The First Summer Academy of the Club of Rome, a Comment by Tatiana Yugay

Tatiana Yugay is professor at the Plekhanov University in Moscow. She is an expert in issues related to the world market of oil and gas. A post of her on this subject can be found here. Above, you can see her in a tree-hugging moment at the Botanical Garden of the University of Florence.

Now that Ugo Bardi has finished presenting on his blog the main speakers at the 1st Club of Rome Summer Academy 2017, at the Florence University, I'd like to share my impressions about this great event. Of course, the speakers were rather prominent, all of them - authors of solid books and\or founders of innovative movements but it was no less interesting to watch reaction and feedback from the audience. Being a university professor, I'm very curious to observe differences between my students and those from other universities.

I was really delighted to meet so many competent and enthusiastic young intellectuals who were ready to save the world today! They were great listeners; very supportive and pro-active at the same time. They put very thoughtful and intelligent questions, sometimes not easy to answer. They were ready to laugh at a good joke or cheer at a statement that met their opinion.

While exchanging opinions with some participants during coffee breaks, I understood that they appreciated most of all those speakers who explored new fields of knowledge, used novel approaches or presented results of their own research illustrated by concrete data.

They wouldn't let go Anders Wijkman, Co-President of the Club of Rome, after his presentation of the Club's concepts. They asked plenty of questions to Kate Pickett from the University of York, who during many years studied problems of inequality. I was glad that contemporary young people are so much concerned about this social problem. They applauded to Ugo Bardi's visual demonstration of the Seneca Cliff.

They were deeply impressed by a groundbreaking discourse by Chandran Nair, Founder of the Global Institute for Tomorrow. In all other respects, they were quite normal modern people. They enjoyed the cultural program in fabulous Florence, dinners in sustainable gardens and each other's company. In sum, this very special young audience is a dream of every university professor and I wish all of them to realize their ambitious plans and desires!

Young activists: are they enough to save the world? Notes from the 1st Summer School of the Club of Rome

Above, an image that I think summarizes the spirit of the 1st Summer School of the Club of Rome, held this September in Florence. A lot of good will, enthusiastic young (and not so young) people, a stellar cast of speakers, in-depth discussions, and state of the art world modeling. But is it enough?

A week of full immersion in the First Summer School of the Club of Rome. Truly an experience for many reasons. One was the sheer physical fatigue of keeping track of everything. If you are one of the organizers of an event like this one, you can't even think that something could go wrong while many sessions are taking place together and people move from one place to another. I don't think that in my life it ever happened to me that I went to bed and I couldn't sleep because I was too tired. But, this time, yes, it happened.

Was it worth it? As far as I can say, yes. It was something that I would have loved to attend when I was in my 20s; it would have changed my life. Actually, my life changed anyway, as human lives tend to do. But for these young people (some young at heart) it was surely a positive experience. I was only marginally involved in assembling the school's program, but the staff of the Club of Rome did a great job in putting together a number of high level speakers and also organizing plenty of space for seminars and informal discussion. It was also a good idea to break the school in two halves, with the Sunday in between left free for the social program and for participants to relax and enjoy their time together. We offered them a chance to visit places that the ordinary tourist has no time to see. From the "Skeleton Room" of the "La Specola" science museum to the Roman Theater on the Hill of Fiesole and much more, including an "archeological dinner" where they were served the food that the ancient Etruscans ate (or that we believe they ate; the archaeology of cuisine is an iffy matter). Maybe these people won't change the world by themselves alone, but I think they will at least try. For sure, they will have a hard time; much harder than we had at their age. At least, they have been warned on what to expect.

In a series of posts on the Cassandra blog (just scroll down), you'll find descriptions and impressions of some of the talks. In this post, here are a few pictures to give you some idea of the friendly atmosphere of the Academy.

The Rector of the University of Florence, Luigi Dei, inaugurates the academy.

Ice-breaking games with the Secretary General of the Club of Rome, Graeme Maxton 

The discussion was always lively, with plenty of questions and comments during and after the talks. Here, the participants are crowding to ask question to Chandran Nair.

Testing state of the art world models in an interactive session. With Ilaria Perissi (red shirt) and Jordi Solé (standing with gray shirt)

Some participants Trying a "lampredotto" (organ meat) sandwich, a traditional Florentine food.

The skeleton room of the La Specola Museum, with curator Gianna Innocenti.

Visiting the Wax Room of the Specola museum. These ancient wax pieces had an important role in the progress of anatomy a few centuries ago. Now they are mainly a curiosity, but they have historical value and they are surely impressive. 

Some of the participants explore the ruins of the ancient Roman Theater of Fiesole

The Etruscan dinner: it included some plain food such as eggs, that seem to have been an Etruscan favorite dish, to reconstructions of the ancient "garum" fish sauce and something called "scottiglia", which is a curious mix of meat and strange sauces that (maybe) the Etruscans would eat.

