Home » Posts tagged 'ugo bardi' (Page 5)

Tag Archives: ugo bardi

Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish, and you’ll find that he already knew that better than you

May 20, 2021

Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish, and you’ll find that he already knew that better than you

The UN program “The Ocean Decade” is starting this year. It is supposed to be ten years of research, assessment, and development of what the world’s oceans can provide to humankind and how that can be managed in a sustainable manner within the concept called “The Blue Economy”. It is a good idea, in general, but from what I saw up to now, many of the participants in the program are still anchored to the view that the Oceans contain large, untapped resources that can be exploited within the model of “sustainable development,” normally understood in terms of economic growth.

That may be a remarkable misunderstanding. As we explain in our recent
book “The Empty Sea,” the world’s oceans do contain enormous resources, but it is also true that — like all biological resources — overexploitation is a misunderstood risk that always takes people by surprise.

It is a mistake done over and over: when the yield of a fishery goes down, governmental agencies think it is a good idea to provide fishermen with more powerful boats and other technological tricks. It works, just until it doesn’t. Then, it makes things worse. Overexploited fish stocks collapse, leaving fishermen with plenty of useless hardware and the sea reduced to a desert.

Below, Paul Jorion tells a story that provides much food for thought in this field: the pretense of Western “experts” to know more than the local African fishermen and to help them by means of more powerful engines and better fishnets. And, as usual, the result was plenty of wasted money, possibly worse than that. The apparent inability of the Fishermen of Benin to produce as much fish as produced in nearby regions was not because they were bad fishermen. It was because of the lack of fish off the coast of Benin.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Concise History of the Concept of “Hydrogen Economy”

May 15, 2021

A Concise History of the Concept of “Hydrogen Economy”

The concept of “hydrogen economy” has a distinct “1960s” feeling. It is the idea of maintaining the lifestyle of the post-war period, with suburban homes, green lawns around them, two cars in every garage, and all that. The only difference would be that this world would be powered with clean hydrogen. It is a dream that started with the dream of cheap and abundant energy that nuclear plants were believed to be able to produce. The idea changed shape many times, but it always remained a dream, and probably will continue to be so in the future.

Before discussing the history of the concept of “hydrogen economy” we should try to define it. As you should expect, there are several variations on the theme but, basically, it is not about a single technology but a combination of three: 1) energy storage, 2) energy vectoring, and 3) fuel for vehicles.

This “hydrogen triad” misses the fundamental point of how hydrogen should be created. Often, that’s supposed to be done using electrolysis powered by renewable energy but, alternatively, from natural gas, a process that would be made “green” by carbon sequestration. There are other variations on the theme, all have in common being multi-step processes with considerable efficiency losses. And all have in common the fact of never having been proven to be economically feasible on a large scale.

Indeed, the immediate problem with replacing fossil fuels is not vectoring or storage, surely not powering individual cars. It is the enormous investments needed to build up the primary production infrastructure that would be needed in terms of solar or wind plants (or nuclear), which don’t seem to be materializing fast enough to generate a smooth transition…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cataclysms and the Megamachine: Is History a Cycle or a Progression?

May 4, 2021

Cataclysms and the Megamachine: Is History a Cycle or a Progression?

This image by the Tuscan painter Piero della Francesca exudes such power that it may truly blow your mind. Apart from the mastery of the composition, the perfection of the details, the fascination of the human figures, a canvas in the hands of a grand master is not just an image: it is a message. In this case, all the figures are static, there is no one moving. Yet, the painting carries the message of a tremendous movement forward in time. It shows a great change occurring: something enormous, deep, incredible: the triumph of life over death. And those who sleep through it are missing the change without even suspecting that it is happening. Just like us, sleepwalkers in a changing world, where gigantic forces are awakening right now.

“Cataclysms” (*) is a recent book by Laurent Testot (Univ. Chicago Press, 2020) that goes well together with “The End of the Megamachine” (Zero Books, 2020) by Fabian Scheidler of which I wrote in a previous post.Both books see human history using the approach that I call “metabolic.” It means to take the long view and see humankind in terms of a living entity. Call it a “machine” (as Scheidler does), call it “Monkey” (as Testot does), call it a “complex system” (as it is fashionable, nowadays), or maybe a holobiont (as I tend to do). It is the same: humankind is a creature that moves, grows, stumbles onward, destroys things, builds new things, keeps growing, and, eventually, collapses.

