Alf Hornborg’s work on thermo-economics (or the “money–energy–technology complex”) offers a searing critique of how modern economies, technologies, and energy systems are woven into a single, uneven, and ecologically destructive tapestry.
🔥 1. Money, Energy & Unequal Exchange
Hornborg builds on Marx and ecological economics to argue that global capitalism doesn’t just exploit labor — it depends on asymmetric transfers of embodied energy, materials, and environmental services from the periphery to core economies. Price doesn’t reflect ecological or social costs — it obscures them en.wikipedia.org+15tandfonline.com+15cambridge.org+15.
⚙️ 2. Thermodynamic Logic of Extraction
Drawing from thermoeconomics and thermodynamics, Hornborg emphasizes that industrial production is a dissipative process: it converts low-entropy resources (like fossil fuels and raw materials) into high-entropy waste. The result? Negative entropy accumulates in wealthier regions, while poorer regions experience a surge in entropy — ecological degradation and social destabilization footnotes2plato.com.
Essentially: growth in one place incurs degradation elsewhere — and money shields us from acknowledging this transfer.
🏛 3. Money as Fetish
Money isn’t just a medium of exchange — it’s a fetishized artifact that severs social relations from material realities. It enables us to act as if nature and society are detachable, disguising the structural violence underpinning energy-intensive technologies and lifestyles .
🧭 4. Toward Radical Reform
Hornborg argues that true ecological justice demands more than tech fixes or green capitalism. It requires redesigning money itself — to create new economic forms that reflect ecological limits and prevent asymmetric resource flows bohrium.dp.tech+14cambridge.org+14tandfonline.com+14.
🌍 Why It Matters
| Concept | Insight |
|---|---|
| Money ≠ Neutral | Money organizes global energy and resource flows, obscuring their ecological impacts. |
| Energy + Ecology | Economy and ecology are thermodynamically inseparable; ignoring that leads to destructive systems. |
| Reform Beyond Tech | No amount of solar panels or wind turbines is enough without addressing the monetary artifact that fuels inequity. |
TL;DR
Hornborg's thermo-economic lens reveals that our economic abstractions (money) are inseparable from material realities (energy and entropy). Wealth concentration and environmental collapse are thermodynamically and monetarily inseparable — and any real fix must address both.
Want to explore Hornborg’s proposal for parallel or localized currencies, or how his work fits into ecological Marxism and critiques of use-value?
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