Greta Thunberg heavily insulted by an Italian newspaper. She's smashing all the mediatic barriers!

The front page of the Italian newspaper "Libero" of April 18. The main title says "La Rompiballe va dal Papa," translatable as "The pain in the ass Girl goes to see the Pope." The red text "vieni avanti Gretina" elegantly plays on the similarity in Italian of the diminutive "Gretina" (little Greta) and "cretina" (cretin).

"Libero" is an Italian newspaper, in terms of level, it is probably below such egregious insults to human intelligence as the British "The Sun" and the "Daily Mail." Similar, but perhaps even worse, than Fox News in the US. So, being insulted by "Libero" is a mark of honor, to say the least.

But, as I argued in a previous post, these and other insults show that Greta Thunberg is smashing through the media: she is a memetic equivalent of the Chicxulub meteorite and she has a chance to destroy the intellectual dinosaurs that populate the earth nowadays.

Of course, the battle is still to be fought, but it is impressive how fast Greta is growing in the memesphere: note how she is pushing down to irrelevance such evil characters as John Bolton and Mike Pompeo.

 
Will Greta's action last? Difficult to say: so far she has been able to arouse the worst rabble existing in the mediasphere and they are spitting their lungs out in their screams against her. But they can do much worse than screaming and they will do their best to destroy her and what she represents. It will be a difficult battle for them, though. Maybe Greta is burning her candle on both ends, sure, but it is such a lovely light!



If you can read Italian, at this link you can find a commented list of the insults that Greta received in Italy.

Italy Becoming Poor -- Becoming Poor in Italy. The Effects of the Twilight of the Age of Oil

The living room of the house that my parents built in 1965. An American style suburban home, a true mansion in the hills. I lived there for more than 50 years but now I have to give up: I can't afford it anymore. 

Let me start with a disclaimer: I am not poor. As a middle class, state employee in Italy, I am probably richer than some 90% of the people living on this planet. But wealth and poverty are mainly relative perceptions and the feeling I have is that I am becoming poorer every year, just like the majority of Italians, nowadays.

I know that the various economic indexes say that we are not becoming poorer and that, worldwide, the GDP keeps growing, even in Italy it sort of restarted growing after a period of decline. But something must be wrong with those indexes because we are becoming poorer. It is unmistakable, GDP or not. To explain that, let me tell you the story of the house that my father and my mother built in the 1960s and how I am now forced to leave it because I can't just afford it anymore.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Italy was going through what was called the "Economic Miracle." After the disaster of the war, the age of cheap oil had created a booming economy everywhere in the world. In Italy, people enjoyed a wealth that never ever had been seen or even imagined before. Private cars, health care for everybody, vacations at the seaside, the real possibility for most Italians to own a house, and more.

My father and my mother were both high school teachers. They could supplement their salary with their work as architects and by giving private lessons to high school students, but surely they were not rich. They were typical middle-class people. Nevertheless, in the 1960s, they could afford the home of their dreams. Large, a true mansion, it was more than 300 square meters with an ample living room, terraces, a patio, and a big garden. It also had many fancy details: windows in high-quality wood, door frames in hand-wrought iron, a home-intercom system (very rare at that time), and more. It was in a green area, on the hills near Florence: an American-style suburban home.

My parents lived in that house for some 50 years and they both got old and died in there. Then, I inherited it in 2014. As you can imagine, a house that had been inhabited for some years by old people with health problems was not in the best conditions and I had some grand ideas about how to restore and improve it. With my wife, we started doing just that: rebuilding the patio, refurbishing the greenhouse, restoring the living room, repairing the roof, and more. But, after a couple of years, we looked into each other's eyes and we said, "this will never work."

We had spent enough money to make a significant dent in our finances but the effect was barely visible: the house was just too big. To that, you must add the cost of heating and air conditioning of such a large space: in the 1960s, there was no need for air conditioning in Florence, now it is vital to have it. Also, the cost of transportation is a killer. In an American style suburb, you have to rely on private cars and, in the 1960s, it seemed normal to do that also in Italy. But not anymore: cars have become awfully expensive, traffic jams are everywhere, a disaster. Ah.... and I forgot about taxes: that too is rapidly becoming an impossible burden.

So we decided to sell the house. We discovered that the value of these suburban mansions had plummeted considerably during the past years, but it was still possible to find buyers and we are just now packing up. We expect to leave the old house in the coming weeks, moving to a much smaller apartment downtown where, among other things, we should be able to abandon the obsolete concept of owning a car. It is not a mansion, but it is a nice apartment, not so small and it even has a garden. As I said, wealth and misery are mostly relative terms: surely we are experiencing a certain degree of "de-growth," but it is good to be able to get rid of a lot of the useless stuff that accumulates in decades of living in the same house. It is a little catharsis, it feels good for the spirit. (and it is also a lot of work with cardboard boxes).

What's most impressive is how things changed over 50 years. Theoretically, as a university teacher, my salary is higher than that of my parents, who were both high school teachers. My wife, too, has a pretty decent salary. But there is no way that we could even have dreamed to build or buy the kind of house that I inherited from my parents. Something has changed and the change is deep in the very fabric of the Italian society. And the change has a name: it is the twilight of the age of oil. Wealth and energy are two faces of the same medal: with less net energy available, what Italians could afford 50 years ago, they can't afford anymore.

But saying that depletion is at the basis of our troubles is politically incorrect and unspeakable in the public debate. So, most Italians don't understand the reasons for what's going on. They only perceive that their life is becoming harder and harder, despite what they are being told on TV. Their reaction is to lash out at whoever or whatever they think is the cause of their economic decline: Europe, Angela Merkel, politicians, immigrants, gypsies, foreigners in general. Italy is rapidly becoming a nasty place to live in: racism, hate, fascism, poverty, the rich getting richer and the poor poorer. It is normal. It has already happened, things will be better one day, shall pass, one day, but I am afraid it will not be soon.

It is also impressive to think that I am moving back to the southern area of Florence, the area called "Oltrarno," where the Bardi family has its roots since Medieval times. The Bardis living there were not rich, they were mostly low-class workers and some of them were wretchedly poor, I told this story in a post of two years ago. It was only with the prosperity of the golden age of oil that some Bardis could feel rich enough to afford a mansion in the hills. Not anymore. I suppose that my descendants will live there, just as my ancestors did. It is the great cycle of life.

And here is me, engaged in packing up my collection of science fiction novels. More than one thousand books, most of them in Italian. They have no commercial value but I don't want to throw them away. For the time being, I'll store them in boxes, then -- who knows? -- one day the great cycle of life may have them resurface again.

Note added after publication: Some people wrote to me worried that we are going hungry or that we'll be living in a shack. No, no....  Not at all! As I said, we are moving to a nice apartment in the Southern area of Florence. Look, it even has a bomb shelter in the garden in the form of an ogival thing in heavy concrete. Someone built it during WW2 and, who knows? It may become useful again!

