Energy

Energy is the conserved quantity that flows through every system on this wiki. Soil, water, sun, air — the substrate quartet — are the materials. Energy is what moves through them and makes them living. Without an explicit entry on energy, the wiki has been describing the geometry of regenerative systems without naming the physics.

This entry is that physics, kept honest about both the biological reality and the civilizational consequences.

Scientific — the two laws

Two laws govern every energy-related claim the wiki makes [1]:

The first law of thermodynamics. Energy is conserved. It cannot be created or destroyed, only converted between forms — chemical, electromagnetic, kinetic, potential, thermal. Every regenerative practice, every farm, every human body, every civilization is, in energy terms, a conversion system: it takes energy in (mostly from sunlight, directly or indirectly), converts it through some series of intermediate forms, and ultimately releases it as low-grade thermal energy.

Implication: an “energy positive” system is impossible at the closed-system level. Any system that produces useful energy is doing so by drawing it from somewhere — sunlight is ultimately drawn from [[sun|the sun]]‘s gravitational binding energy converted to fusion; “renewable” energy is sunlight on different timescales. The honest framing is not “create energy” but “harness, convert, and use energy from a source that is functionally inexhaustible at human civilizational timescales.”

The second law of thermodynamics. Entropy — disorder, the dispersion of usable energy — increases in any closed system. Living systems maintain order locally by exporting disorder elsewhere; a body builds itself by releasing waste heat to the environment; a forest builds soil by converting concentrated solar energy into dispersed thermal energy along [[daoism|the way]].

Implication: abundance has a thermodynamic cost. A living, growing, regenerating system is doing thermodynamic work — it is creating local order at the expense of broader environmental disorder. This is fine when the broader environment is the entire solar system (as it functionally is); it is not fine when the broader environment is bounded (as Earth’s finite material budget is).

The two laws together produce the energy budget framing that regenerative thinking requires: every system has an energy in (sunlight, food, fuel, fertilizer), an energy converted (the metabolism, the harvest, the work output), and an energy dissipated (waste heat, low-grade infrared, ultimately leaving Earth). Sustainability questions reduce to whether the energy-in side is replenishable at the rate the system consumes it.

Photosynthesis — the reaction that runs life

Almost all energy that enters living systems comes from one biochemical reaction [2]:

6 CO₂ + 6 H₂O + photons → C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6 O₂

Carbon dioxide and water, in the presence of light energy captured by chlorophyll, become glucose (a stable storage form of chemical energy) and oxygen (a high-energy molecule that the rest of the biosphere uses to release the stored energy in glucose).

The reaction was invented by cyanobacteria roughly 2.4 billion years ago. The oxygen released over the subsequent two billion years is what produced the modern atmosphere. The glucose stored, accumulated, and buried over the same period is what produced fossil fuels. Photosynthesis is the slowest and most consequential infrastructure project in Earth’s history.

For the wiki’s [[mission-district-sf|mission]] framing:

• Every calorie in every food on this wiki was, recently, sunlight. The kale on a plate; the chicken from [[polyface-farm|Polyface]]; the apples from a tree; the bread from wheat; the honey from bees that ate flowers. All of it: solar photons converted by chlorophyll into chemical energy, then variously transformed through trophic chains.
• Every regenerative farm is, mechanically, a solar capture system. The design problem is maximizing the fraction of incoming photons that get converted into living tissue and rooted in soil rather than reflected, scattered, or wasted.
• [[soil-organic-matter|Soil organic matter]] is stored solar energy. A teaspoon of healthy soil contains the chemical-energy residue of millions of past photosynthetic events, accumulated over decades or centuries. Building soil is energy storage at landscape scale.
• Hempcrete sequesters carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide which had previously been removed from [[air|the atmosphere]] by photosynthesis. The lime binder in [[hempcrete]] then takes additional CO₂ from the atmosphere during the carbonation cure. A hempcrete wall is a small inverse photosynthesis machine — concentrating low-grade carbon back into a long-term storage form.

Trophic energy flow — the food web as energy cascade

Once chemical energy enters the biosphere through photosynthesis, it cascades through trophic levels, with substantial loss at each step [3]:

• Producers (plants, algae, photosynthetic bacteria) capture roughly 1–3% of the solar energy that reaches them — this is photosynthesis’s actual efficiency, much lower than the theoretical maximum. The captured energy is stored as chemical energy in plant tissues.
• Primary consumers (herbivores, decomposers eating fresh plant matter) typically capture 5–20% of the energy in the plants they eat — most of it is lost as heat during digestion, used for the herbivore’s own metabolism, or excreted in undigested form.
• Secondary consumers (carnivores, omnivores eating herbivores) typically capture 5–20% of the energy in their prey. The rule of thumb known as the 10% trophic efficiency describes the typical loss at each step — approximately 90% of energy is lost as heat at each level of the food chain.
• Tertiary consumers (predators of predators) capture 5–20% of their prey’s energy. By this level, the available energy is substantially smaller than at the producer level. This is why apex predators are rare and have large territories.
• Decomposers (bacteria, fungi, scavenger insects) capture energy from dying and dead organisms at every trophic level. They are often left out of the standard food-chain diagram, but in energy terms they are at least as significant as the predator chain.

