Consider this opportunity from a pioneer in biophysical monetary policy. Peter
James Quilligan writes:
“I leverage my decades of experience in biophysical monetary policy to find organizations interested in measuring and optimizing the energy flows between natural and human systems. Please contact me if you want to apply the principles of ecology and thermodynamics to develop more equitable and sustainable regional economies. I collaborate with governments, international organisations and NGOs to compute the……
Webmaster adds: at this point I googled the heading and it came up with the following text:
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James Bernard Quilligan—an international development expert and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for New Critical Politics and Governance—advocates for a radical restructuring of economics and climate governance based on the laws of thermodynamics. Quilligan argues that traditional economics fails to address climate change because it treats money as the ultimate arbiter of value, completely ignoring the physical limits of Earth’s ecosystems. By shifting the baseline from monetary exchange to thermodynamic carrying capacity, his work reframes the climate crisis as a systemic “entropic debt” or “energy deficit” that humanity owes to the planet. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Quilligan’s core ideas linking climate change, economics, and thermodynamics center on several key shifts in perspective:
1. Redefining Value: Energy vs. Money
- Embodied Sunlight: Quilligan asserts that everything humans create, consume, and trade is ultimately a form of transformed sunlight.
- Biophysical Currency: In his work consulting for global governments, Quilligan began using bioregional carrying capacity metrics to calculate the true thermodynamic value of currencies. He proposes that prices should reflect natural replenishment and energy expenditure, rather than speculative market dynamics. [1, 2, 3, 4]
2. The Climate Crisis as Thermodynamic Imbalance
- Entropy and Material Degradation: Traditional economics treats the market as a closed system capable of infinite exponential growth. Viewed through the lens of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, production inevitably generates irreversible waste, entropy, and heat. [1, 2]
- The Failure of the “Planetary Cooling System”: Rather than viewing climate change merely as an abstract rise in average temperature, Quilligan’s framework aligns with the concept of entropic debt. Burning fossil fuels shifts an unbearable thermodynamic load onto the atmosphere. Violent weather events and collapsing biospheres are effectively the physical system’s chaotic attempt to discharge this excess accumulated energy. [1, 2]
3. The Biosocial Contract and Planetary Commons
To prevent total ecological collapse, Quilligan proposes moving away from state-centric capitalism toward a new global structure: [1]
- The Planetary Commons: Critical life-support systems (like the atmosphere, oceans, and major forests) must be managed as shared, collective resources rather than commodities to be exploited.[1, 2]
- The Biosocial Contract: Instead of relying entirely on sovereign state borders, governance should move down to bioregional commons (local ecosystems and watersheds that understand their place-based carrying capacity) and up to planetary trusts tasked with defending Earth’s broad life-support boundaries. [1]
If you want to explore his framework further, I can provide more details on:
- How bioregional accounting works in practice.
- His critique of how the Global North extracts net energy from the Global South.
- The specific differences between globalization and his concept of “planetization”. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