Bot “Cataclysms” and the “Megamachine” catch this multiform aspect of the great beast and both emphasize its destructive aspects. Both understand that the thing is moving. More than that, its trajectory is not uniform, it goes in bumps. It is a continuous sequence of growth and collapse, the latter usually faster than the former (what I call “The Seneca Effect“).…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Future of the Oceans: The two Souls of the Club of Rome

May 1, 2021

The Future of the Oceans: The two Souls of the Club of Rome

I was very happy when I finally managed to find a copy of the old report to the Club of Rome, “The Future of the Oceans” by Elizabeth Mann Borgese. A book published in 1986, one of a long series of reports that the Club commissioned to various scientists and researchers. And the only one, so far, that dealt with marine resources. Not so easy to find: I finally managed to dig out a used copy from an obscure bookstore in Michigan. But, eventually, it arrived here.

Of course, my interest in that old book was generated by having written a report on marine resources myself, “The Empty Sea,“ together with my coworker Ilaria Perissi (you see her with our book in the photo.) So, how do these two books compare, at 35 years of distance from each other?I must say that I was surprised. Our book can be defined as a little catastrophistic: just the title should tell you what I mean. The one by Elizabeth Mann Borgese, instead, is completely different in tone, approach, and contents: you could define it as cornucopian. The first part of the book is dedicated to describing the abundance of the resources that the oceans contain, the second and third part are dedicated to how the international community was going to develop a “common heritage economics,” and about treaties, regulations, and laws needed to manage the exploitation of these riches for the good of all humankind.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of who is right and who is wrong, you may be just as surprised as I was to discover that the Club of Rome could sponsor two books that took such a different approach on the same subject…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Saudi Arabia Goes the way of the Garamantes. Google Earth Confirms the Collapse of the Water Supply

April 18, 2021

Saudi Arabia Goes the way of the Garamantes. Google Earth Confirms the Collapse of the Water Supply

In 2008, I noted the decline in Saudi Arabian water production and I published an article in “The Oil Drum” titled “Peak Water in Saudi Arabia.” Using a simple version of the Hubbert model of resource depletion, I noted how the supply of “fossil water” had peaked in 1990 and had been declining ever since. This is the typical behavior of “fossil” resources: they tend to peak and then decline. It had already happened to the ancient Garamantes, inhabitants of central Sahara, who had developed sophisticated technologies of water extraction during the 1st millennium BC. That had allowed them to prosper for about one thousand years, but then depletion had its revenge and they vanished among the sand dunes. Something similar (but probably much faster) is going to happen in the Arabian peninsula.

The old Hubbert model was developed to describe the cycle of extraction of crude oil. It may be oversimplified if you want to use it for detailed predictions. But, as a quick tool for understanding the situation of the production of a non renewable resource, it tells you a lot of what you need to know. That first stab of mine on water production in Saudi Arabia turned out to be correct.

It is impressive how, today, you can use Google Earth to look at the situation “from above.” You can see the collapse of the agricultural fields as depletion progresses. Here are the images of an irrigated area for a region East of Al Jubail, in Saudi Arabia, 26°48’29.60″N and 49° 8’47.58″E.

Let’s start with an image of the desert in 1984. There is absolutely nothing there:

One year later, 1985. Someone has started extracting water and irrigating the land. There are two active fields there.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Phrasing the Question Right is the First Step to Find an Answer. How to Prevent Nuclear War

March 27, 2021

Phrasing the Question Right is the First Step to Find an Answer. How to Prevent Nuclear War

Professor Bernard Lown died this February at 99. A great man by all means: Physician, cardiologist, professor at Harvard University, and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He was the inventor of the defribrillator, the proposer of many successful ways to help people suffering from heart failure. He was also the recipient of the Nobel prize for peace for his activity against nuclear war.