Those Weird Italians: do They Really Think Italy is a Sovereign State? A Comment on the Recent Failure of Forming a New Government

The political history of Europe during the past 5 centuries or so. Note how nation-states crystallized in the current form mostly during the 19th century. These entities turned out to be extremely resilient and they survived two major world wars and all sorts of disasters. Nation-states are much less important today in the age of the Globalized empire, but they are still alive and kicking. The recent events in Italy the attempt of creating a more independent national government clashed against the international political imperatives. It is all part of a general trend that may lead to the disgregation of the Eurozone and, perhaps, to a Seneca Collapse for the weaker European economies, including the Italian one.

A few things became clear in Italy during the past few days. One is that Italy is not a real "sovereign state," as it became evident when President Mattarella refused to accept a government which included people who had taken critical positions against the European Union and against the Euro. It was a necessary outcome of the situation: from 1943 Italy has been occupied by the troops of the victorious American Empire. Only a certain degree of fiction has been maintained to imply that Italy is able, in principle, to take independent decisions in matters dealing with the economy and foreign policy.

In practice, whenever Italian officers tried to take such independent decisions, they discovered that it was an unwise choice - even for their own physical survival. There have been several instructive cases in the past, starting with Enrico Mattei, president of the Italian National Oil Company (ENI). He pursued a politics of independence for the Italian energy system and he died in a mysterious (but not so much) airplane crash in 1962.

History, as usual, rhymes with itself and, recently, the winners of the latest Italian elections, the leaders of the M5s and the Northern League (now simply the League) parties, tried to form a government with a program of sweeping reforms which included an attempt to gain a larger degree of independence from the European Union in financial matters. The program didn't include anything equivalent to the British "Brexit" but it was, clearly, a step in that direction.

It didn't work, and it should have been obvious from the beginning that it couldn't. The rules of the imperial game are not based on democracy: defeated and occupied countries can't vote for their independence (it happened to Catalonia, too). Try a little exercise, imagine that, after the defeat of Queen Boudicca, the Celts of Britain had voted for a National government pursuing a policy of independence from Rome. You get the point, I think.

What's perhaps most surprising is how a lot of Italians reacted to the events. They took Mr. Mattarella's decision as an insult to the sovereignty of Italy. That is, they seem to believe that such a thing as an Italian sovereign state exists, despite the American troops occupying Italy with more than 10,000 men in at least a hundred military bases (all your bases are belong to US). And the military occupation is just a marginal element of a much more in-depth political and financial occupation.

Yet, in a certain sense, the Italians are right. In politics, often beliefs are stronger than reality - politics creates its own reality. And so, if Italians truly believe that Italy is an independent country, then at least it could become one. It is what happened in 1861, when Italy was created as an independent state for the first time in history.

Now, there are events that highlight long-term trends. The power scuffle about the new government in Italy is one of these events. It shows that the Global Empire is still strong, but also in evident decline because it could be challenged - although unsuccessfully - by the winning parties of the recent Italian elections. Empires are fragile things in the sense that they need a lot of energy to keep moving - and they tend to have a short lifetime in comparison to the more resilient entities we call "nations." Empires, in other words, are subjected to the kind of rapid collapse that I call the "Seneca Collapse"

The Global/American Empire is no exception. It is the product of the power of fossil fuels and it will persist only as long as fossil fuels are cheap and abundant. That can't and won't last forever, although at present it is impossible to say for how long. Rome was said to be eternal at the time of the Roman Empire, but it wasn't. The same is true for Washington D.C. (and for Brussels, which will probably fall earlier).

So, at some moment Italy may become again an independent state, as it was from 1861 to 1943. Most Italians, right now, seem to think that it would be a good idea. But will it be? Think about this: after the Roman Legions left Britain, were the Britons richer? Or happier to be ruled by tribal chieftains? Debatable, to say the least.

The people who are proposing that Italy should leave the Eurozone seem to think that all the problems for the Italian economy are financial and political. They don't understand the structural problems of an economy which is almost 100% dependent on the import of mineral commodities, and of fossil fuels in particular. Leaving the Eurozone or making cosmetic changes in the taxation system won't do anything to address this dependency. And, if it is true that nation-states are more resilient than empires, they too can suffer the Seneca Collapse if they lack the energy needed for their economy to function. So, the future is obscure, as always, but one thing remains clear: "Fortune is of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid" (Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 4 BC-65 AD)

The road to the Seneca Cliff is paved with evil intentions. A new cycle of destruction of the world's forests may be starting

The oldest stories of human lore have to do with cutting trees and with the disasters that followed as a consequence. Above, legendary Sumerian heroes Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the guardian of the trees, Huwawa (image source). Several thousand years afterward, we don't seem to have learned much about how to manage our natural resources.

I expected this to happen, perhaps not so soon and not in this form, but it had to come. With the era of cheap fossil fuels coming to a close, what's left as low-cost fuel is wood and that had to be the target of the next wave of exploitation.

Naively, I was thinking that the rush for wood would have taken the form of desperate people moving toward the mountains with axes and chainsaws, but no, in Italy it is coming in a much more destructive way. It is a government decree approved on Dec 1st, 2017 which allows local administrations to cut woods, even against the will of the owners of the land. It is the start of a new wave of deforestation in Italy, probably an example that the rest of the world may follow in the near future.

It is a long story that goes back to the roots of Italian history. Already in Roman times, deforestation was a major problem, believed to have generated the marshes still present in Italy in modern times. During the Middle Ages, woods returned. Sometimes, the regional governments took good care of the forests (as, for instance, in Tuscany) but a new cycle of deforestation came with the political unification of Italy, in 1861. At that time, the Piedmontese government treated the newly acquired lands as spoils of war, razing down ancient forests without any regrets. The story is reported in a novelized form by the British writer Ouida, in "A village commune." (1881).

Gradually, with fossil fuels becoming more and more important -  first coal, then oil and gas - trees ceased to be the crucial economic resource they had been before. In the 1920s the Italian government engaged in a serious reforesting policy whose effects are still visible nowadays. After the end of the war, in 1945, the Italian economic system prospered mainly on industry. For the local administrations, the main source of revenue was concrete and that led to the paving of large areas with buildings of all kinds, but the woods in their mountains were left more or less in peace. With agricultural land left abandoned, in many places woods advanced and covered new areas.

Then, there came the 21st century and with it the increasing costs of fossil fuels. Prices have been going up and down, generating occasional screams of "centuries of abundance." But, by now, nobody sane in their mind can miss the fact that the old times of cheap fuels will not come back. One consequence has been the diffusion of pellet-fueled stoves in Italy, often done in the name of "saving the environment." (figure on the right, source) Theoretically, wood pellets are a renewable fuel - but only theoretically. If they are consumed faster than trees can regrow, they are not. And the appetite of Italy for pellets is insatiable: Italians consume 40% of all the pellet burned in Europe while Italy produces only about 10% of the wood it burns.

With the housing market stagnating, someone was bound to realize that the only remaining source of profit from the land would come from turning forests into pellets. The consequence is the just approved evil piece of legislation. All in the name of the universally agreed concept that a tree is worth something only after it is felled, the new law gives to local administrations the power to cut everything, when they want, as they want. Let me leave the description of this disaster to my friend and colleague Jacopo Simonetta, writing in a recent post in "apocalottimismo".

