Can you imagine being a whale? A tale of empathy and communication

From left to right in the photo, Ishmael, Captain Ahab, and Captain Peleg. Actually, the top-hatted, harpoon-bearing person in the center is me (Ugo Bardi) giving a talk on sustainability in Bagnaia, Italy, on July 17, 2019. Near me, Albert Bates (right in the photo) and Simone (left in the photo -- sorry that I don't know his last name).

Some people see whales as nothing more than an economic resource. But, for many of us, whales are an endless source of fascination. Herman Melville, in particular, may have been the first person in history who tried to see the world from the viewpoint of a whale, as he does in his "Moby Dick" novel. It is not an easy task, surely, what can whales see with their small eyes, located the sides of their gigantic heads? But, once you start to follow this line of thought, you discover a whole new world where whales see the world not with their eyes but with their sophisticated sonar system. 

Whales and men are truly alien to each other, even though they had a common ancestor, a furry creature living at the time of the dinosaurs, more than 60 million years ago. From then on, the ancestors of the two species lived in completely different environments, unaware of each other, until the hominin known as "homo sapiens" took to the waters and started a true war on whales. It started perhaps as early as in Neolithic times, but its pace and violence enormously increased in recent times. And the whales are losing it. 

Why this war? Why did we need to erase entire populations of whales, such as the "Right Whale" of which just a few are left alive in the Earth's oceans? The question is deeper than it seems and it can't be solved simply in terms of optimizing the exploitation of an economic resource that just happens to be in the form of a giant sea mammal. Who gave us the right to think of these creatures as resources?

The story is long and it is one of the subjects of the book I am writing with my colleague, Ilaria Perissi, that should be titled "The Empty Sea" (sorry that it will be in Italian). Let me just say that I am working on it on the basis of the concept of "biotic regulation" developed by Victor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva. It can be seen as a "strong" version of the concept of Gaia proposed by James Lovelock. The idea is that all the elements of an ecosystem are tightly coupled with each other and it is that the reason for the ability of the ecosystem to maintain itself in relatively stable conditions. 

Something that Makarieva and Gorshkov don't emphasize is that, in order for the system to work as a control system, the elements composing it must communicate with each other. There follows that if we need to maintain the Earth system reasonably stable, we don't just need to optimize whaling for human needs -- we need to communicate with whales. It means, within some limits, becoming a whale, or at least trying to understand what a whale is. It is, in the end, a question of empathy, not of economics.

I don't claim that all this is completely clear to me, as I said, I am still working on it. Anyway, giving talks on things you don't completely understand -- yet -- is a way to improve. This is what I did last week in Bagnaia where, among other things, I had a chance to meet Albert Bates in person. Albert wrote a comment on my talk that I am reproducing below. As he notes, not everything in this story is completely clear. Indeed, learning is always a journey, not a destination

(h/t Cristina)

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It was a dried gourd that brought whales to the edge of extinction in the 19th Century. 

by Albert Bates - Resilience 

For some time now I have been writing in this space that our Achilles Heel as a species may have come at a fork along our evolutionary biology pathway many millions of years ago. Relatively few others of our fellow creatures decided to follow our lead, and for good reason. We decided to sweat.

Having sweat glands conferred an immediate advantage, the type of advantage our kind also seems to select for, rather than thinking through the more distant implications. Only primates — such as humans, monkeys, and apes — and horses have skin covered by sweat glands to regulate their body temperature through evaporation of water. Maximum sweat rates of an adult human can be 2-4 liters per hour or 10-14 liters per day. Dogs and cats, which have just a few such glands, accomplish temperature regulation by panting, which evaporates water from the moist lining of their oral cavity. Elephants manage it with capillaries in their giant, flapping ears (Woolly Mammoths, unfortunately, lacked those and were hunted to extinction).

As bipedal athletes, our ancestors could not dash as fast as deer, boar, or zebras but had the advantage of sweat. We could keep up a fast pace longer than our prey could. As the prey overheated, they were forced to slow down. As we overheated, we only needed to refill our water reserve— hence the gourd. It became as important as the spear. Fear, anxiety, stress, and pain can also cause us to sweat because our biological instincts kick in and prepare us to run.