It was in the 1980s when I attended a seminar in Berkeley given by a member of the group called “International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.” Some decades later, I am not sure the talk was given by the founder of the group, Dr. Bernard Lown, but it may have been him. In any case, I was impressed by the clarity of the talk. The speaker said it very simply: “it is not a question of being left or right: nuclear war is the greatest medical emergency I can imagine.”

It is the way you frame a problem that gives you the tools to solve it! Just like “The Seneca Effect” gives a name to a typical behavior of complex systems, that of collapsing, framing the nuclear confrontation as a medical emergency and not as a political struggle brought it to the realm of concrete problems that people could understand. We might also frame nuclear war as an especially nasty kind of Seneca Cliff affecting humankind and the whole planet.

Probably because the problem was framed right, the Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War had a remarkable success…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Tunnel Vision Problem. How Mineral Depletion Became Completely Incomprehensible to the Public and Decision Makers Alike

March 18, 2021

The Tunnel Vision Problem. How Mineral Depletion Became Completely Incomprehensible to the Public and Decision Makers Alike

Image source

A few days ago, I sent a comment to a blog where the author had cited the “abiotic oil” hypothesis by Thomas Gold. He had read Gold’s book “The Deep, Hot Biosphere” and, not being an expert in the matter, had believed that Gold’s ideas were correct and that the author had been unjustly ignored by the scientific community and by the oil industry.

In my comment, I briefly discussed the matter and cited an article that I had written together with other authors where we discussed Gold’s ideas, showing that they are incompatible with what we know about the geosphere and the processes of formation of fossil hydrocarbons.

Some of the commenters seemed to be completely clueless about the matter, and that was already worrisome. But the surprising thing was that one of the answers I received was that I should avoid discussing political issues such as “peak oil” in a scientific discussion.

So, after 20 years of scientific studies on the concept of oil depletion — in itself a necessary consequence of the fact that oil resources are finite — the idea of “peak oil” has been transmogrified into a political slogan that has no place in a serious discussion.

And that’s not just the case of peak oil. Try to mention “mineral depletion” in any discussion about the current economic situation, and you’ll be treated like a slightly feebleminded person who is completely out of touch with reality. Our problems, right now, are completely different as everyone sane in his/her mind knows.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Death of Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the “Oil Sheik” who Understood Everything

March 3, 2021

The Death of Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the “Oil Sheik” who Understood Everything

Ahmed Zaki Yamani, oil minister of Saudi Arabia until 1986, died in London last week. In memory of the “oil sheik,” I reproduce here a comment that appeared on the ASPO-Italia blog in 2006. The interview of Yamani by Oriana Fallaci in 1976 is a good example of how the oil problem is misunderstood in the West and of the many lies told about it. Yamani, despite all the accusations and insults he received, was always a moderate who sought compromise. He managed to prevent his country, Saudi Arabia, from the disasters that befell all oil-producing countries in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, Yamani’s legacy has been somewhat lost over the years, but it is only now that Saudi Arabia is seeing bombs falling on its territory — a destiny that so far the country had avoided. Now, things are going to become very difficult as Saudi Arabia faces the unavoidable decline of its once abundant oil resources.

Yamani is remembered, among other things, for having said that “The Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.” And, with that, he demonstrated that he had perfectly understood the concept of “EROEI” and the consequences of gradual depletion.

http://aspoitalia.blogspot.com/2006/11/fallaci-intervista-yamani.html

(Fallaci’s interview is available in full at this link.)

Fallaci interviews Yamani: thirty years later
Di Ugo Bardi – September 2006 (slightly edited for publication on “The Seneca Effect“)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Seneca and the Virus: Why does the Pandemic Grow and Decline?

March 2, 2021

Seneca and the Virus: Why does the Pandemic Grow and Decline?

Seneca, the Roman philosopher, knew the term “virus,” that for him had the meaning of our term “poison.” But of course, he had no idea that a virus, intended in the modern sense, was a microscopic creature reproducing inside host cell. He also lived in a time, the 1st century AD, when major epidemics were virtually unknown. It was only more than one century after his death that a major pandemic, the Antonine Plague, would hit the Roman Empire.

