And it's a very powerful, romantic story--lone wolf tracking a powerful idea, standing fast against conformity, smug self-satisfaction, and sheer hermetic wrong-headedness.  It's been an exemplar for me.

But I do think that the thermodynamic point of view has something to offer.  Not that I would replace a "labor theory of value" or a "socially constructed" (i.e. neoclassical economic, utility-based) "theory of value" with a "thermodynamic theory of value."  Low entropy doesn't capture all of what we (humans) mean by "value."  But that persepctive has a lot to show us; and one implication seems to be, that value has an irreducibly objective component.  There's simply no way that the valuation of cast metal as being more valuable than the ore from which it was made is a subjective valuation; the former has lower entropy than the latter, and low entropy is always and everywhere prized above high entropy.

Industrial society is not sustainable. Unsustainable systems change--or disappear.

So low entropy (however defined and measured) is relatively more valuable than high entropy.

I am not familiar with this approach, but it does have appeal. Nevertheless it is an approach which requires a "Value judgment" - which may be subjective or objective.

You cannot extract all the energy out of a physical system. All you can do is extract what is called the "free energy" but which might be better called "usable energy". And the usable energy of a system is its energy content minus the temperature times its entropy content.

So low-entroy matter can be turned into high-entropy matter at a net energy gain. That is, in fact, the only way to get any energy.

Low-entropy energy from the Sun is radiated away into space as high-entropy heat. This would happen even if the Earth was a lifeless rock. Life (and the economy) feeds of this entropy flow by taking as much of the "free energy" as possible and turning it into structure rather than let it be lost as heat.

Whether things should have a value proportional to their "free energy" content is a different story, and they probably shouldn't.

It'd be nice if the battle were only against the right wingers, not half of the left on top of that — François in Paris