Ugo Bardi teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence, in Italy. I have been following his writing on biophysical economics, system dynamics modeling, and metahistory for more than 20 years. His blog in English is Cassandra’s legacy. His most recent book in English is Extracted: How the Quest for Global Mining Wealth is Plundering the Planet (Chelsea Green 2014). He was also the author of The Limits to Growth Revisited (Springer 2011).

In essays just this month so far, he seems to have debunked the notion that the Roman Empire fell from climate change, but raised the possibility that its fall caused a climate change; described how Earth’s ecosystem controls climate by the biotic pump; how the mountain Ebih “melted into a vat of sheepfat” in the 3rd Millennium BCE; and how in times of crisis the panicked elite do not react with reasoned debate, but with the usual combination of lies, damned lies, and propaganda.

I was delighted to have the chance to experience Ugo in person when he gave a lovely workshop entitled, La Grande Transizione — Da Dove e Per Dove (The Great Transition — From Where and To Where) at the annual convergence of GEN-Europe in Comune di Bagnaia, Italy, this week. What was surprising was not what he said, because he left many of the questions he raised unanswered, but how he lectures.

Describing how Herman Melville developed his empathy for the whale, Bardi donned Ahab’s top hat and fastened his sister-in-law inside a raincoat so that her arms were replaced by empty sleeves for fins, then set out with a spear to chase her around the tent.

How did these small humans in their rowed boats kill these leviathans, he asks. Why didn’t these mammals, who were much faster and stronger, merely swim away? He holds up the gourd.

In whaling, the gourd takes the form of an empty oak cask, attached to a line. If the harpooner can toss a barbed dart into the thick skin of the whale as it passes his boat, the whale is doomed. The barb may cause some superficial bleeding but is not fatal by itself. Attach a cask to its line, however, and now the whale is unable to dive to safety. As it swims, pursued by the rowboat, the drag of the line wears it out. Eventually, the boat overtakes the whale and delivers the coup de grâce, usually by a lance driven through the creature’s heart.

In a 2004 post to the Oil Drum, Bardi wrote:

In his 1878 book, Alexander Starbuck cited several factors for the decline of production of the whale fisheries in times that for him were recent. He seems to have believed that it was not the extermination of the whales that caused the decline but, rather, the increase of the human population which led to “an increase in consumption beyond the power of the fishery to supply.” But it was also clear to him that the cost and the length of voyages had increased beyond reasonable limits. He did cite “the scarcity and shyness of whales” as a problem, but he stops short of saying that the whale stock was depleted beyond recovery. Most likely, the concept of “extinction” was alien to him, as it was to most of his contemporaries.

Our perception problem with crude oil is equivalent to that of Starbuck, and indeed it is perhaps more severe. The concept of the terminal depletion of a mineral resource is alien to us, since there have been no worldwide precedents. In addition, we are apparently just near the midpoint on the production curve, so we still have to experience the peak, the associated price rise, and the decline. What the future has in store is uncertain: perhaps an energy equivalent of the “rock oil” of Starbuck’s times will materialize in the near future. But if it does not materialize we will have to live with depletion and before long begin to see lamps going out.

So what is our lesson here? Bardi never really got to that, but my takeaway was that we humans have immense technological hubris but little empathy. Bardi said we have developed empathy for honeybees, pandas, and whales but are unlikely to do that for mosquitoes and cockroaches. Unless we can imagine ourselves within the web of life, instead of seeing ourselves as its masters, we are doomed.

I think we risk destruction by many separate routes. We can fill our gourds to slake our thirst, but these days the water is likely contaminated with microplastics. The plastic spear Bardi used to illustrate his whale story is killing more whales now when it is discarded than Ahab could have with forged iron at the tip of a wooden pole.

One real problem we will face stems from that evolutionary decision about sweat glands that our ancestors made.

Orcas, thanks to subcutaneous fat stores, can withstand water temperatures ranging from 0° to 30–35°C (32–95°F). Certain species of tardigrade, including Mi. tardigradum, can withstand and survive temperatures ranging from –273 °C (near absolute zero) to 150 °C in their anhydrobiotic state. Humans have no such tolerance.

