On the Edge of the Cliff: We need a new way of seeing the world

A new blog by Ugo Bardi, "The Proud Holobionts"

Long-term predictive models don't have a very good record, but some turned out to be prophetic. One case is that of Hubbert's 1956 prediction of a peak in the production of fossil energy shortly after the start of the 21st century. He was optimistic about the possibility of replacing fossil fuels with nuclear energy, but, apart from that, he was right on target. Now we are on the edge of the cliff and we have to take a different attitude toward the ecosystem that supports our existence. The concept of "Holobiont" may help us a lot in this task. We are holobionts, the ecosystem is a larger holobiont, we must find a way to live together. 

The American geologist Marion King Hubbert deserves the credit of having been the first to see the main trends of the 21st century, nearly 50 years before it were to start. In his 1956 paper, Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels, he presented the figure above: a bold attempt to place the human experience with energy on a 10,000 years scale.

Of course, Hubbert was overly optimistic about nuclear energy which, in reality, started declining decades before fossil fuels did. But, with this graphic, Hubbert had laid down the human predicament several years in advance with respect to more famous studies such as "The Limits to Growth" (1972). Catton's "overshoot" (1980), and many others. Without a miracle that could replace fossils well before they would start declining, the human world as it was in the 20th center was doomed. Nuclear energy was not, and could not have been, that miracle.

Hubbert's may not have been always cited, but the debate on the decline of the natural resources raged for decades -- with most of the debate being based on various interpretations of the concept of technological progress. In the most optimistic views, depletion was not considered a pressing problem and, in any case, it was believed that technology would chase the problem away, automatically and without pain for anyone, purely on the basis of market forces. In this view, it made no sense to slow down economic growth in order to save resources: on the contrary, accelerating the exploitation would lead to more growth and to the consequent availability of more and more advanced technologies. The opposite attitude was that the problem was important and imminent, but that predictive models could lead to planning efforts based on slowing down the exploitation of the remaining resources, giving sufficient time for a technological switch toward higher efficiency/new sources. Over time, the debate veered more and more toward the concept that climate change was a much more important problem than resource depletion. But the contrasting attitudes didn't change.

All the debate led to nothing. Nothing was decided, nothing was done. Society turned out to be impervious to early alerts and technology unable to be the miracle that was touted to be. In 2020, we have arrived at a critical point: the start of the irreversible decline of the technological society that had been developed over about two centuries of use of fossil fuels as an energy source. We are seeing the "Seneca Cliff," the unavoidable destiny of a system that has expanded beyond its limits, that has gone in heavy "overshoot" to use Catton's definition?

And now? Clearly, it is too late to deploy miracle technologies: we are starting to go down and the question is how to face the decline: can we still avoid to turn it into a crash? The data show that it would still be possible to soften the decline and to go down on a relatively smooth slope. But the resistance to the unavoidable is actually worsening the situation. Politicians and most of the public are still convinced that the way to go is to "growth" without realizing that they are hastening collapse and making it faster and harsher.

How did we arrive here? It was not a failure of science and technology. It was a cultural failure. We tried to manage the future without the right tools. In retrospect, it was obvious that tools developed in an age of abundance wouldn't be useful, actually counterproductive, in an age of scarcity. Imagine a banker stranded on a remote island trying to get food by building a automated cash teller. You get the point.

At this point, we could say that we need a new vision of the ecosystem. That's correct, although reductive. It is not a question of what we "need." It is a question of an unavoidable cultural transformation that's going to come, whether we like it or not. We have to come to terms with the ecosystem. In different terms, we could say that the ecosystem is going to decide what it is going to do with us -- not consciously (probably) but just practically. Either it is going to get rid of an obnoxious species -- the humans  -- that has done only damage to everything, or that species is going to take a different attitude that will make it less obnoxious.

That's the challenge we face, not an easy one, but not impossible either. The cultural tools we need have been partly developed and are being developed. A basic one is the concept of "Holobiont" the idea that the fundamental components of the ecosystem are not organisms, but holobionts intended as colonies of creatures that hang together for mutual benefit. Human beings are holobionts, trees, forests, steppes, and tundras are holobionts. The whole ecosystem is a holobionts. And we can be proud of being good holobionts and learn to live together with the larger holobiont we call "Gaia" . Will we be able to do that?

We can discuss these matters on the new blog "The Proud Holobionts" and in the Facebook group with the same name. Onward, fellow holobionts!