But Seneca was a fine observer of nature and when he said that “ruin is rapid” he surely had in mind, among many other things, how fast a healthy person could be hit by a disease and die. Of course, Seneca had no mathematical tools that would allow him to propose a quantitative epidemiological theory, but his observation, that I have been calling the “Seneca Effect,” remains valid. Not only people can be quickly killed by diseases, but even epidemics often follow the Seneca Curve, growing, peaking, and declining.

Of course, the concepts of growth and collapse depend on the point of view. In many cases one man’s fortune is someone else’s ruin. What we see as a good thing, the end of an epidemic, is a collapse seen from the side of the virus (or bacteria, or whatever). But, then, why do epidemics flare up and then subside? It is a fascinating story that has to do with how complex systems behave. To tell it, we have to start from the beginning.

One thing that you may have noted about the current Covid-19 pandemic is the remarkable ignorance not just of the general public about epidemiology, but also of many of the highly touted experts. Just note how many people said that the epidemic grows “exponentially.”…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The End of the Megamachine: A Seneca Cliff, by any Other Name, Would Still be so Steep.

February 18, 2021

The End of the Megamachine: A Seneca Cliff, by any Other Name, Would Still be so Steep.

Our civilization seems to be acutely aware of an impending decline that nowadays is rapidly taking the shape of a collapse. It is still officially denied, but the idea is there and it appears in those corners of the memesphere where it makes an long term imprint even though it doesn’t acquire the flashy and vacuous impression of the mainstream media.

An recent entry in this section of the memesphere is “The End of the Megamachine.” A book written originally in German by Fabian Scheidler, now translated into English. Not a small feat: Scheidler attempts to retrace the whole history of our civilization under the umbrella concept of the “megamachine.” A giant creature that’s in several ways equivalent to what another denizen of the collapse sphere, Nate Hagens, calls the “Superorganism.” Perhaps these are all new generation of a species which had as ancestor the “Leviathan” imagined by Thomas Hobbes and explicitly mentioned several times in Scheidler’s book.

We may call these creatures “technological holobionts.” They are complex systems formed of colonies of subsystems, holobionts in their turn, too. They are evolutionary creatures that grow by optimizing their capability of consuming food and transforming it into waste. It takes time for these entities to stabilize and, at the beginning of their evolutionary history, they may oscillate wildly, grow rapidly, and collapse rapidly. As Lucius Annaeus Seneca said long ago, “the road to ruin is rapid” and it is a good description of the fate of young holobionts.

The book can be seen as a description of the life cycle of one of these giant creatures, leviathan, superorganism, or megamachine — as you like to call it…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why the Hummingbird is the Most Dangerous Animal in the World

February 12, 2021

Why the Hummingbird is the Most Dangerous Animal in the World

This is a revised translation of a post that I published in Italian a couple of years ago. The concept that the Hummingbird is NOT a good example of how to deal with the problems we have is also explained in some detail in my book “Before the Collapse” (2019),

If you can understand French, do watch this clip that tells not only the story of the virtuous hummingbird, but how it ends. The conclusion is “if you think with a hummingbird brain, you end up screwed”. (h/t Igor Giussani). (In French, hummingbird is “colibri”)

Have you ever heard the story of the hummingbird and the fire? It goes like this: there is a gigantic fire raging in the forest. All the animals run for their lives, except for a hummingbird that heads towards the flames with some water in its beak. The lion sees the hummingbird and asks, “Little bird, what do you think you are doing with that drop of water?” And the hummingbird replies, “I am doing my part”.

If you studied philosophy in high school, you may think that the hummingbird is a follower of Immanuel Kant and of his categorical imperative principle. Or, maybe, the hummingbird is a stoic philosopher who thinks that his own personal virtue is more important than anything else.

Apart from philosophy, the moral of the story is often interpreted in an ecological key. That is, everyone should engage individually in good practices for the sake of the environment. Things like turning off the light before leaving the house, turning off the tap while brushing one’s teeth, take short showers to save water, ride a bicycle instead of a car, separate waste with attention, and the like…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Censorship: How the West is becoming more and more like the old Soviet Union

February 8, 2021

Censorship: How the West is becoming more and more like the old Soviet Union

A message I received from Facebook on Jan 29, 2021. Five of my posts were deemed “spam” and erased. Some were somewhat “political” although non-partisan, but two were purely technical. That these posts were erased is an indication that censorship is by now applied to all forms of dissent, not just political ones. It was not unexpected, but it was still somewhat shocking after decades of propaganda that had convinced most of us that the Western world was a place where you could enjoy “freedom of expression.” But we are quickly moving toward a Soviet-style management of public information, as Dmitry Orlov noted already in 2013. It had to happen and it did.