Certain sharks, tuna, billfishes, birds and mammals, including ourselves, are endothermic, or “warm-blooded” in common parlance. We have a larger number of mitochondria per cell than ectotherms, enabling us to generate heat by increasing the rate at which we metabolize fats and sugars. If we get too hot, we sweat. If we get too cold, we shiver, sit in strong sunlight, bundle in furs, or burn fat faster.

To sustain higher metabolism, we need several times the food intake of ectothermic animals. Endothermism has its advantages, such as a constant core temperature for optimum enzyme activity. We are not only ourselves under the skin but an entire community. Our human microbiome is optimally advantaged at 37°C (98.6°F).

But endothermism also has disadvantages. If we get too hot we try to slow our metabolic burn. That is what happens during sleep when our core temperature drops typically 1°C. It’s also why the greatest threat to life during heat waves may be during the night when bodies cannot stay cool enough to survive.

When relative humidity is 100%, sweating does nothing to cool us. Hotter air can store more water than colder air. When the human body is exposed to constant temperatures of approximately 55°C (131°F) longer than a few hours, death is almost inevitable. In the early stages, we may try to slow heat generation by ceasing activity. If the heat persists, the effects of our diminished metabolism damage our central nervous system first, especially the brain and those parts concerning consciousness; then heart rate and respiration decrease; judgment becomes impaired as drowsiness supervenes, becoming steadily deeper until we lose consciousness. Mammalian muscle becomes rigid with heat rigor at about 50°C (122°F), with that sudden rigidity of the whole body rendering life impossible.

Humans may catch lethal hyperthermia when a wet-bulb temperature (heat index) is sustained above 35°C (95°F) for six hours. In these conditions, if the temperature of the surroundings is greater than that of the skin, the body actually gains heat by radiation and conduction. Peter Sinclair writes: “Stepped outside yet today? Today in the midwest is what a normal summer day will be like in a few decades.” National Geographic: “In less than 20 years, millions of people in the United States could be exposed to dangerous “off-the-charts” heat conditions of 127 degrees Fahrenheit or more….”

Sadly, hyperthermia occurs in birds, insects, fishes, land animals, and plants of course, too. The sacred lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) can sustain 20 degrees C (36 degrees F) above air temperature while flowering by breaking down starch in their roots, consuming oxygen at a rate of a flying hummingbird, but lacks a similar ability to cool itself. Many plants do not flower, do not fruit, and do not reproduce themselves when it is too warm.

We will need better tools than gourds if we are going to survive this time. We need to discover empathy. And then plant a whole lot of trees.

Saving the World: Top-Down or Bottom-Up? A Review of the Latest Report to the Club of Rome, "Come On"

Come On: Capitalism, Short-termism and the Destruction of the Planet. A new Report from the Club of Rome. By Ernst von Weizsaecker and Anders Wijkman -  Book Review by Ugo Bardi

Nearly half a century has passed since the publication, in 1972, of the first – and still the most famous – report of the Club of Rome, “The Limits to Growth.” That first report was heavily criticized but, nowadays, it is turning out that it had correctly identified the main lines of the trajectory that the human industrial society was to follow and is still following. To the authors of this report and to their mentor, Jay Forrester, goes the merit of having identified for the first time the critical problem that we are facing nowadays, that of “overshoot”, exceeding the limits that the planetary ecosphere can sustain and forcing humankind to a return within the limits that could be painful or even disastrous.

Today, the Club of Rome keeps following its tradition of studying the long-term prospects of humankind facing the twin challenges of resource depletion and climate change. The latest report of the Club on these matters is “Come On” by Anders Wijkman and Ernst Von Weizsacker, published with Springer in 2017, in occasion of the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the Club.

Clearly, this is a book which has been thoroughly planned and carefully created. The text is divided into three parts: 1) A review of the currently unsustainable trends, 2) A review of how to look at the situation 3) A discussion of solutions designed to avoid disaster. It is a sort of Aristotelian syllogism structure.

The first part, the review of the current trends, is – in my opinion – the best part of the book. It is a well thought-out review which doesn’t shun from facing some politically unnameable subjects, such as that of overpopulation and of the need to stop its growth. The unsustainable nature of the current agricultural system is also discussed in detail here. This section is also an excellent summary of the results of the first version of “The Limits to Growth” and how the scenarios of that early work have played out in our world. The “Come on!” here, refers to how obvious all this should be, but it isn’t in the current debate.

The second part of the book is a review of the theories and models currently used to understand the situation in which we find ourselves. This section provides a description of religious views of the relation of humankind with the world, starting with the Pope’s encyclical letter “Laudato si” and then moves to a detailed criticism of the current economic theories. It includes also a very interesting section on the moral imperative of change and on the need of a “new enlightenment” rather than a “new rationalism.” It is correctly recognized that a purely rational choice is often framed in a short-term vision and it may lead to effects opposite to those intended.

In this second section, the “Come On” is referred to the need of not sticking to outdated but still current philosophies, especially in economics. It is what the authors call a "mind shift," that we may describe in terms of the often mentioned (although probably apocryphal) quote by Albert Einstein, "we cannot solve problems with the same thinking that created them.” This is the context in which the quest for a new enlightenment should be seen. A fundamental element of this vision is the circular economy, returning to the ecosystem what we took from the ecosystem. It is a concept that's making inroads in the debate, but much work remains to be done to make it real and not just an empty slogan.

Finally, the third part of the book. This is the most ambitious section, indeed it is as long as the first two summed together. It is also the most difficult and complex: what to do, in practice? Here, the authors face a problem that has affected the Club’s analysis over the past 50 years: who should act to save humankind from destruction?

The initial attitude of the Club on this point was heavily influenced by the personality of the Club’s founder, Aurelio Peccei. In the 1960s, Peccei had developed a vision that saw humankind as an ekklesia, a gathering of free and equal citizens of the world. As a consequence, the Club tended to propose actions that were to be agreed upon by all the citizens of the Earth by means of a democratic process. It was a top-down vision, in the sense that it implied that the choices made by the people were to be enforced by some kind of world government, or at least by an association of all the existing governments

As we all know, this approach has not worked. Peccei was misunderstood and the Club of Rome was accused of planning a world dictatorship and all sorts of nefarious actions, including even a new holocaust designed for population control. It was all false. As you can read in my book "The Limits to Growth Revisited," it was just propaganda, but it turned out to be effective in demonizing the Club of Rome and protecting the special interests of various lobbies. But then, what to do?

50 years after that first report, the authors of “Come On” describe a different approach, basically focused on the “bottom-up” strategy. This choice appears most clearly in the third section of the book, which is dedicated to practical, implementable solutions, such as agro-ecology, the blue economy, regenerative urbanization, benign investments, and much more. The basic idea is always the same: do not force people not to do something with laws coming from a government (top-down). Encourage them to choose to do something for their own benefit (bottom-up).

For instance, instead of forcing people to emit less CO2, encourage them to use technologies which don’t emit it and that make people save money. Or help people seeing the economic advantages of waste recycling. Or show them how they can save money by using the public transportation system instead of private cars. Here, the "Come on" statement refers to pushing people to overcome their inertia and stop sticking to their old ways simply because they never thought there were other ways of doing the same things.

The third chapter goes on for about 100 pages and I won’t try to summarize it here – it is surely worth reading for the wealth of ideas it carries. But will this approach work? The answer remains unclear. If we compare the "top-down" and the "bottom-up" approaches, we see that neither has done much to stop the ongoing unsustainable trends. Decades of attempts of setting up top-down international treaties to reduce, for instance, the overexploitation of resources has brought very little in terms of results - for instance, the CO2 emissions keep increasing. On the other hand, the bottom-up approach is successful in some areas, but not with most people. Just as an example, it would seem strange that people buy the expensive and useless vehicles called "SUVs." It is not a rational choice, one feels like telling SUV owners something like "come on, why are you wasting your money in this way?" Yet - today - about one car in three sold in Western countries is an SUV. The fact that some people choose to use bicycles, instead, doesn't change the situation.

All this doesn't mean that the world is not changing, just that it is not changing fast enough (and this can be quantitatively demonstrated). It means, also, that we have to keep pushing for the change to occur in the right direction. Probably, neither a purely bottom-up nor a purely top-down approach can save humankind. We need an integrated approach. The "Come on" book is a step in the right direction.