The most accurate model-based prediction of all times

The "base case" scenario from the 1972 edition of "The Limits to Growth." This scenario described the trajectory of the world's economy on the basis of the data and assumptions that were judged to be the most reliable ones. This run might turn out to have been amazingly accurate some fifty years after it was proposed.

One of the most remarkable features of the story of the "Limits to Growth" study of 1972 is how effectively it was possible to convince almost everyone that it was completely wrong. Amazingly, though, the most vituperated model-based prediction in history may turn out to have been perhaps the most accurate one.

Note how the scenario above, the "base case" scenario, saw the start of the decline around 2010 and the start of the collapse maybe a decade afterward, that is now. If the oil collapse generated by the coronavirus takes the whole economy with it, as it may well happen, then this scenario turns out to have been unbelievably accurate. And that for a prediction made 50 years ago. Truly amazing!

Now, of course, this story has to be taken with some caution, predictions can be right even by mere chance. But, in this case, there is a certain logic in this result: the base case scenario had been already noted by Graham Turner to have been following the real-world data. But that was true for the growth side of the diagram: even standard economic models had been predicting economic growth. The crucial test for the model was to be the sharp change in slope expected to take place around 2010-2020.

Of course, no model could have predicted that the turning point would have been triggered by a word pandemic -- as it happened. But "something" had to give and the virus is not a cause of anything, it is just the straw that breaks the camel's back. The little push that sent the system in a direction where it had to go.

So, it IS possible to use models to predict the future. Another example of a good prediction is the famous one by Marion King Hubbert of the peak of oil production in the US. In 1956, he had proposed 1970 as the likely date and he had been right. On the other hand, predictions are not always so good. In 1970, Hubbert himself had predicted the global "peak oil" for the year 2000. Later on, ASPO (association for the study of peak oil) had estimated the peak for 2010. Both predictions were not so bad, but a little pessimistic if the peak arrived in 2020.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery, here, is how the most vituperated predictions turned out to be the most accurate. Conversely, many economic models that predicted infinite growth were much praised, but they seem to have badly missed the ongoing collapse. Maybe vituperation is a good yardstick to judge whether a prediction is good or bad. In any case, always remember that the future always takes you by surprise. You can't really predict it, but you may always be prepared for it.

The real reason why we didn't go back to the Moon: The decline of spaceflight

With the massive onslaught of fake news we are subjected to, a particularly obnoxious one is that the Moon landings never took place. It is not just a fashionable idiocy, it is a symptom that the whole Western society is rotting at the core.

In a way, the spreading of the "Moon landing was a hoax" legend was to be expected -- it was even unavoidable. The society we call "The West" inflicted itself mortal wounds during the past few decades with the those technologies that go under the name of "perception management," once known as "propadanda" but now much more refined and effective. If you start using this form of black magic, it is a slippery slope that leads you to the illusions of greatness that were voiced during the invasion of Iraq, in 2003. At that moment, someone was so intoxicated by the new power of propaganda that he uttered the well know words "now we create our own reality."

That was the ultimate hubrys and it didn't go unpunished. Reality cannot be created by mere human beings. What they can do is to create illusions that look like reality and that can hide reality so well that noone can discern the true reality anymore. Losing track with reality would be sufficient punishment in itself, but it carries even worse consequence. Once you start creating your own reality, you can't be trusted any more. And if trust is lost, everything is lost. Society becomes an Empire of Lies and it is destined to fade away and disappear.

So, who would believe the story that people landed on the Moon when it was told by the same people who, later on, invented non-existing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? For everything that happens there is a reason and there is a reason also for the disbelief in the Moon landing.

Will we ever be able to restore trust? Maybe it is too late, maybe it is not even worth trying. Yet, I was thinking that the astronauts who performed the incredible feat of the several travels to the Moon deserve better than being ridiculed, as it seems to be becoming fashionable nowadays. They deserve respect and admiration for their courage and their dedication. For this reason let me address one of the few reasonable questions that may be asked about the story: why didn't we go back to the Moon? Some people are genuinely perplexed on this point: could it be because it really was a fake?

No. There were deep structural reasons that made it impossible for the Western economic system to provide again the same surplus that was used to finance the Moon program. Here, let me reproduce a post that I published in 2015 examining the trends of human spaceflight. (you can read similar considerations in a post by Antonio Turiel). Clearly, we have peaked and we are going down. It is the way civilizations end.

Monday, February 9, 2015

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 at 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 the 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.

The Hubbert Game - Teaching the Science of Collapse

My students playing the "Hubbert Game." It is a simple operational game illustrating the exploitation of a non-renewable resource and the phenomenon of overshoot and collapse. 

In my presentation at the recent Summer Academy of the Club of Rome, I stressed the point that the major stumbling block we face in managing the ongoing crisis is that most people, and in particular policymakers, lack the concept of "overshoot." As a consequence, they also lack the concepts of peaking and collapsing (also in the form of the "Seneca Cliff"). It is not surprising: the idea of overshoot and collapse is a new development in the science of complex systems. It goes back to a little more than 50 years ago when it was proposed first by Jay Forrester. Earlier on, it simply didn't exist.

So, most people think of the exploitation of natural resources in linear terms, assuming that we can continue extracting oil (a physical thing) as long as we have money (a non-physical thing) to pay for it. When depletion is taken into account, it is done only on the basis of oversimplified and misleading models such as the "resources to production ratio." It is something I have termed "Tiffany's fallacy" (the mineral pie is shrinking and most of what's left is in the sky).

The recent summer academy of the Club of Rome in Florence brought back to my attention the need of exposing people to the basic concepts of the dynamics of real bioeconomic systems. Young people who care about the survival of humankind and of the earth's ecosystem know a lot of things, but I noted that they too often miss the concept of overshoot and collapse. That's something that I had already noted years ago and it had led me to develop an operational game called "The Hubbert Game."

The Hubbert game is a simple boardgame that needs no computers and no special equipment except some black and white counters used to mark oil fields. It is designed to be run in a few hours at most and to provide to players a "hands-on" experience of what means to run a company that exploits non-renewable resources. Players take the role of oil companies which compete in exploiting the gradually dwindling oil resources. The game is competitive and some versions involve strategic choices; the game surely tends to capture the attention of the players. The final result is always the same, the pattern of oil production, in the game as in the real world, tend to look like the "bell shaped" Hubbert curve.  You can see the curve below, hand drawn from the results of a game session

The Hubbert game is described in detail in a paper that I presented at the 2016 conference of the System Dynamics Society in Delft, Holland. There is also an earlier version which I uploaded on the "academia.edu" site. As I keep experimenting, new versions may appear.

In the meantime, the game seems to be enjoying a certain popularity, at least in Italy. It has been used by my colleague Luca Pardi for his class in environmental economics at the University of Florence. It was played in a high school and it is planned for the "night of the researchers" to be held this Sep 29 in Trento. You see here a snapshot of the flyer of the game for that occasion (h/t Luciano Celi and Luca Pardi).

Will this game have some positive effects? Well, in an earlier post I said that we need something like "a new axial age" to develop the tools we need to manage the earth's ecosystem (which includes humankind as an element). So, it is hard to think that a boardgame will save the world. But it is a step in the right direction and, after all, it is fun!

Amelie the Amoeba: How Things Grow

This academic year, I gave a lesson on the growth mechanism of complex systems. It is a fascinating subject that can be applied to several fields, from biology to economics. Since the students I was talking to were not specializing in complex systems (they were students of geology), I used a light tone and used "Amelie the Amoeba" an image for the growth mechanism of bacteria in a Petri dish of many other things dish. Then, the image above summarizes what I told them.

If you know about these matters, you can probably understand what the drawings show. If you don't, some notes are appropriate. So, here is a very brief summary of how things grow in the universe.

1. The "Solow" mode, or exponential growth. The name refers to the economist Robert Solow who proposed this model, but most economists today seem to argue that exponential growth is the natural, actually the only possible, mode of growth of the economy. They may not be completely wrong; after all, it is the way bacteria grow (for a while) in a Petri dish. So, Amelie the Amoeba is very happy to be growing exponentially, too bad that if she were to continues for a long time, she would eventually devour the whole universe.

2. The "Malthus" mode, also "Verhulst" or simply "sigmoid" mode. It takes into account the fact that the Petri dish contains a limited amount of nutrients and Amelie can't keep growing forever. Malthus was the first to apply this model to the human population, assuming that it would reach a certain limit and then stay there: contrarily to what commonly said, Malthus never predicted collapses. The concept of "collapse" was alien to him, but at least he was right in noting that all physical systems have limits.

3. The "Hubbert" mode or the "bell-shaped" curve. That's more like what could happen to Amelie in a Petri dish. Grow for a while, reach a "peak amoeba" size, and then shrink and die for lack of food. Hubbert applied the model to the oil production of the United States, predicting reasonably well the future of the extraction of "conventional" oil. And, if you try to do the test for bacteria (or amoebas) in a Petri dish, it works as well.

4. The "Seneca" mode. This is the name I gave to the kind of growth kinetics where the decline is much faster than the growth. It comes from something that the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca said in one of his letters ("increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid") and it happens all the time, even to amoebas in a Petri dish.

5. The "Hokusai" mode. The Japanese painter Katsushita Hokusai never made mathematical models and he probably never knew what an amoeba is. But with his famous painting, "the wave", he provided a good visual impression of what happens when things get real bad. Not only decline is faster than growth, but the curve actually starts chasing you! Even amoebas can get nasty and eat your brain.

Living in interesting times: have CO2 emissions peaked?

Image from MIT Technology Review

The projections that had been circulating during the past few months turned out to be correct. Now, it is official: the global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions peaked in 2014 and went down in 2015. And this could be a momentous change.

Don't expect the emission peak, alone, to save us from the impending climate disaster, but, if CO2 emissions will start an irreversible decline, then we need to rethink several assumptions that we have been making on how to deal with climate change. In particular, depletion is normally assumed to be a minor factor in determining the trajectory of the world's economy during the coming decades, but that may not be the case. Depletion is not a good thing in itself, but it might help us (perhaps) to stay within the "safe" limits and avoid a climate disaster.

CO2 emissions are mainly the result of the combustion of fossil fuels and of activities made possible by the combustion of fossil fuels. And, since we expect the production of fossil fuels to peak and decline as the result of depletion, it shouldn't be a surprise that CO2 emissions should peak too. But it is surprising that we may be already seeing the peak. For instance, Laherrere had assumed the peak for all fossils to occur not before around 2025. And many people would have seen these projections as ridiculously catastrophistic. Most of the published scenarios for the future saw CO2 emissions increasing for at least a few decades in the future unless draconian economic or legislative measures to limit them were taken.

So, what we are seeing may be simply a fluctuation; not necessarily "the peak". But, it might also be the big one: the point of no-return. From now on, we may find ourselves rolling down on the other side of the Hubbert curve. It would be the true vindication of the "base case" scenario of "The Limits to Growth" that had seen the combination of gradual depletion and pollution to cause the start of the terminal decline of the fossil based industrial system at some moment during the 2nd-3rd decade of the 21st century.

Let's assume that we really are at the peak of both emissions and fossil energy consumption, then what? First of all, the event will be surely misinterpreted. The techno-optimists will say that what we are seeing is proof of how human ingenuity can solve all problems while the anti-science crowd will hail these results as the evidence of two things: 1) that climate is nothing to be worried about and 2) that those silly climate scientists have been proven wrong one more time.

Of course, none of these interpretations is correct and the situation remains critical for various good reasons. I can list at least three of them

1. There is really no reason to congratulate ourselves for being so smart. The reduction in emissions may be partly due to better efficiency, renewable energy, and the like. But, mainly, it is the result of the global economic slowdown. The IMF data indicate that the world's GDP has peaked in 2014, together with CO2 emissions and 2016 could shrink even more (see also Tyler Durden). The reasons for all this have to do with the gradual decline of the energy yield of fossil fuels, in turn related to progressive depletion. That has generated the disaster that struck the oil industry and the whole mineral industry in the form of collapsing prices. With the decline of the extractive industry, the reason why emissions peaked is because people are poorer, not smarter (so much for the so-called "dematerialization" of the economy).

2. The fact that emissions may have peaked does not mean a reduction in the CO2 accumulation in the ecosystem. We are only slowing down the flow, but the stocks keep being filled. CO2 accumulates in two main reservoirs: the atmosphere and the oceans and we may already have too much of it in both. And that says nothing about possible feedback effects out of human control, such as the release of methane from hydrates. So, we are still risking a lot in terms of the very unpleasant things that could occur in the future (including a runaway climate change).

3. Even assuming that emissions are facing an irreversible decline, the decline rate is likely to be still too slow to stay within the limits that are perceived as (perhaps) safe. Let's assume that emissions will follow a "Hubbert" curve, that is they will go down at the same speed as they went up so far. It means that in the future we will emit approximately as much we have emitted up to now. Can that save us from catastrophic climate change? Not really. So far, we emitted a grand total 1465 gigaton (Gt) of CO2) that might be the amount that we'll emit in the future. Unfortunately, according to Meinshausen et al  in order to have a 25% probability to stay below the 2 degrees limit, we cannot emit more than about 1000 Gt of CO2. And we are not there. According to Meisenhausen, with 1500 Gt of CO2 emitted, we are almost exactly at a 50/50 probability of staying below 2 C. If your hobby is to play the Russian roulette with a real gun, you should enjoy the situation we find ourselves in.

Still, the possible peaking of the CO2 emission. although not sufficient to save us, may not be a bad thing since, at least, it eases the task of staying within the safe limits. And not just that. These new data should lead us to rethink about some of our entrenched assumptions. So far, we have been assuming that a herculean effort will be needed to force the economic system to stop using resources that were assumed to be abundant and cheap. So herculean that it seemed to be totally impossible. But, if we really are at the peak of fossils, then the effort needed could be much less herculean: depletion will help us a lot. At this point, the emphasis should shift from "phasing out" fossil fuels - that would go largely by itself - to "phasing in" renewables - that needs a specific effort. And if we want to phase in the renewables we need to do that before the collapse of the fossil fuel industry makes it impossible to invest enough in their deployment.

Finally, there is another interesting possibility (in the sense of the ancient Chinese curse: 'may you live in interesting times'). The decline might not follow a

Hubbert curve but, rather, a Seneca curve. That is, emissions may decline much faster than they grew in the past. That implies, of course, a parallel crash of fossil fuel production and of the world GDP. The resulting  economic collapse might keep us within the "safe" climate limits. That would be so bad to be almost unimaginable, but, at least, better than some truly horrible climate scenarios. And, why not, we could have both the collapse of the economy and a runaway climate change! (not just fire or ice, but fire and ice)

Truly, we live in interesting times.

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Note: from some messages I received, it seems that many people find that the mere concept that the world GDP could decline is unthinkable and contrary to some universal principle. And, yet, it is shrinking. See this plot from Vox.

Peak pyramids: the way to ruin is rapid

The graph above is a little exercise in cliodynamics, the attempt of quantitatively modeling historical data. Here, the size of the great Egyptian pyramids is plotted as a function of their approximate building date, taken as the last year of the reign of the Pharaoh associated to them. The data are fitted with a simple Gaussian, which approximates the cycle of the Hubbert model of resource depletion.

The great Egyptian pyramids built during the 3rd millennium BCE are the embodiment of the power and of the wealth of the Egyptian civilization of the time. But why did the Egyptians stop building them? Not lack of interest, apparently, since they kept building pyramids for a long time. But they never built again pyramids on such a giant scale.

Probably, we will never have sufficient data to understand the economics of the Egyptian pyramid building cycle of the 3rd and 4th Egyptian dynasties. But we can try at least to examine the quantitative data we have. So, I went to Wikipedia and I found data for the size of pyramids and their approximate dates. The result is the graph above. Here, I show only the data for completed pyramids as a function of the last year of the reign of the Pharaoh associated for each one.

As you can see, it is possible to fit the data with a Gaussian curve, which approximates the Hubbert curve, known to describe the depletion of a limited, non renewable resource. This suggests that the Egyptians had run out of resources, possibly in the form of the fertile soil necessary to sustain the large workforce needed to build pyramids. Or, perhaps, in an age of increasing warring activity, they were forced to funnel more and more resources into the military sector, taking them away from pyramid building.

Another phenomenon we can note in the graph is the rapid collapse of the size of the pyramids at the end of the cycle. The last pyramid of this cycle, the one associated to Pharaoh Menkaure, is even smaller than the first one of the cycle, the "stepped pyramid" of Pharaoh Djoser. Perhaps, this rapid decline is a manifestation of the "Seneca Effect", a term that I coined to describe economic cycles in which decline is faster than growth. Unfortunately, however, the data are too scattered and uncertain to be sure on this point. But surely there was no "plateau" nor a slow decline after the construction of the largest pyramids andit is suggestive to think that even pyramid building may be described with Seneca's words "increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid."










 

Technocrats

On the left, Marion King Hubbert (1903-1989), originator of the "Hubbert Model" of oil production. On the right, Mario Monti (1943-), prime minister of the Italian government. They seem to share a certain style and both of them have been defined as "technocrats". 

Marion King Hubbert had foreseen many things correctly in his career, mainly about oil production. But he had also joined a group called the "technocrats" who proposed that technical experts should run governments. Maybe he was right also in this prediction, as the recent events in Italy may indicate.

Professor Mario Monti has been appointed by the President of the Republic as the new head of the Italian Government, replacing the democratically elected, but disastrous, Silvio Berlusconi. I am not sure of whether Mr. Monti likes to be defined as a "technocrat,"  but the term fits his present job very well. Is this the start of a new trend? It is too early to say but, who knows?


Big Gav has an interesting post on "peak Energy" about the rise of Mario Monti in Italy .