[The law] says that if the landlords refuse to cut the woods they own, the local administrators can occupy - even without the landlord's agreement - the land and leave the "productive recovery" (that is the cutting of the trees) to companies or cooperatives of their choice (which means, "the friends of their friends"). And not just that. The companies which obtain the grant to cut the trees will provide economic compensation to the city administration in a form that the administration will define. For example, new streets, new parking lots, new street lighting, or anything the mayor will deem necessary for his or her electoral campaign. Or in the form of money, this time to the regional government, in order to "cash in" something - as people say.

It is easy to see here the hidden hand of the pellet industry, but there is - or at least there will be - much more. Anyone who has a minimum knowledge of how the administrations of small towns in Italy work can understand how this law is a formidable incentive for every administration to install a gang of local notables who will organize squads of henchmen financed with the cutting of other people's woods. And those who, like me, have 40 years of experience in these matters know that the line that separate a squad from a Fascist squad  (a "squadraccia") is thin and it tends to become thinner and thinner as the power of the state fades away. 

From my personal experience, I can completely confirm Simonetta's analysis. Even in the theoretically civilized Tuscany, the local administrations have little or no resources to enforce the law outside urbanized areas. What had saved the woods, so far, is that at least the national laws were rather strict in protecting trees and that provided at least a veneer of protection. Now, the central government has abandoned even the pretense of governing the territory, leaving it all in the hands of the local bosses. It is normal, the collapse of civilizations comes first and foremost with the collapse of the central authority.

You may wonder whether anyone in Italy is speaking against such a horrible law; shouldn't the government protect people's property, including woods? In practice, just a few of the usual suspects have been protesting: environmental associations, a few experts, university professors, and the like - all people without any real power in the Italian society. From everybody else, especially at the political level, the silence has been deafening.

It is understandable: fighting this law implies going against an unholy alliance of 1) local politicians looking for funds for their re-election, 2) people living in the countryside, desperate for a revenue of some kind, of any kind, 3) the pellet industry, seeing a good market developing, and 4) city dwellers who want to warm their homes. And if you are thinking of defending a forest you believe should not be destroyed, you don't need to live in places where mafia rules to understand that "they" know where your children go to school.

In the end, it is all the result of the harsh law of EROI the energy return on energy invested. Humans exploit first the resources which give them the best yield (high EROI) and, in the recent history, these resources have been fossil fuels. Then, they move to progressively lower EROI resources. Now, it is the turn of woods in Italy, but it is not limited to Italy. Most civilization of the past fell together with a wave of deforestation that destroyed their last resources. Ours is not different, why should it be?

But a battle is surely going to be lost only if one refuses to fight it. So, if you want to give your contribution to this probably unvinnable battle to help the Italian woods, you can sign this petition. And, who knows? It might do something.

As a final consideration, you surely noted that I mentioned the Fascist government as having protected the trees in Italy. Surely, it did that better than the democratic governments which preceded and followed it. You may also know about the case of Japan: during the Edo period, the Japanese government enacted draconian laws to protect the Japanese forests: the unauthorized cutting of a single tree could be punished with death. 

Does that mean that we need an authoritarian government to keep alive the world's forests (and with them, humankind)? Perhaps, but the problem is more complex than that. An authoritarian government is expensive - it needs a police, an army, a bureaucracy, a propaganda system, and more - all things which need resources to be maintained. In times of collapse, an authoritarian government cannot survive better than a democratic one. Right now, we are clearly moving towards more and more authoritarian forms of government, but that doesn't seem to be leading to a better management of the ecosystem. Rather, these governments seem to be more adept at sponsoring the plunder of whatever is left.

What is needed for keeping the ecosystem alive is a stable economic system, which is exactly what we don't have and we won't have in the foreseeable future. So, it looks like we have to go through collapse. Then we'll re-emerge, perhaps, wiser than before. In the meantime, we have to put up with the limits of human nature.

Italian Elections: The Great Five-Star Surprise

Nearly definitive results of the Italian national elections of March 4, 2018. the "five-star movement" (M5s) got the most votes, although the center-right wing coalition (CDX) has the largest number of seats in the Italian parliament. For the center-left (CSX), it was a total disaster. So, what made the M5s party so successful: my impression is that their mode of functioning could be described as  "government by Facebook, for Facebook, in the name of Facebook." Is it our political future?

In several senses, it is not difficult to understand the results of the recent Italian elections. Think of the center-right leader, Mr. Berlusconi, as an older Mr. Trump. At nearly 82, Mr. Berlusconi still tries to play the role of the alpha-male while his acolytes built up a program based on building a barrier against immigrants (not exactly a wall, because there is a sea in between Italy and Africa, but the concept is the same.). The center-right is also pursuing policies akin to "making Italy great again" (or perhaps grate again, if they were referring to Parmesan cheese). In short, the Italian right and the American right are very similar, including such details as allowing citizens to carry firearms.

The left - what remains of it - is represented by Mr. Matteo Renzi, the perfect equivalent of Ms. Clinton, in terms of being both hateful and out of touch with reality. Just like Ms. Clinton, Mr. Renzi and his followers managed to conduct an unbelievably obsolete and counterproductive campaign. The left carefully avoided any references to new ideas or - God forbid! - ideas that could be understood as being "leftist". During the campaign, they gave the impression of being completely dominated by the right, desperately trying to tell voters that they would do the same things that the right was proposing, just with a little extra human touch - maybe. One wonders whether Mr. Renzi was actually paid for the job of finishing off the remnants of the Italian left. It was a necessary outcome anyway, the only surprise was how well the Italian left played the role assigned by the Gods to those whom they want to destroy - that is, of becoming crazy. (at least, however, so far the Italian Dems didn't blame Putin for their defeat(*).)

But how about the "five-star" movement? Who are they? Why did they win? For sure, there is no equivalent of the M5s in the US or anywhere in the West - so far. Their strong point, it seems, was the obsolescence of the traditional political parties. Politicians are widely perceived as thieves and, perhaps worse than that, they are deeply embedded and compromised with the "system."

In the US, the "system" is mainly represented by the military-industrial complex, pushing for more and more money for more and more useless wars overseas. In Italy, there is less emphasis on the military system, but the government is surely embedded with this and other traditional power centers, including the oil and gas industry. Otherwise, how would you explain that the Renzi government engaged in the destruction of the Italian renewable energy industry, killing tens of thousands of jobs? Do this and more idiocies, and eventually, the people will remember that and punish you, if they can.

In the end, Italians seem to have reasoned that their political system is so deeply corrupt to be unrecoverable, at least in terms of the traditional political forces (e.g. the left). So, they rewarded a force claiming to be composed of honest citizens - in a way amateurs rather than professional politicians. And the M5s movement won despite the concerted effort of both the Left and the Right to defame them.