Last year, a Spanish climatologist, a friend of mine, had one of his posts censored by Facebook. Apparently, it was because it was deemed as too “catastrophistic” (or for whatever reason had caused the opaque fact-checkers of Facebook to erase it). He protested and he also tried to convince other climatologists to start a boycott of Facebook.

The answer was a little disappointing, to say the least. It may be best described as a resounding worldwide “meh.” Those climatologists who bothered to reply to him expressed the concept that, yes, censorship is bad, but, you know, you can’t allow deniers to diffuse their fake science around.

It was on this occasion that I discovered that most people like censorship. It is just that it should be applied to those they disagree with. In that case, they actually love it and protest because Facebook doesn’t censor enough (you can read that, for instance, here).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Ghost Shirt Rituals: Preparing for the End of the World

January 26, 2021

The Ghost Shirt Rituals: Preparing for the End of the World

Ishi, (c. 1861 – 1916), the last member of the Native American Yahi people, photographed as he was in 1911 when he came out of the woods in California. How did the Yahi react when they saw that the Whites were going to exterminate them? Perhaps not differently from the way we are reacting to the prospect of the collapse of our civilization: going crazy. The overreaction to the current Covid pandemic is just the first stage of the wave of madness that’s engulfing humankind.

Imagine you are a Native American living before the arrival of the Whites. Maybe you are a Lakota, hunter of the central plains. Or maybe a Yahi, living in the thick forests of California. Or a member of any of the many Native American nations that existed back then.

As a Native American, you have your family, your friends, your day-to-day routine of things and tasks. And you are busy with that, except for one thing: you know that there is a big problem. A VERY big problem. There is an entire nation, out there, bent on exterminating you and your people: the Whites.

At first, you try to ignore the problem: those Whites are far away. Or maybe you’ll deny that they are coming, or that they are so many as they are said to be. But, at some moment, the truth cannot be anymore ignored or denied. The Whites are there. They are coming for you, for your family, your children, your friends, your people. And you know that there is really no way to stop them. So, what do you do?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ugo Bardi’s The Universal Mining Machine

January 21, 2021

Ugo Bardi’s The Universal Mining Machine

Preface. Below I’ve excerpted some of Ugo Bardi’s “The Universal Mining Machine” (24 January 2008 europe.theoildrum), but I’ve left a great deal out of this excellent article, I encourage you to read all of it if you have time. The biggest problem the world faces is “Peak Diesel”, which is what my book “When Trucks stop running” is about. Bardi points out “that 34% of the energy involved in the US mining industry is in the form of diesel fuel.” Nor are there more minerals to be found: “There is little hope of finding high grade sources of minerals other than those we know already. The planet’s crust has been thoroughly explored and digging deeper is not likely to help, since ores form mainly because of geochemical (especially hydrothermal) processes that operate near the surface.”

Earth’s mineral resources

The Earth’s crust is said to contain 88 elements in concentrations that spread over at least seven orders of magnitude. Some elements are defined as “common,” with concentrations over 0.1% in weight. Of these, five are technologically important in metallic form: iron, aluminum, magnesium, silicon, and titanium. All the other metals exist in lower concentrations, sometimes much lower. Most metals of technological importance are defined as “rare” and exist mostly as low concentration substituents in ordinary rock, that is, dispersed at the atomic level in silicates and other oxides. The average crustal abundance of rare elements, such as copper, zinc, lead and others, is below 0.01% (100 ppm). Some, such as gold, platinum and rhodium, are very rare and exist in the crust as a few parts per billion or even less. However, most rare elements also form specific chemical compounds that can be found at relatively high concentrations in regions called “deposits”. Those deposits from which we actually extract minerals are called “ores”...

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: ugo bardi

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts