it goes, it has some effect. If something happens and it doesn't go where it normally goes, the effect doesn't occur. A different one does.

So, let's take solar energy, just to randomly pick an example. When sunlight strikes the desert, the light energy doesn't just dissipate. Some of it gets reflected around as light, but some of it gets converted into heat, both in the air and in the sand. That heat has an effect on the air and the sand. I'm not sure what the heat in the sand does, but it probably adds to the overall heat in the air, among other things.

The heat in the air causes the air to rise. That sucks more air in to take the place of the rising air. That causes wind, not just over the desert, but over the territory at the edges of the desert. That wind itself causes effects, including more wind in other places. But, it also affects the weather patterns, keeping it dry on the desert, but, ultimately, wet in other places.

Now, let's suppose, just for example, that we intercept some of that light energy before it strikes the desert floor, with solar panels, for example, and convert some of that light energy into electical energy. That means, necessarily, that there is less light energy to convert into heat, both in the sand and in the air. Less heat, less wind. (Or maybe we take kinetic energy directly out of the wind with wind turbines, that convert that energy into electrical energy, instead of letting it go wherever it goes and have whatever effect it has now.) Less wind, some change in the weather, somewhere. I'm not at all sure we can figure out what that change will be, or the extent of that change, or whether some tiny little change will snow-ball, like the fluttering of a butterfly's wings that causes a hurricane, or even if we know what changes, besides weather, will occur. But, we do know that some change will occur.

Now, it is tempting to dismiss this line of thought with the comforting idea that there is so much desert (or so much wind) and the number of solar panels (or wind turbines) will be so small that the relative amount of heat energy we will be taking out of the desert (or kinetic energy out of the wind) will be so small that it won't really matter.

That, however, is the thought with which we comforted ourselves for all those years we were pumping smoke into the atmosphere and thinking the atmosphere was so big and the amount of smoke was so small that it wouldn't ever wind up mattering. We were wrong. And we were wrong much sooner than most folks ever imagined we would be.

So, I'm thinking we ought to be thinking about the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy and how it just might interact with the Law of Unintended Consequences as we develop all this "clean" energy instead of learning to live on less energy.

And I wanted to say it. Now.