Education for the Transition? My 2nd Seminar in Paris

There I am, together with Gaell Mainguy, Directeur du développement et des relations internationales du Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires in Paris. It was on Wednesday, Oct 11 and we are on the 21 floor of the "Tour de Montparnasse", spectacular view of Paris and of the Eiffel Tower.

We had a good hour or more of discussion about the role of education in shaping our future. I was truly impressed by the competence and the dedication of the people who participated in the debate. Yet, I remain somewhat skeptical about the possibility for education - at any level - to change society.

On this point, I have some personal experience as a teacher, but more than my limited record I tend to trust Jorgen Randers, one of the original authors of "The Limits To Growth" who defined himself as "a depressed man with a smiling face." That was for various reasons, one was that after, maybe, 40 years of teaching his students about sustainability, he observed that when they moved into the real world, outside the university, they behaved exactly in the same way as the people who had not been taught these matters. Dennis Meadows told me something very similar regarding his own experience. And all that fits well with my personal experience.

Basically, people normally tend to go along the path of lowest resistance and in a society that does not reward sustainability-oriented actions, they will rapidly learn how to maximize their utility function, even though that means forgetting what they learned in school.

That doesn't mean it is useless to teach sustainability and, of course, no rule is without exception. Maybe the kind of creativity that people can develop after a certain training remains an asset all over their life. It means, however, that as long as society remains what it is, the lofty principles that we learn from the science of ecosystems will not be put into practice. So, what is the solution? Well, a good Seneca Cliff can do wonders in terms of changing things!


Apart from lofty principles and Seneca cliffs, a good beer in Paris is always a good thing! Here I am, after the seminar, in a bistrot of Montparnasse together with Jean Pierre Dieterlen, a member of the Adrastia association.

H/t Jacques Chartier-Kastler for the organization of this meeting

My first presentation on the energy transition in Paris: is it a problem or a change?

My first presentation in Paris, yesterday, one of at least four that I am planning to give here (busy times!!). It was at the Ecole National Superieure (ENS) and it was centered on the Energy Transition, as part of a seminar involving several presentations.

Overall, I'd say that all the presentations were good with some very competent speakers. The problem that I have in these debates/seminar is always the same. People tend to think of the transition in terms of a problem. And if it is a problem, it means it has a solution (or maybe not). But if the transition is a change, then it is not a question of solutions, you cannot solve a change, you can only adapt to a change.

So, many pretended "solutions" are ways to oppose change, one that was proposed at the seminar was to exchange all tungsten filament bulbs with LED lights. Fine, it will allow us to save a lot of energy. But the change is deeper and it goes at the heart of everything we do in this society. We need to think systemic, not problem-specific. It is not just question of changing our light bulbs, it is a complete ecosystemic change.

And so we continue. Change continues to occur, too.

(h/t Daniel Moulin, image courtesy Camille Olinet)

We’ll always have the Sun: solar energy and the future of humankind

Above, Rick (Humphrey Bogart) speaks to Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) in the movie “Casablanca” (1942). Here, the sentence has been a little changed. In the film, the phrase refers to “Paris”, not “The Sun”. But in the debate on the future of civilization, there is only one certainty: we’ll always have the sun.

This post was originally published on Aug 15, 2017 by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowdfunded investigative journalism project for people and planet. Support us to keep digging where others fear to tread.

In this eight contribution to the INSURGE symposium, ‘Pathways to the Post-Carbon Economy’, Ugo Bardi, Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Florence, Italy, reflects on the importance of transitioning away from fossil fuels and how it, inevitably, means we should engage with some form of renewable energy. But, he points out, while such a transition requires us to recall the fundamental role of the Sun as the primary energy source for all our activities, it also means we will have to re-think and re-do civilization-as-we-know-it. Whatever happens, much of what we have taken for granted in our consumer-centric societies today will be increasingly meaningless in the post-carbon future. What we do know, concludes Bardi, is that we will always have the Sun: the question remains — what will we, and can we, do with it?

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As it becomes clear that we must get rid of fossil fuels before they get rid of us, a question is being asked over and over:

“Can renewables replace fossil fuels?”

Some people have been sufficiently impressed by the rapid decline of the price of renewable energy that their answer is not only, “yes,” but that switching to renewables will be fast and painless. It will come simply as the result of the free market mechanisms, at most aided by a little magic called “carbon tax”. Then, economic growth will continue unabashed in the best of worlds.

Others take the opposite position. Noting that renewables require large investments in the energy infrastructure, that they don’t easily produce liquid fuels, that they can’t support energy “on demand,” and more, they conclude that renewables are useless; an illusion, if not an outright scam.

This viewpoint is further split in two views. One seems to welcome the collapse of an energy-starved economic system and the associated return to the Middle Ages, or even to extinction. The other simply sees fossil fuels as a good thing to be kept and subsidised. After all, CO2 is food for plants, isn’t it?

The debate is raging and, as usual in debates, rational arguments seem to have little weight in them, and we could go on forever debating arcane technological details.

But I would rather point out that maybe all this discussion is based on a wrong question.

Axiom 1: Asking if renewable energy can replace fossil energy implies that the only possible civilization is our civilization as it is nowadays, including SUVs parked on every driveway and vacation trips to Hawaii by plane for everyone.

But keeping these incredibly expensive wastes of energy will obviously be impossible in the future, even imagining that we were able to stay with fossil fuels for another century or even more.

We are hitting so many physical limits on this planet that the question is a completely different one. I could frame it as this:

“How can renewable energy help us in getting rid of fossil fuels, while maintaining at least a minimum indispensable supply of energy to society?”

Seen in these terms, are renewables a help or a hindrance? I would say that they are not only a help, but a big help and a great hope. To explain this point, I think we need another little reframing.

Rather than speaking of “renewables”, I would use the term “solar energy.”

This term includes technologies which directly exploit sunlight, such as photovoltaics, and those which do that indirectly, such as wind turbines (this definition doesn’t include geothermal, but it is a detail).

Once we frame the question in this way, we see the following:

Axiom 2: Solar energy has been used by humans for a long, long time. Agriculture is the most ancient technology directly using sunlight, while windmills and watermills are indirect methods of exploiting sunlight, used for millennia in the past. What we have been doing recently consists of developing more efficient ways to do exactly what we have been doing in our remote past.

Photovoltaic energy is a sophisticated way to duplicate in a solid-state devicewhat biological photosynthesis does in the leaves of plants. The modern wind turbines are upgraded versions of the old windmills. The same is true for hydroelectric plants, today more efficient than in the past, but still basically the same.

The real oddball in the panorama is fossil energy; something that has been around in a massive form for just a couple of centuries and that will disappear in a century or less, no matter what dreams of energy dominance may be popular in Washington D.C.

This said, we could examine the arguments against solar energy that pervade the debate. For instance, that modern solar energy technologies are not really renewable because they cannot produce enough energy to replace themselves after their lifetime is over. Or that their energy yield is so low as to make them useless. Or that they need rare minerals that will soon run out. Or that an industrial civilization can’t survive without having energy “on demand”, that is available 100% of the time, always at the same price. And many others.

Here, in part we are dealing with people who can’t conceive a world different than the one they are used to. In part, we are dealing with objective difficulties which, however, may have some technological solutions.

As an example, consider the common objection of the low energy yield of solar energy. It is often expressed in terms of “EROI”( (energy return on investment) a concept made popular by professor Charles Hall.

It is said that the EROI of solar energy is very low in comparison to that of fossil fuels and that for this reason solar energy is useless. But this is just wrong.

Let me ask you a question: what was the EROI of fossil fuels at the time of the Apollo program that sent men to the moon? Was it an order of magnitude larger than that of solar energy, as it is sometimes said? No, it was around 20–30, about the same EROI that we have today for wind turbines and not much larger than that of photovoltaics.

Surely, then, these values are not so small as to make solar energy useless.

As another example, it is easy to find on the web that solar cells need expensive and rare elements. Once again, this is not the whole truth, as solar cells can be made using only materials that are common in the earth’s crust, mainly silicon, aluminum and oxygen.

We could spend a lot of time in this discussion, but the point that I would like to make here is this:

Insight: All these objections have been unable to disprove that solar energy today is a set of robust and economically viable technologies.

