The Climate Debt: Combining the Science, Politics and Economics of Climate Change

Climate warming and disorder are the consequence of a free trade economic growth model that has failed to anticipate its physical impact on the environment. This failure reveals a lack of interaction between economists and scientists, long separated from an academic standpoint.

The separation is artificial. This book shows that the free trade concept of David Ricardo and that of the Sadi Carnot thermodynamic cycle, both developed at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, are amazingly close to each other. The analogy between the two cycles helps understand the fundamental mechanism of free trade. Irreversible processes, such as the release of CO₂ by fossil fuel burning, have increased the Boltzmann entropy level. It has generated climate warming and disorder, a phenomenon accelerated by a growth model largely based on delocalization of industrial production to low wage countries. Major irreversible phenomena such as melting of all arctic ice including the Greenland ice sheets can be expected within 1000 years that can only be avoided by active removal of atmospheric CO₂, whose cost can be calculated based on the entropy laws of Clausius and Boltzmann.