Implications for agriculture:

• Eating lower on the food chain is energetically more efficient. A pound of grain represents far more captured solar energy than a pound of animal protein, because the animal has metabolized away most of the plant energy that fed it. This is the energy argument for plant-rich diets.
• Polyculture is energetically more efficient than monoculture. A diverse plant community captures sunlight across a wider range of canopy heights, root depths, and seasonal timings. The [[three-sisters]] system, the [[food-forest]] design, [[permaculture]] all are, energetically, attempts to maximize the photon-capture efficiency of a given land area.
• Soil-building is the agricultural form of energy storage. Soils with high organic matter hold more energy (and more carbon) than depleted soils. Restoring depleted soil is, energetically, recharging an energy battery that [[industrial-agriculture|industrial agriculture]] discharged.

Civilizational energy — the budget at scale

Civilizations run on energy budgets [4]:

• Pre-agricultural humans lived on roughly 2,000–4,000 kcal/person/day of total energy use — approximately the amount needed to fuel one human body.
• Agricultural humans added perhaps 5,000–10,000 kcal/person/day from animal labor, fire, controlled fermentation, agricultural surplus.
• Industrial humans added 50,000–100,000 kcal/person/day from fossil fuels — coal, oil, gas. The industrial revolution is, energetically, the conversion of buried photosynthesis (fossil fuels) into immediate civilizational work.
• Modern wealthy humans use 200,000+ kcal/person/day — much of it for transportation, heating, electricity, embedded in goods and services.

The trajectory is the principal background fact of the modern era. The transition from agricultural to industrial energy budgets (from solar-current to solar-buried) is what produced everything we recognize as the modern world: rapid population growth, rising material wealth, urbanization, the global supply chain, the internet, this wiki.

It also produced the climate crisis and [[soil|the soil]] crisis. Burning buried photosynthesis at the rate humans currently do releases CO₂ into [[air|the atmosphere]] far faster than current photosynthesis can recapture it. The atmospheric concentration of CO₂ is, in a real sense, the visible accounting of the imbalance between current photosynthesis (the energy in side) and current fossil-fuel combustion (one of the energy out sides).

For the wiki’s [[mission-district-sf|mission]] of worldwide abundance: the question is whether human civilization can be supported, at meaningful material standards, on energy budgets that derive from current solar capture rather than buried solar capture. The honest answer in 2026: probably yes, but the math is tight, requires a substantial decrease in the per-capita energy consumption of wealthy populations, requires substantial increases in the photosynthetic productivity of degraded ecosystems ([[regenerative-agriculture|regenerative agriculture]] is one path), and requires the deployment of solar and wind energy at scales that make today’s deployment look small.

This is a real engineering project, not a values statement. Energy is the constraint that determines whether the regenerative-abundance project is physically possible.

Net energy and the energy-return-on-investment problem

A specific concept that deserves naming: net energy or energy return on investment (EROI) — how much energy you get out of a system per unit of energy you put in [4, 5].

• Pre-industrial firewood: EROI roughly 25:1 to 50:1 (one unit of energy spent gathering produces 25–50 units of energy from burning).
• Conventional petroleum at the wellhead, 1930s: EROI roughly 100:1.
• Conventional petroleum at the wellhead, 2020s: EROI roughly 15:1 (declining as easy oil is exhausted).
• Tar-sands oil: EROI roughly 3:1 to 5:1.
• Modern [[solar-pv|solar PV]]: EROI roughly 10:1 to 30:1 depending on installation and methodology.
• Modern wind power: EROI roughly 18:1 to 25:1.
• Modern [[industrial-agriculture|industrial agriculture]]: EROI roughly 0.1:1. [[industrial-agriculture|Industrial agriculture]] takes 10 calories of fossil energy to produce 1 calorie of food on the table — including fertilizer, machinery, transport, processing, refrigeration, retail. Most of the inputs are buried-photosynthesis substituting for current-photosynthesis.