The most advanced ones (solar and wind) account for a significant, although still small, fraction of the world’s energy mix, about 6% of the global electric power production and around 1.6% of the total energy consumption.

Can they grow to 100% without the world’s economy collapsing and without climate going over the “tipping point”? They could, according to a study carried out by Sgouridis, Csala, and myself.

We used the term “Sower’s Strategy” for a concept analogous to what ancient farmers did, saving some of their current harvest for the future harvest.

Insight 2: We found that it is possible to move to a fully solar-powered society without collapsing and without wrecking the climate system, if we are willing to use the same strategy: that is, investing in solar energy a sufficiently large fraction of the energy produced today.

Will we follow the wisdom of our ancestors and save enough of our current energy harvest for our future?

Or will we waste our remaining resources in the desperate attempt to keep using fossil fuels, even putting our trust in untested and potentially counterproductive technologies such as carbon capture and sequestration? To say nothing about the risks and the uncertainties involved with a possible return to nuclear energy.

As usual, it is impossible to say what the future has in store for us, but there remains a certainty: we’ll always have the sun.

Ugo Bardi is Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Florence, Italy. His research interests encompass resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. He is a member of the scientific committee of ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil) and blogs in English on these topics at “Cassandra’s Legacy”. He is the author of the Club of Rome report, Extracted: How the Quest for Global Mining Wealth is Plundering the Planet (Chelsea Green, 2014) and The Limits to Growth Revisited (Springer, 2011) and "The Seneca Effect" (Springer 2017).

What is the worst product ever marketed?

The worst product ever marketed: the disposable butane lighter. Wasteful, expensive, non-recyclable, using non-renewable materials, having benign alternatives (matches). In short, evil. And yet, it was hugely successful. Image from Wikipedia.  

Greens often exaggerate in inviting people to save energy and be happier by staying in the dark and eating insects. However, it is also true that sometimes wastefulness goes a few notches higher and becomes truly a scandal. It is the case of the ordinary disposable lighter. Bic alone produces almost a billion lighters per year and has produced some 20 billions of them in the past 30 years. The whole world production is probably of a few billion per year. A good example of a successful product, but is it a good product?

The disposable lighter is surely practical but also, if you think about it, a very bad deal. It contains some 5 cc of butane, that you pay, typically, more than $1. That means around $200 per liter, or $800/gallon. You wouldn't be happy to pay that kind of money when you refill the tank of your car. And, being powered by a fossil fuel, butane, every time you light up one you add some CO2 to the atmosphere, some of which will stay there for tens of thousands of years.

Then, the disposable lighter doesn't contain just non-renewable fuel but plastics manufactured from fossil fuels and also polluting. Then, it contains metals such as cerium, lanthanum, neodymium, praeseodymium and more. These metals are classified as "rare earths;" they are not so rare as the name seems to imply, but they are not so common, either. And the lighter is thrown away after use and it will never be recycled. The rare earths it contains will be lost forever.

Is all that enough to qualify disposable lighters as "the worst product ever marketed"? Well, everything can be questioned, but if you line up the characteristics of a bad product as 1) uses rare and non-renewable resources, 2) is not recycled and not supposed to be recyclable, 3) is manufactured on a large scale, 4) it has non-polluting and less expensive alternatives, there are few examples other than lighters for which you can tick all the four boxes. I can hardly think of anything so wasteful to set something on fire, no matter whether you are a professional arsonist or simply an ordinary smoker.

After all, what was so wrong with using the old matches? Matches contain only recyclable materials: wood, paper, phosphorous, sulfur. I can't see anything that can be done with a lighter that cannot be done with a match, except that a lighter can burn steadily for a longer time. But if your purpose is to light up a cigarette or a kitchen burner, it makes no difference. And, by all means, there is no way that a lighter would cost less than a match, at least if manufactured on a comparable scale.

So, disposable lighters are all an example of how a combination of financial factors and government regulations can push a bad product to dominate the market. It is, after all, what has happened with fossil fuels, still gathering large government subsidies, despite the damage they are doing to all of us.

