page_title: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
section_title: Technology assessments in historical perspective
hierarchical_section_title: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen / Work / Work after magnum opus / Technology assessments in historical perspective
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Tokamak à Configuration Variable: vue intérieure du tore dont les parois sont recouvertes de tuiles de graphite. Avec l'aimable autorisation du CRPP-EPFL, Association Suisse-Euratom English: Tokamak à Configuration Variable (TCV): inner view, with the graphite-claded torus. Courtesy of CRPP-EPFL, Association Suisse-Euratom
context_page_description: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen was a Romanian mathematician, statistician and economist. He is best known today for his 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, in which he argued that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity. A progenitor and a paradigm founder in economics, Georgescu-Roegen's work was seminal in establishing ecological economics as an independent academic sub-discipline in economics.
  Several economists have hailed Georgescu-Roegen as a man who lived well ahead of his time, and some historians of economic thought have proclaimed the ingenuity of his work. In spite of such appreciation, Georgescu-Roegen was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, although benefactors from his native Romania were lobbying for it on his behalf. After Georgescu-Roegen's death, his work was praised by a surviving friend of the highest rank: Prominent Keynesian economist and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Samuelson professed that he would be delighted if the fame Georgescu-Roegen did not fully realise in his own lifetime were granted by posterity instead.
context_section_description: In his technology assessments, Georgescu-Roegen puts thermodynamic principles to use in a wider historical context, including the future of mankind.    
  According to Georgescu-Roegen's terminology, a technology is 'viable' only when it is able to return an energy surplus sufficiently large to maintain its own operation, plus some additional energy left over for other use. If this criterion is not met, the technology in question is only 'feasible' (if workable at all), but not 'viable'. Both viable and feasible technologies depend on a steady flow of natural resources for their operation.
  Georgescu-Roegen argues that the first viable technology in the history of man was fire. By controlling fire, it was possible for man to burn a forest, or all forests. It was also possible to cook food and to obtain warmth and protection. Inspired by the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, Georgescu-Roegen terms fire 'the first Promethean recipe'. According to Georgescu-Roegen, a later important Promethean recipe (technology) of the same (first) kind was animal husbandry, feeding on grass and other biomass (like fire does).
  Much later in the history of man, the steam engine came about as the crucial Promethean recipe of the second kind, feeding on coal. The invention of the steam engine made it possible to drain the groundwater flooding the mine shafts, and the mined coal could then be used as fuel for other steam engines in turn. This technology propelled the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the second half of the 18th century, whereby man's economy has been thrust into a long, never-to-return overshoot-and-collapse trajectory with regard to the earth's mineral stock. Georgescu-Roegen lists the internal combustion engine and the nuclear fission reactor as other, later examples of Promethean recipes of the second kind, namely heat engines feeding on a mineral fuel (oil and uranium (plus thorium), respectively).
  By a Promethean recipe of the third kind, Georgescu-Roegen understands a solar collector returning a net energy output sufficiently large to supply all the energy input needed to manufacture an additional solar collector of the same kind, thereby constituting a full serial reproduction with regard to solar energy only. The fact that solar collectors of various kinds had been in operation on a substantial scale for more than a century without providing a breakthrough in energy efficiency brought Georgescu-Roegen to the conclusion that no Promethean recipe was yet around in the world in his day. Only feasible recipes for solar collectors were available, functioning like what he labelled 'parasites' with regard to the terrestrial inputs of energy for their manufacture and operation – and like any other parasite, these recipes cannot survive their host (the 'host' being the sources of the terrestrial inputs). Georgescu-Roegen believed that for a worldwide solar-powered economy to be truly energy self-supporting, a Promethean kind of solar collector had yet to be invented. Later, some scholars have argued that the efficiency of solar collectors has increased considerably since Georgescu-Roegen made these assessments.
  Georgescu-Roegen further points out that regardless of the efficiency of any particular kind of solar collector, the major drawback of solar power per se when compared to terrestrial fossil fuels and uranium (plus thorium) is the diffuse, low-intensity property of solar radiation. Hence, a lot of material equipment is needed as inputs at the surface of the earth to collect, concentrate and (when convenient) store or transform the radiation before it can be put to use on a larger industrial scale. This necessary material equipment adds to the 'parasitical' operation of solar power, Georgescu-Roegen maintains.
  Assessing fusion power as a possible future source of energy, Georgescu-Roegen ventured the opinion that, regarding magnetic confinement fusion, no reactor will ever be built to be large enough to effectively withstand and confine the vehement thermal pressure
caption: By the 1990s, the technology of fusion power was still in the making. The research & development continues today...
exif: {}