The agriculture number is the most striking. [[industrial-agriculture|Industrial agriculture]] is, in net-energy terms, a system that runs at a substantial energy loss; it is sustained because the buried-photosynthesis subsidy is currently cheap. When it is no longer cheap, the system either has to dramatically restructure or starve. This is the energy-side of the regenerative-agriculture argument: regenerative practices have substantially better EROI because they substitute current-photosynthesis (sunlight on cover crops, animals on pasture, polyculture canopies) for buried-photosynthesis subsidy.

Pre-[[industrial-agriculture|industrial agriculture]] had EROI well above 1:1; some traditional systems are documented at 5:1 to 20:1. The work of [[regenerative-agriculture|regenerative agriculture]] is, energetically, getting back to a positive net-energy system.

Why this matters for 0mn1.one

[[mission-district-sf|The mission]] depends on this entry being honest:

• Abundance is an energy question. Without naming energy as the substrate, the abundance argument can drift into magical thinking. With it named, the question becomes a real engineering problem with a real answer: [[regenerative-agriculture|regenerative agriculture]], current-solar deployment, end-use efficiency, demand reduction in wealthy populations.
• Hempcrete, [[mycorrhizal-fungi|mycorrhizae]], regenerative practices all show their actual structural advantage when measured in energy terms. A hempcrete wall is energy-positive across its lifecycle. A mycorrhizal-supported plant requires less external nitrogen fertilizer (saving substantial buried-photosynthesis energy). A polyculture captures more incoming sunlight than a monoculture. The wiki’s regenerative claims are not aesthetic preferences; they are energy-accounting claims that have to be defended in energy-accounting terms.
• Civilizational timescales mean energy timescales. [[0mn1one|The platform]]‘s commitment to think in centuries means thinking about energy systems whose dynamics play out over centuries. Buried photosynthesis (fossil fuels) is a one-time inheritance; current photosynthesis (regenerative agriculture, solar deployment) is an ongoing dividend. The platform’s mission is structurally aligned with the dividend, against the inheritance.

Lenses still to grow

• Specific photosynthetic biochemistry — the light-dependent and light-independent reactions in detail; the C3/C4/CAM divergence; photorespiration as the costly inefficiency
• Specific energy budgets for representative farms — Polyface, Singing Frogs, [[apricot|Apricot]] Lane in measured energy terms
• Solar energy deployment economics — current installed capacity, cost trajectory, the integration with regenerative agriculture (agrivoltaics)
• Wind, hydro, geothermal in detail — the other current-solar energy sources
• The biomass debate — when and where biomass-for-energy is genuinely sustainable vs. when it competes with food production
• Embodied energy in materials and goods — the full-lifecycle accounting that distinguishes hempcrete, lime plaster, rammed earth, conventional concrete
• Charles Hall’s Energy Return on Investment corpus — the academic literature on EROI; primary-text ingest worthy
• Thermodynamics in living systems — Schrödinger’s What Is Life?; the “life as negative entropy” framing
• Vaclav Smil’s energy-history work — the most rigorous historical energy accounting; Energy and Civilization (2017) as primary text
• Modern decarbonization scenarios — IEA pathways, IPCC AR6 mitigation chapter, Drawdown solutions ranking — what the realistic energy transition looks like

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Enables: [[sun]] · [[soil]] · [[gut-microbiome]] · [[cognitive-symbiosis]]
• Opposes: [[industrial-agriculture]]

Sources

1. Atkins, P., & de Paula, J. Atkins’ Physical Chemistry. Oxford University Press, multiple editions. The standard university-level treatment of thermodynamics; the first and second laws are foundational chapters.

2. Wikipedia: Photosynthesis. Standard treatment of the reaction, its history, the modern biochemistry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis

3. Lindeman, R. L. “The trophic-dynamic aspect of ecology.” Ecology, 23(4), 399–417, 1942. The foundational paper on trophic energy flow; the 10% efficiency rule descends from this work.

4. Smil, V. Energy and Civilization: A History. MIT Press, 2017. The most comprehensive single-volume treatment of human civilizational energy budgets. Should be ingested in primary form.

5. Hall, C. A. S., et al. “EROI of different fuels and the implications for society.” Energy Policy, 64, 141–152, 2014. The standard reference for energy-return-on-investment numbers; primary source for many of the figures in this entry.

This entry currently rests on widely-known thermodynamics and on widely-cited civilizational energy data. The specific numbers (EROI figures, civilizational energy budgets, photosynthesis efficiency) should be verified against current sources before being cited in any consequential analysis. The [[Vault Source Roadmap|vault source roadmap]] should be updated to flag Smil and Hall as Tier 2 priorities.

Page filed 2026-05-03. The physical substrate under every other claim the wiki makes about regenerative systems and worldwide abundance.