And, finally, the traditional group photo in front of the university building of Via Capponi, in Florence

Resource wars and the current geopolitical unrest as seen from Russia. A speech from Tatiana Yugay at the 1st Summer Academy of the Club of Rome in Florence

Professor Tatiana Yugay of Plekhanov University in Moscow speaks at the first summer academy of the Club of Rome in Florence. 

The Summer Academy of the Club of Rome is in full swing in Florence. Many things are being discussed and I'll see to present a summary of the main points in future posts. Here, I think I can already start with the presentation by professor Tatiana Yugay who brought to the school a voice from outside the Western World. Professor Yugay is an expert in geopolitical issues and, in particular, she works on questions related to oil and gas. Her thesis at the meeting was that much of the current world unrest can be seen as the result of the ongoing wars for mineral resources which are becoming scarce. She also noted that this situation may be one of the main causes for the rising inequality trends almost everywhere in the world.

In the following, an example of prof. Yugay's work in this field.

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This is an abridged version of a review of Douglas Reynolds' book "Cold War Energy" by Tatiana Yugay and Ugo Bardi published on Energy Research & Social Science, Volume 34, December 2017, Pages 200-201. For the complete text, write me (ugo.bardi(thingything)unifi.it).

Book Review

Cold War Energy. The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union, D. Reynolds. Alaska Chena LLC, Alaska (2016).

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.07.011t

The fall of empires is a much-studied subject, but also one where an agreement on the cause (or causes) of the fall seems to be extremely difficult to find. For, instance, in the case of the Roman Empire, Demandt [1] describes some 210 theories on why Rome fell, and this is probably an incomplete list. Overall, however, we can divide this domain into two main subsets: theories based on several independent causes acting together (concauses) and theories based on a single cause that generates a cascade of different effects. An example of the first approach – many concauses – is the recent study by Cline on the Bronze Age Civilization [2]. The other approach is probably best represented by John Tainter’s study “The Collapse of Complex Societies” [3] where he identifies a general factor in the decline and fall of civilizations and empires as the “diminishing returns of complexity.”

Douglas Reynolds’ book, “Cold War Energy” examines the most recent case of the fall of a large empire, that of the Soviet Union. It does so falling straight into the camp of the proponents of “single cause collapse.” In this case, Reynolds identifies this cause as the peak of oil production in the Soviet Union, in turn related to the increasing costs of production generated by progressive depletion. 

With some exceptions [4] Reynolds’ interpretation is clearly minoritary. In Russia, today, the prevalent opinion seems to be that the Union’s fall was due to the mistakes, or the outright betrayal, of the secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev. In the West, a commonly reported opinion is that the fall of the Soviet Union was the result of a secret agreement between the leaders of the US, UK, and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis agreed to flood the market with cheap petroleum and this caused a loss of revenues for the Soviet Union that depended on petroleum exports for its economy. In general, the most common interpretations focus on shortcomings of the Soviet economic system, namely the lack of the incentives produced by the free market that prevented the Union from attaining the same efficiency of the West in resource exploitation.

Reynolds’ interpretation, instead, is original and interesting since it turns completely around the way the subject is normally discussed. Reynolds focuses on the Union’s strengths, rather than its shortcomings. Reynolds makes the bold step of trying to look for similarities – rather than for differences – between the Soviet Bloc and the Western Bloc. 

Reynolds’ analysis leads us to follow the trajectories of the two superpowers of the 20th century, the USA and the USSR. Reynolds uses the modern concept of energy return on investment (EROI) to show that both countries faced increasing costs of extraction for the vital resource that was crude oil. Neither was able to allocate sufficient capital resources to continue the growing production trend and both went through a production peak. Reynolds makes a strong case for peak oil being a major factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union and he also notes the relevance that this interpretation may have on our modern globalized world which is facing a global peak in the oil production, right in this period. The ongoing social and political turmoil, notes Reynolds, can be seen as similar to the events that brought down the Soviet Union. 

A weak point of the book is that it remains strongly focused on the Soviet Union but doesn’t make an in-depth comparison with how the peaking phenomenon played out in other regions of the world. There are other cases of states that collapsed or went into economic crisis and political turmoil in correspondence with their productive peak: one is Iran, which peaked around 1975, shortly thereafter experiencing the collapse of the ruling Pahlavi dynasty. Other, more recent, cases of peaking followed by turmoil are those of Egypt, Yemen, and Syria. None of these cases are discussed in the book, although an extensive comparison is made with the case of the United States, whose oil production peaked in 1970. Also here, however, we lack an explicit explanation of why the peaking of the internal energy production had such different effects on these two large producing regions. If peak oil is the underlying factor of the collapse of complex societies, why are we talking about the “Former Soviet Union” and not of the “Former United States of America?” (even though the latter term might become useful in a non-remote future).

Reynolds is very passionate about his peak oil hypothesis as the cause of the Soviet collapse that, helps him to further develop and enrich the macroeconomic analysis. On the other hand, we should all be wary of the old saying that goes as ‘when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail'. It is valid for peak oil as well.