My impression, however, is that there is more than that. The M5s movement may be the harbinger of things to come.Maybe the M5s success will turn out to be short-lived. But the great intuition of the founders of the M5s movement (Beppe Grillo and Roberto Casaleggio) that social media are destined to become more and more important. And that not just as tools for politics. Social media are becoming politics.

If you look at how the M5s movement works, you see that it is unlike anything you would call a "political party." I could say it looks like more like a version of Facebook. No leaders, no plans, no ideology, just a general idea that a networked group of people debate to find the best solutions for the problems we face. It seems to work - it is a new way to manage the system.

Government by Facebook, in the name of Facebook, for Facebook? Maybe.



*Note added on March 9: As we might have expected, Putin has been accused to have meddled in the Italian elections. The task fell on Samantha Power, former UN envoy during the Obama administration, presently in the midst of a scandal involving abusing her of power when she was at the UN. I don'think anyone took that seriously on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Power's tweet was ignored by the American press and ridiculed in the Italian press in the rare cases when it was considered worth of attention.

The great fossil cycle and the story of a family.

My great-great grandfather, Ferdinando Bardi. The story of the branch of the Bardi family to which I belong is inextricably linked to the great world cycle of the fossil fuels. (this painting was made by Ferdinando's son, Antonio)

There was a time, long ago, when the Bardis of Florence were rich and powerful, but that branch of the family disappeared with the end of the Renaissance. The most remote ancestors of mine that I can track were living during the early 19th century and they were all poor, probably very poor. But their life, just as the life of everyone in Italy and in the rest of the world, was to change with the great fossil revolution that had started in England in the 18th century. The consequences were to spill over to Italy in the centuries that followed.

My great-great grandfather Ferdinando (born in 1822) lived in an age when coal was just starting to become common and people would still use whale oil to light up their homes. He was a soldier in the infantry of the Grand-Duke of Tuscany and then of the King of Italy, when Tuscany merged into the newly formed Kingdom of Italy, in 1861. The family lore says that Ferdinando fought with Garibaldi in Southern Italy, but there is no trace of him in the records as a volunteer of Garibaldi's army. He may have fought there with the regular army, though. In his portrait, we can see the medals that he gained. Today, I still have the ribbons, the medals were lost during the 2nd world war when they were given to "the country" to support the war effort.

Despite the medals, however, there is little doubt that Ferdinando was poor; his condition is described as "dire poverty" in some documents we still have. But things were changing and the conditions of the Bardi family would change, too. The coal revolution had made Northern Europe rich. England had built a World Empire using coal, France had its revolution and Napoleon, and the industrial age had started. Of course, Italy had no significant coal resources but, already in those times, coal started being imported from England and that changed many things. Tuscany was slowly building up a certain degree of prosperity based on a rapidly developing industry and on a flow of tourism from Northern Europe that, already at that time, had made of Florence a favorite destination.

That had consequences on the life of Florentines. Antonio Bardi (1862 - 1924), Ferdinando's son and my great-grandfather, seems to have started his life as a street urchin. But that changed when he was befriended by a "gentleman in the service of the Emperor of Brazil," then visiting Florence. It may have happened in 1877 and some of the newspapers of that time report the story of how this gentleman, whose name was "Pedro Americo," paid for the studies of this boy in whom he had somehow noticed a special artistic talent. The papers of that time don't seem to have considered the implications (obvious for us, today) involved in the story of a mature and rich gentleman befriending a poor boy, but those were different times. In any case, Antonio started a career as a painter.

That such a career was possible for Antonio was due to tourism becoming more and more common in Florence. Tourism had not just brought there the Emperor of Brazil, but a continuous flow of foreign tourists interested in ancient paintings and works of art. Color photography didn't exist at that time and this led to a brisk market of hand-made reproduction of ancient masterpieces. These reproductions were especially prized if they were made by Florentine artists, in some ways supposed to maintain the genetic imprint of the people who had created the originals. So, the main art galleries of Florence would allow local artists to set up their easels in their rooms and they would later provide them with a stamp on their canvases guaranteeing that it was "painted from the original". It seems to have been a rather diffuse occupation and, already at that time, Florentines were adapting to the opportunities that the world changes were offering to them.

Some of the paintings of Antonio Bardi are still kept by his descendants and, for what I can say, he seems to have been a skilled painter with a special ability with portraits. But he never was very successful in this career and, in his later life, he moved to a job as a guardsman. Still, he had escaped the poverty trap that had affected his ancestors. Many other Florentines of that time were doing the same, although in different ways. From our viewpoint, Tuscany in the 19th century was still a desperately poor place, but its economy was rapidly growing as a result of the ongoing coal age. That opened up opportunities that had never existed before.

My grandfather, Raffaello Bardi, was born in 1892. His instruction was limited, but he could read and write and perhaps he attended a professional school. When he was drafted for the Great War, he had a hard time with the defeat of the Italian Army at Caporetto, in 1917, but he managed to get back home, all in one piece. There, he married a seamstress, my grandmother Rita and he found a job in a Swiss company that had established a branch in Florence and that manufactured straw hats, exporting them all over the world.

There were reasons for that company to exist and to be located in Florence. One was that the manufacturing of straw hats was a traditional activity in Tuscany, having been started already during the 18th century. Another was that the Italian economy in the 20th century had gone through a rapid growth. Many Italian regions were playing the role that today is played by Eastern European countries or South-Asian ones. They were being colonized by North European companies as sources of cheap labor. Tuscany had a well developed hydroelectric energy system and could offer a skilled workforce. Swiss, German, and British companies were flocking there to establish profitable branches for their businesses.

That was the opportunity that my grandfather exploited. He was only a modest employee in the company where he worked, but he could afford a lifestyle that his ancestors couldn't even have dreamed of. In 1922, he bought a nice home for his family in the suburbs; very much in the style of the "American Dream" (although without a car in the garage). It had a garden, three bedrooms, a modern bathroom, and it could comfortably lodge my grandparents, their four children, and the additional son they had adopted: a nephew who had been orphaned when his parents had died because of the Spanish flu, in 1919.  Raffaello could also afford to take his family on a vacation at the seaside for about one month every summer. He could send his sons to college, although not his daughters; women were still not supposed to study in those times.

There came the Fascist government, the great crash of 1929, and the 2nd world war. Hard times for everyone but this branch of the Bardi family suffered no casualties nor great disasters. Raffaello's home also survived the allied bombing raids, even though a few steel splinters hit the outer walls. With the end of the war, the Italian economy experienced a period of growth so rapid that it was termed the "economic miracle". It was no miracle but the consequence of crude oil being cheap and easily available. The Italian industry boomed, and with it tourism.

During this period, the Italian labor was not anymore so cheap as it had been in earlier times. The activity of manufacturing straw hats was taken over by Chinese firms and the Swiss company in which my grandfather had worked closed down. Still, there was a brisk business in importing Chinese-made hats in Florence, adding to them some hand-made decoration and selling the result as "Florentine hats."  One of my aunts, Renza, continued to manage a cottage industry that did exactly that. My other aunt, Anna, tried to follow the footprints of her grandfather, Antonio, and to work as a painter, but she was not very successful. Tourism was booming, but people were not anymore interested in hand-made reproductions of ancient masterpieces.

