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What if we could REALLY convince the public that climate change is a threat?

February 6, 2018

What if we could REALLY convince the public that climate change is a threat? Maybe one day some really gigantic-awful-horrible-monstrous-humungous climate related disaster will hit us. And that, at that moment, people will stop playing the boiling frog and will be forced to admit that climate change is real and we have to do […]

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How Big a Disaster Can Climate Change Be?

February 3, 2018

How Big a Disaster Can Climate Change Be? Above, you can see an image from the paper by Marsicek et al., just appeared on Nature. It shows a reconstruction from pollen records of the temperatures of the past 10,000 year or so, the “Holocene,” for North America and Europe. Note the black squares, showing […]

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Donald Trump: Wise Emperor or Condemned to Damnatio Memoriae?

January 28, 2018

Donald Trump: Wise Emperor or Condemned to Damnatio Memoriae? About one year ago, shortly before the US elections, I published a post on Cassandra’s Legacy where I wondered what Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton would look like if they were Roman Emperors. I reasoned that the Roman Empire of the 1st and 2nd Century AD […]

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Delusions of Grandeur in Building a Low-Carbon Future

January 27, 2018

Delusions of Grandeur in Building a Low-Carbon Future Some excerpts from Carey King’s excellent paper titled “Delusion of Grandeur in building a low-carbon future” (2016). By all means worth reading: it identifies the delusionary approach of some policy proposals. Image Credit: K. Cantner, AGI. …. the outcomes of economic models used to inform policymakers and […]

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How long will the rich be willing to share the roads with the poor?

January 24, 2018

How long will the rich be willing to share the roads with the poor? In Ray Bradbury novel “Fahrenheit 451” we are told of a world with no private cars (above, a still from the 1966 movie by François Truffaut). Bradbury had correctly understood that dictatorships not only tend to burn books but also don’t like […]

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Trump and Berlusconi: harbinger of the coming Seneca Cliff

January 20, 2018

Trump and Berlusconi: harbinger of the coming Seneca Cliff Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi have many similarities as country leaders. I argue here that they are the symptom of a giant political transition which is reversing the trends that started more than two centuries ago with the French revolution. Human rights have a cost and […]

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How to convince the public of the danger of anthropogenic global warming

January 19, 2018

How to convince the public of the danger of anthropogenic global warming Last year, the vagaries of life led me to chair a commission charged with examining the candidates for the admission to the Italian Chemists Association. It was a rather formal exam that was supposed to provide the successful applicants with the legal status […]

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The Seneca Effect: a Book Review by Jantje Hannover

January 12, 2018

The Seneca Effect: a Book Review by Jantje Hannover This is a review of the German edition of “The Seneca Effect” written by Jantie Hannover for the site of the radio station “Deutschelandfunk.” Very well done by someone who really read the book. Here I report a translation made mainly using “Google Translate,” and also […]

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The Romans and Us. Why State Violence is on the Rise

January 9, 2018

The Romans and Us. Why State Violence is on the Rise The Spanish police injured hundreds of people, including women and the elderly, during the referendum for the independence of Catalunya, in 2017 (image source). It was not the worst that states can do – and have have been doing – to their citizens, but […]

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The Impending Curtailment of Conventional Oil and the Total Resource Curtailment

January 5, 2018

The Impending Curtailment of Conventional Oil and the Total Resource Curtailment In a previous post titled “The Soft Belly of the Oil Industry“, I mentioning the impending unlocking of numerous negative feedbacks affecting the oil industry. I argued that the gradual increase of production costs, the need of reducing emissions, the weakened demand created by […]

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Are We Decoupling? (Not really, but happy 2018 anyway!)

January 2, 2018

Are We Decoupling? (Not really, but happy 2018 anyway!) “Decoupling”: are we really so smart that we can do more with less? Apparently not: we can paint things in green, but it is not the same thing. But so is life and happy 2018 to everybody! Decoupling looks like an obvious idea, isn’t it? […]

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Book Review: Food Scarcity. Unavoidable by 2100?

December 27, 2017

Book Review: Food Scarcity. Unavoidable by 2100? This is an excerpt from the review by Ugo Bardi published on the “Journal of Population and Sustainability“ Scientific studies that examine the food supply and its correlation to human population have a long tradition that goes back to Thomas Malthus and his “An Essay on the Future […]

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The Golden Rule of Technological Progress: Innovation Doesn’t Solve Problems, It Creates Them

December 21, 2017

The Golden Rule of Technological Progress: Innovation Doesn’t Solve Problems, It Creates Them Image from RealPharmacy See that thing up there? It is an autonomous security robot, something that’s becoming fashionable nowadays. Obviously, for every problem, there has to be a technological solution. So, what could go wrong with the idea that the problem of […]

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Mineral depletion need not be always a problem: the case of aluminum

December 17, 2017

Mineral depletion need not be always a problem: the case of aluminum In my book “Extracted” (2014) I make the case that mineral depletion is one of the main problems the industrial system faces today. Slowly degrading ore grades make the production of mineral commodities more expensive and this worsens the performance of the whole […]

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The Energy Transition: Too Little, Too Late

December 10, 2017

The Energy Transition: Too Little, Too Late The idea of the energy transition (“energiewende” in German) originated in the 1980s and gained legislative support in Germany in 2010. The idea is good and also technically feasible. But it requires sacrifices and, at present, sacrifices are politically unthinkable since most people don’t realize how critical the […]

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