The paper reaffirms the author's view that entropy is not relevant to
the economics of natural resource scarcity. Once system boundaries are
carefully defined, entropic considerations are either already incorpo
rated into relative price information or represent such a long-run con
straint as to be irrelevant to foreseeable human welfare. While matter
and energy both undergo entropic dissipation, it is argued there is a
n asymmetry in that energy can be imported to recycle matter, but the
converse, importing matter to recycle energy, is pure science fiction.
Therefore, an open system, such as the earth, can maintain any level
of organization. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.