For my father, Giuliano, and my uncle, Antonio, both graduated in architecture, the booming Italian economy offered good opportunities. The period from the 1950s to the early 1970s was probably the richest period enjoyed by Italy in modern times and the moment of highest prosperity for the members of the Bardi family in Florence. All my relatives of that generation were rather well-off as employees or professionals. Their families were mostly organized according to the breadwinner/housewife model: even a single salary was sufficient for a comfortable life (my mother was an exception, like my father she had graduated in architecture and worked as a high-school teacher). Most of them could afford to own their homes and, in most cases, also a vacation home in the mountains or on the seaside (also here, my family was somewhat an exception, preferring a single home on the hills). They also owned at least one car, often two when their wives learned how to drive. On the average, the education level had progressed: even the women often attended college. Few of the people of that generation could speak any language but Italian and very few had traveled outside Italy, even though some of my uncles had fought in North Africa.

Then, there came the crisis of the 1970s. In Italy, it was normally defined as the "congiuntura economica" a term that indicated that it was just something temporary, a hiccup that was soon to be forgotten as growth were to restart. It never did. It was the start of the great oil crisis that had started with the peaking of the US oil production. The consequences were reverberating all over the world. It was in this condition that my generation came of age.

Our generation was perhaps the most schooled one in the history of Italy. Many of us had acceded to high university education; we traveled abroad, we all studied English, even though we were not necessarily proficient in it. But, when we tried to sell our skills in the labor market, it was a tough time. We were clearly overskilled for the kind of jobs that were available in Italy and many of us had to use again the strategy of our ancestors of old, emigrating toward foreign countries. It was the start of what we call today the "brain drain".

I moved to the US for a while. I could have stayed there, but I found a decent position with the University of Florence and I came back. Maybe I did well, maybe not, it is hard to say. Some people of my age followed the same path. Some moved to foreign countries and stayed there, others came back to Italy. Some worked as employees, set up their own companies, opened up shops, they tried what they could with various degrees of success. One thing was sure: our life was way more difficult than it had been for our fathers and grandfathers. Of course, we were not as poor as our ancestors had been in the early 19th century, but supporting a family on a single salary had become nearly unthinkable. None of us could have afforded to own a home, hadn't we inherited the homes of our parents. Fortunately, families were now much smaller and we didn't have to divide these properties among too many heirs.

There came the end of the 20th century and of the 2nd millennium as well. Another generation came of age and they faced difficult times again. They were badly overskilled, as we had been, perhaps even more internationalized than we were; perfect candidates for the brain drain trend. My son followed my example, moving to a foreign country to work; maybe he'll come back as I did, maybe not. It will have to be seen. My daughter still has to find a decent job. The oil crisis faded, then returned. The global peak of oil production ("peak oil") was closer and closer. The Italian economy went up and down but, on the average, down. It was a system that could grow only with low oil prices and the period of high prices that started in the early 2000s was a hard blow for Italy, causing the start of a de-industrialization trend that's still ongoing.

Only agriculture and tourism are still doing well in Italy. That's especially true for Florence, a town that went through a long-term cycle that transformed it from a sleepy provincial town into a sort of giant food court. Tourists are still flocking to Florence in ever-increasing numbers, but they don't seem to be so much interested in art anymore; their focus today seems to be food. It is for this reason that, today, almost everyone I know who is under 30 is either unemployed or working in restaurants, bars, or hotels.

People in Italy keep adapting to changing times as they have always done, everywhere in the world. It is hard to say what the future will bring to us, but one thing is certain: the great cycle of the fossil fuels is waning. The hard times are coming back.

The earthquake in Italy and the silliest comment ever received about climate change

It is hard to take precaution against events that are difficult or impossible to predict. That holds for all kinds of "systemic shocks" which include earthquakes, economic crises, climate-related events, and more. 

Italy may be an especially vulnerable place for earthquakes. It is a country located in a highly seismic zone where a large number of  buildings have been erected just by piling up bricks, without worrying too much about safety. The results can be seen in the earthquake of a few days ago and in several other earthquakes of the past decades. (see the image above, source). But, if Italy is a bad place in terms of precautions against seismic events, it is normal that everywhere large earthquakes strike, the damage is enormous. Even Japan, although a country that places a lot of attention on earthquake safety, was badly hit by the 2011 tsunami and by the 1995 earthquake near Kobe.

The discussion about the recent earthquake in Italy raised up some comments on my Italian blog, one of which I found especially silly. Summarizing it, it said, "If earthquakes cannot be predicted, how can you pretend to predict climate change? We should just wait and see."

I think that the logic of this comment doesn't need to be deconstructed but, at least it is further evidence that human beings are not rational creatures. Nevertheless, it raises an issue worth discussing about the predictability of climate change. Much of the debate on climate turns around the often raised objection against the need of doing something that says, "if you can't predict exactly what's going to happen, then we should just sit and watch". Obviously, nobody would even dream to raise such an objection against reinforcing buildings against earthquakes, although in practice the idea is often resisted. Nor, anyone would maintain that you shouldn't wear seat belts in your car because you can't predict exactly when an accident will occur.

So, why is the debate on climate change so special? In one sense, it is the sheer vastness of the problem. While you can always think that the next earthquake will strike somewhere else, there is no escape from climate change: it affects the whole planet and that surely makes people tend to react by disregarding even the most elementary rules of logic. In another sense, it I think that the problem is in the very concept of "predictions". Geologists know a lot about earthquakes. but they have wisely abstained from trying to make predictions about them. Climatologists, instead, have made a big effort to develop predictive tools and they keep publishing diagrams telling us what temperatures we should expect for 2050 or 2100. That has led to a heated debate about the validity of the models which, as all models, can only be approximated (the map is not the territory).

Don't make me say that there is anything wrong in climate models. They are sophisticated, physics-based tools, perfectly valid within the assumptions that they make. There is, however, a problem. Climate change and seismic phenomena are, at the most basic level, similar in the sense that they are both about the accumulation of energy in a reservoir. Geological faults cause the accumulation of elastic energy in the earth's crust. Greenhouse gases cause the accumulation of thermal energy in the atmosphere and in the oceans.

Now, it is known that the release of elastic energy in the crust is not a linear phenomenon and that, as a consequence, it generates sudden and catastrophic events. How about the release of thermal energy in the atmosphere/hydrosphere system? Mostly, we tend to think that it is a linear phenomenon: higher concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere cause rising temperatures and, indirectly, rising sea levels. But, unfortunately, that's not the whole story and it cannot be.

Complex systems tend to react to forcings in strongly non-linear ways, something that I termed the "Seneca Effect". And the rising temperatures may create plenty of sudden catastrophes when linked with the other elements of the ecosphere and also of the human econosphere. Just think of the effect of a sudden increase in the sea levels on the world's economy, largely based on marine transportation. And think about the effects on agriculture: much of the recent turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East may be seen as a non-linear reaction to rising temperatures and droughts.

But the most worrisome sudden transition related to greenhouse warming is known as the "runaway greenhouse" or the "Venus catastrophe." It is the planetary equivalent of a major earthquake; something like what happened to the city of Amatrice, in Italy, completely razed down a few days ago. Of course, we may say that such a transition is "sudden" only in terms of a different time scale in comparison to earthquakes, but it may still be rapid enough to cause gigantic damage. We don't know for sure if such a catastrophe can occur on the Earth but, according to some recent studies, it seems to be possible. And make no mistake: a runaway greenhouse effect is not just a hotter earth, it involves the extinction of the biosphere.

In the end, the main problem of this whole story is that we don't know how to convince people about the risks related to non-linear phenomena, earthquakes, climate change and the like. Should we emphasize the risk? That has the unwanted effect that people tend to run away plugging their ears and singing "la-la-la." Or should we sweeten the pill and tell them that there is nothing to be really worried about; just a few minor adjustments and everything will be fine. That has the effect that nobody is doing anything, surely not enough. Will we ever find the right strategy?






  

The "Limits to Growth" was right: Italy's population starts declining.

The "base case" scenario described in the 2004 edition of "The Limits to Growth", an update of the original study sponsored by the Club of Rome and published in 1972. Note how the world's population is supposed to start declining some years after the peaking of the world's economy. We are not yet seeing this decline at the global level, but we may be seeing it in some specific regions of the world; in particular in Italy.

More and more data are accumulating to disprove the legend of the "mistakes" that has been accompanying the study titled "The Limits to Growth" (LTG). For instance, Graham Turner has shown how the historical data for the world's economy have been following rather closely the curves of the "base case" scenario presented in 1972. But the fact that this scenario has been working well up to the beginning of the 21st century doesn't mean it will keep working in the same way in the future. The base case scenario describes a worldwide economic collapse that should start at some moment during the first two-three decades of the century. Clearly, the world's economy has not collapsed, so far, even though it may be argued that it is giving out ominous signs that it is starting to do just that. But, we can't yet prove that the base case scenario was right.

Yet, the LTG collapse scenario is an average over the whole world and we may imagine that some sections of the world's economy should collapse earlier, and some later. And, indeed, it appears that some local economies are collapsing right now. It may be that a country like Italy is already well advanced in this process, so that we shouldn't be not just seeing the decline of its GdP, but also the start of an irreversible population decline. And some recent data indicate that this is exactly the case: the LTG base case scenario is playing out in Italy, and probably not just in Italy.

So, let's try to make a qualitative comparison of the LTG scenario and the actual data for Italy. First of all, the scenario shows how the consumption of natural resources is supposed to reach a maximum and then decline, followed by a similar trajectory for the economic output. We are already well past this point in Italy. As you can see in the figure below, from a previous post on Cassandra's legacy, Italy's consumption of hydrocarbon fuels (by far its main source of energy) peaked in 2005, followed by the peak in the GdP in 2008. Considering that the GdP is a measure of the overall economic output of a country, we can take it as proportional to the parameters that were indicated as the industrial and agricultural production in the LTG study (the data for 2015  indicate a small GdP increase for Italy, but that changes little to the overall trend).

So, we may say that the base case LTG scenario has been playing out in Italy in terms of the behavior of the economy of the country. But, if this is the case, at some point we should expect another curve of the scenario to peak and start declining: the population curve. And, indeed, we seem to be seeing exactly that. Here are the most recent data from the Italian statistical agency, ISTAT

You can see the remarkable jumping up in the mortality rate for 2015: it corresponds to 165,00 more deaths than births. Despite the influx of immigrants, Italy has lost 139,000 residents in 2015; not a large loss (0.23%) but it is significant. And it had never happened during the past few decades. Also, Italy sees for the first time in decades a reduction in the life expectancy at birth (from 80.3 years to 80.1 years for males and from 85 years to 84.7 years for females).

What have been the causes of this population decline? There are several, and the torrid summer of 2015 has surely played a role in killing more old people than usual, as you can see in the figure below (again from ISTAT)

Then, other causes have been proposed; the general aging of the population, the economic crisis, the worsening diet, pollution, the higher costs of medical care, and more. But the point, here, is not to discuss these various causes, most of which probably had a role in the decline. The model doesn't describe the details of the process, nor it is detailed to the point of considering different age cohorts. It is a quantitative description of a relatively simple phenomenon: a population under stress because of reduced resource availability and pollution will react by an increasing number of deaths in its weakest age groups: the elderly ones. And this is exactly what we are seeing in Italy: a decline in population following the decline in GdP.

Of course, we only have data for one year and we cannot say if what we are seeing is a long-term trend or just a statistical fluctuation. Yet, it is hard not to think that the degrading economic, social conditions in Italy, as well as the degradation of the ecosystem, are not taking their toll on the population. And that we are indeed seeing the LTG scenarios playing out.

Climate facepalm: the Italian Society of Physics declares that climate science is not science

So, Mr. Darwin, what is the equation of evolution?

With the climate negotiations in full swing in Paris, 14 Italian scientific societies got together to release a document in which they expressed their support for the COP21 negotiations and for the need of taking action against anthropogenic climate change. However, one scientific society was conspicuously missing:  the Italian Society of Physics (SIF).

Later on, the president of SIF, Prof. Luisa Cifarelli, diffused a statement on this issue as a comment to the blog of the Italian Society of Chemistry. This comment has not been officially confirmed, but neither it has been denied, so it appears to be real. Let me report its initial statement here, translated from Italian.

The SIF is an association of physicists used to consider physical laws determined by equations of varying degrees of complexity and results expressed with appropriate confidence or likelihood levels. This is, after all, the scientific method. 

Then, Professor Cifarelli goes on, stating that the Italian Society of Physics refuses to sign a document in which some statements are given as certainties and not as possibilities, and that science cannot be based on consensus and on "mixing science and politics". She concludes that it is important that the earth is protected from pollution, but that the study of climate should be "based on physics."

And so, here we stand. What Prof. Cifarelli is saying is that science is science only if it is based on equations. Therefore, since an "equation of climate" doesn't seem to exist, climate science is not a science. In a single stroke, Prof. Cifarelli has removed from the category of legitimate sciences everything from earth sciences (what is the equation of dinosaurs?) to the study of complex systems (what's the equation of Bak's sandpile?). 

This is something that deserves a facepalm for the whole Italian physics community. Even though several Italian physicists have strongly criticized the behavior of SIF in this occasion, it remains a hard blow for the prestige of the Italian research community. Even more so considering earlier blows such as the initial support given to the "E-Cat" by the Department of Physics of the University of Bologna. 

But it is worse than that.  In a moment in which we all badly need to support the work of climate scientists to promote an indispensable change in our policies, it seems that some scientists tend to cling to obsolete paradigms, for instance about the human influence on climate. True, obsolete paradigms tend to be removed from science by the progress of knowledge; but it takes some time, as this story shows even too well.

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Note: after writing this text, I noted a comment signed by Luisa Cifarelli to the blog of the Italian Society of Chemistry. It says, in Italian "Eppure Lei sa bene che la Groenlandia era verde in tempi non sospetti." Translated, it is, "and yet you know well that Greenland was green in times above suspicion". I cannot be sure that this sentence was written by the president of the Italian Society of Physics but, if it is the case, it is worth another facepalm.

Happy August 15th (and a little rant from UB)

August 15th is a big holiday in Italy. Here is a translation of the post I published today on the Italian version of this blog.

An image of the "new normal" in Italy. In Florence, a downtown shop tries to fight the heat wave of this summer by installing an air conditioner, without worrying too much about spewing hot air right onto the hot and sweating tourists.

Happy Aug 15th, everybody! Here, in Florence, the worst seems to be over and the forecasts tell of rain today and tomorrow. This July has been the hottest ever recorded in Italy, but we suffered, on the whole, only limited damage. We had more than a month of brutal heat, but also some rain that eased the problem of the forest fires. Now, we can hope to arrive to September without big troubles, at least in terms of sheer heat. 

It is sure, anyway, that this Summer we got a taste of what the "new normal" is going to be. Apart from the horrible heat, we saw a number of spectacular disasters created by bad weather. I can tell you that I had never seen the roof of a house blown away by the wind. I had seen something like that only on TV, and mainly in the US, where the wooden homes always have that look as if they were coming from the tale of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf. But seeing the roofs of concrete buildings in Florence being ripped off and deposited in the courtyards, below, well, it has been a shock.

So much the shock caused by these events, that on TV someone mentioned the term "climate change". Fortunately, they immediately found an "expert" who appeared on screen and said that everything was fine and that it had been just a normal summer thunderstorm. 

Apart from the shy, and immediately removed, intrusion of the real world on the TV screen, Italy continues to operate in conditions that I would call "political Alzheimer." That is, conditions in which the patient continues to repeat the same things over and over, without reacting to external stimuli. So, we vaguely remember that, in the past, there was a good time in which the economy was growing and there follows that there is nothing else and nothing more than pursuing growth to fix all the problems.

This catatonic form of politics is not a fault of any specific political force. The faces we see on TV are a little like what people saw in one of those old "houses of mirrors" in amusement parks. Distorted mirrors would return your image as taller or shorter, fatter or thinner, crooked or straight; but it was always the same person. So, the politicians ruling Italy today are just slightly deformed reflections of the society that has produced them. It is us: we are aggressive, disoriented, angry, and without ideas. 

On this point, there is a very interesting post by John Michael Greer (the "archdruid") titled "the war against change."  Greer maintains that the traditional distinction between "progressives" and "conservatives" has been replaced by a situation in which the progressives became conservatives in the sense they oppose any and all change, whereas the conservatives still favor changes, provided that they will worsen things considerably.

This view can be perfectly applied to the Italian situation, with the so called "left" that shows a deep hate for renewable energy and for everything sustainable, whereas the right continues to push for drilling more and drilling deeper in order to get more energy from the sea of oil on which, notoriously, Italy floats. This idea of the right is being applied with great enthusiasm by the left, presently in power.   

But I would also say that Greer is somewhat optimistic, in the sense that the ongoing mental paralysis is affecting all political forces, both on the right and on the left. And it is not just a problem of the political parties: it is the entire Italian society that can't find anything better to do than to blame the bugaboo of the moment, be it Putin's Russia, Merkel's Germany, or whatever. And a good fraction of the public seems to find refuge in the most extreme forms of conspiracy theories, those which are unseemly for the dignity of the human condition, such as chemtrails and the upcoming new ice age. 

All right, sorry for this little rant from me. But, really, it is impressive to note how nothing moves in the debate, while we are facing gigantic changes in the ecosystem and in the economy. Do we have any hope to see something moving in the future? Hard to say. Surely, 2016 will be hotter than 2015, and 2017 will be even worse. But, on TV, there will always be some "expert" telling people that everything is normal. 


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Note: to be sure, this 2015 has seen one big change in terms of new ideas. The "Laudato Si" Papal encyclical. It is impressive how this set of  ideas comes from the Church of Rome, the bugaboo of the old and rigid "left," who once were priding themselves of the definition of "progressives." It reminds me of Tonybee, when he placed himself in the position of an ancient Roman and asked: "what good can ever come out of Bethlehem?" And yet....

Long live Italy! Can the "sun country" reach one million photovoltaic plants?

Despite the unabated economic disaster, despite unemployment, bureaucracy, overtaxation, bad government, corruption, mafia, and all the rest, Italians are reacting at least in one field: in renewable energy, especially photovoltaic energy.

You can see the trends in Italy in the image below (from assoelettrica). Note how the number of plants is growing more rapidly than the installed power, indicating the trend toward small plants.

In 2013, the number of installed plants had gone over half a million and, little more than one year later, Italy had already reached the number of 650,000 plants. But the actual number of plants is surely larger, as we need to take into account all the plants that are not connected to the grid; for self-sufficiency or for mobile applications. And we should also count all the micro-applications where PV panels are used to power such things as street signs and the like.

So: does Italy have one million PV plants? Probably not yet, but the growth continues unabated and we are rapidly getting there. The interesting point is that this growth is occurring despite the evident (and partially successful) attempt on the part of the government to kill the Italian PV system (*). They succeeded in stopping the growth of large plants, but Italians reacted by invested in small plants, and a lot of them.

The consequences are impressive, likely very different than what the government (and the fossil fuel lobby supporting it) had in mind. With so many plants, PV is becoming entrenched in the economic and social fabric of the country. One million small plants mean that at least 3-4 million people are directly connected and benefitting from a PV plant they own, or they use. They won't take so lightly the attempt of anyone to take those plants away from them.

That has political consequences that shouldn't be underestimated. Indeed, some signs seem to indicate that the anti-PV campaign of the Renzi government is losing steam. Eventually, it may fold up and disappear altogether (and I don't mean just the anti-PV campaign).

So, Italy is living up to its fame of "sun country". Long live Italy!!




(*) Obviously, there are no more incentives from the state for new PV plants in Italy; but this is not an obstacle since the lowered price of PV has made them unnecessary. However, what the government has been doing is a policy of positively discouraging new plants, as well as trying to kill the existing ones by a combination of overtaxation and overregulation. The last attempt in this action is the proposed law that establishes a flat fee for the connection of a home to the grid - instead of the current one; proportional to consumption. In this way, even if a PV plant produces 99% of the owner's need, the owner still has to pay a hefty fee to the government owned energy producer. Of course, then owners could react by disconnecting from the grid and storing energy in batteries; but then the government could react like the Spanish government has done: flatly forbidding PV plants not connected to the grid. In short, it is a war. We will win it, but we have to fight it. 


 h/t Antonio Belsole and Fausto Lorenzoni

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi gave a powerful speech on the need of acting against climate change..... or did he?

The international media seem to be fascinated by the similarities in the physical aspect of Mr. Bean and of Mr. Matteo Renzi, prime minister of the Italian Government. There may be some similarities, indeed, but it is also true that Mr. Renzi is a shrewd politician who can be seen as a good example of a political style that privileges form over substance.

A few days ago, Mr. Renzi, Italy's prime minister, attended a meeting on the climate situation. He was praised for having taken a stance against climate change, but I think his speech is a good example of how a smart politician can say a lot and, at the same time, say nothing. It is a political style that is not specific to Italy, but is, rather, universal today.

So, I took the liberty of translating some of Mr. Renzi's statements at the meeting on climate, (as reported here) and adding their real meaning as Mr. Renzi himself could have done. (boldface: Mr. Renzi actual statements)



"I don't believe in a culture of negativity and of pessimism, I am optimist, but it is necessary to assume one's responsibilities and the time of choices is today" - So, I am starting with this remarkable platitude, and don't think I'll stop here!

"...to say that for us climate is a priority means to give back a sense of identity to our country..." which is, of course, another platitude, but it serves a purpose: note that I said "a" priority and I didn't say which are the other priorities so that, as you may well imagine, there will always be some priority higher than climate (and in a moment I'll tell you what these priorities are).

"Today, our enemy is coal", and I can say this because in Italy we use little coal, so that I can make a bugaboo out of it without offending the fossil fuel lobbies that finance my government. Besides, it is an excellent idea because it gives me a chance to say that other fossil fuels are clean in comparison.

"In 40-50 years we'll need to go well beyond the fight against coal"  And notice that what I really mean is that we don't need to do anything for at least 40-50 years. This, at least, explains what I really think about climate change.

"We need to be able to say things as they stand, that is, that renewables, alone, are not enough." Which doesn't mean I know anything about renewables, of course, but just that I represent a different lobby. 

"Neither oil nor gas will run out tomorrow morning" And, if you are really, really dumb, now I am explicitly stating what are my priorities. Are you happy, now?

The last astronaut: the cycle of human spaceflight is coming to an end

Smart, dedicated, competent, polyglot, and more; Samantha Cristoforetti seems to have been invented for a "Star Trek" episode. She is shown here at the International Space Station, where she is staying at the moment of publication of this post. Cristoforetti may not be the last astronaut to orbit the earth, but it is possible that the end of what was once called "the space age" will not be far away in the future. (image credit: ESA/NASA)

I experienced the enthusiasm of the "space age," starting in the 1960s, and I am not happy to see the end of that old dream. Yet, the data are clear and cannot be ignored: human spaceflight is winding down. Look at the graph, below. It shows the total number of people launched into space each year. (The data are from Wikipedia - more details.)

As you see, the number of people sent to space peaked in the 1990s, following a cycle that can be fitted reasonably well using a bell-shaped curve (a Gaussian, in this case). We have not yet arrived to the end of space travel, but the number of people traveling to space is going down. With the international space station set to be retired in 2020, it may be that the "space age" is destined to come to an end in a non remote future. 

The shape of the cycle can be seen as a "Hubbert curve." This curve typically describes the exploitation of a non-renewable resource; fossil fuels in particular, but it also describes how economic activities are affected by a diminishing availability of resources. In this case, the shape of the curve suggests that we are gradually running out of the surplus resources needed to send humans into space. In a sense, the economics of human spaceflight are like those of the great pyramids of Egypt. These pyramids were expensive and required considerable surplus resources to be built. When the surplus disappeared, no more were built. The shape of the pyramid building curve was, again, Hubbert-like.

This result is not surprising, considering that we are reaching the planetary limits to growth. In part, we are reacting to the diminishing availability of resources by replacing humans with less expensive robots, but sending robots to space is not the same as the "conquest of space" was once conceived. Besides, the decline of space exploration is evident also from other data, see for instance this plot showing the budget available to NASA (from "Starts with a Bang").Note how the peak in human spaceflights coincides with the peak in the resources destined to space exploration.

If space exploration is directly related to the availability of resources, it is also true that, from the beginning, it was not meant to be just a resource drain. The idea of the  conquest of space involved overcoming the limits of the earth's ecosphere and accessing the resources of the whole solar system. Some of the concepts developed in this area were thought explicitly as ways to avoid the dire scenarios laid out in the 1972 study, "The Limits to Growth." Proposals involved placing giant habitats at the Lagrange libration points, where no energy was necessary to keep them there. The idea gained some traction in the 1970s and, in the figure, you see an impression of one of those habitats - the "Bernal Sphere."(image credit: NASA)

Today, we can't look at these old drawings without shaking our heads and wondering how anyone could take them seriously. Yet, these ideas were not impossible in themselves and, in the 1970s, we still had sufficient resources to make it possible some kind of human expansion into space, even though not on the grand scale that some people were proposing. But we missed that occasion and we much preferred to invest our surplus in military toys. Today, we can't even dream of colonizing space anymore. 

The space age is not completely over, yet, but it is becoming more and more difficult to sustain the costs of it. Right now, the Russians are still willing to launch to orbit West European astronauts. But how long will they continue to do so while Western Europe is enacting sanctions devised to cripple the Russian economy? Samantha Cristoforetti, brave and competent Italian astronaut, may well be a member of the last patrol of humans orbiting around the earth for a long time to come. 


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Note added after publication: This post  generated several interesting comments. It is clear that our interest in space has not faded: we are still going to space and we still think that there is a future there. However, it is also clear that we need to cut corners in whatever we do and the "conquest of space" as it was envisioned in the 1950s and 1960s is today completely beyond our means. Surely we can send robots up there, but the conquest of space means to go there and stay there, as human beings, but for that we missed the (space) boat.

There still remains a big question mark about what what role will have space in our future. Will we decline so sharply that we'll have to abandon all space exploration? It may well be and, in this case, the curve will "look Senecan", indeed. Or, we may be able to maintain a certain level of activity, up there. And it might even expand, pick up momentum, and become something that moves by itself.

Space has some peculiar characteristics as an environment, for one thing, it can be seen as the opposite of the earth's environment in terms or relative availability of energy and resources. The earth's surface is rich in mineral resources, but relatively poor in energy sources. Space is rich in energy resources, but poor in terms of mineral resources. Decades of studies about the "self replicating lunar factory" have built up a lot of knowledge on how a self sustaining metabolic system could be built in space to harness the available energy and resources. But it is very difficult and space enthusiasts have a tendency of launching (almost literally) themselves in wild speculations which, then, leave the details unwritten. Think of the "Dyson sphere", for instance. Beautiful concept, but how do exactly dismantle Jupiter and turn it into a solid sphere that surrounds the sun.... ? Still, space is part of our world view and it will remain there for quite a while.

Then, I thought I could also mention the debate on the "Lunar Landing Hoax" which, apparently, keeps flaring up, and did so also in relation to the present post on the "doomstead diner". On this point, I am absolutely sure: even Samantha Cristoforetti is a hoax and I have solid proof of this. See the image below. She is not a real human being; she is just a cartoon character created by Walt Disney Studios! (source)