In the case of lighter vs. matches, the playing field has been made unfavorable to matches from the beginning, because they have been traditionally taxed by governments (also lighters, in some cases, but not always). Add to that the rapid expansion of the cigarette market during the past decades, with some six billion cigarettes sold worldwide every year, and growing, some large companies saw their chance. They engaged in the large scale manufacturing of lighters and they crushed the match manufacturers, mainly small companies that couldn't match (indeed!) the financial power of large corporations. The advertising power, too,  played a big role, with the appeal of colored and fashionable items that could also be collected. And it was world domination for the disposable lighter.

Could we reverse this demonic trend? Maybe there are signs of an inversion of the tendency and, not long ago, I saw again courtesy matchboxes appearing in an Italian Hotel. Maybe it was because finally (in 2015) the Italian government decided to abolish the tax on matches, a good idea that, unfortunately, arrived at least 50 years too late (the French Government did that in 1999). Whatever the case, it is high time that someone realizes that some ideas, such as disposable lighters, are evil to the bone. And that the mythical "free market" cannot turn evil into good.

But maybe you think that the old matches are passé? In this case, we have technologies for getting rid of the obsolete propane lighters without having to get back to the somewhat primitive matches. For instance, we have spark lighters that use only electricity. They are a solid state alternative to propane lighters in the same way as photovoltaic energy is a solid state alternative to fossil energy. In the picture, you see one of these super hi-tech lighters in the hands of my daughter, Donata.

So, eventually, we learn what's the good way to do things. Too bad that it is almost always too late.

Doughnut Economics:a step forward, but not far enough

Doughnut Economics, by Kate Raworth (Chelsea Green, 2017) is an interesting book that goes in the right direction in the sense that it promotes a circular economy, But it leaves you with the impression that it missed that extra step that would have lead it to define the goal in the right way. Bridging the gap between standard economics and biophysical economics is still far away.

So, what is this "Doughnut" that gives the title to the book? Initially, I had imagined that it was supposed to be a sort of mandala representing the concept of circular economy. But that doesn't seem to be the case: circular mandalas often represent the cyclical movement of a wheel, but the doughnut doesn't (as, indeed, most doughnuts are not supposed to be used as wheels). Here is how it is represented in the book:

It is described as "a radically new compass for guiding humanity this century." Ambitious, to say the least, but how is that supposed to work, exactly? Maybe I am missing something, but I not sure I can understand why the numerous concepts appearing in the figure should be arranged in a "doughnut."

The problem with the doughnut is not so much understanding why it is shaped like a doughnut, but what it lacks. Look at the outer ring; you will see 10 sectors, all related to pollution: climate change, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, etc. Something is conspicuously missing and it is not a minor element of the overall picture. It is natural resources and, in particular, non-renewable resources (*)

Natural resources, their depletion, and the related concept of "overshoot" are not just missing from the doughnut, they go mostly unmentioned and unnoticed in the whole book. To give you an example, Raworth mentions only once the 1972 study "The Limits to Growth" that was the first to pinpoint the resource problem. In a discussion of less than than two pages, I think her position can be summarized by the following statements:

Mainstream economists were quick to deride the model's design on the basis that it underplayed the balancing feedback of the price mechanism in markets. If non renewable resources became scarce, they argued, prices would rise, triggering greater efficiency in their use, the wider use of substitutes, and exploration for new sources. But in dismissing World 3 and its implied limits to growth , they too quickly dismissed the role and the effect of what the 1970s model simply called pollution ... World 3's modeling of pollution turned out to be prescient.... recent data ... find that the global economy seems to be closely tracking its business-as-usual scenario.

As it is often the case in this book, Raworth's statements need some work to be interpreted because they are always nuanced; if not vague, as when she says one should be "agnostic" about economic growth (**). Here, the interpretation seems to be that The Limits to Growth may have been right, but only because it took into account pollution. Instead, its treatment of non-renewable natural resources was wrong because depletion can be completely neutralized by market factors. Raworth doesn't seem to realize that she is contradicting herself, here: if the "business as usual" scenario produced good results in terms of comparison with the real world's economy, it is because it contained depletion as a major constraint. World 3 could also be run in the hypothesis of infinite natural resources, with pollution the only constraint, but the results would not be the same.

That's the thread of the whole book: natural resources are not a problem; we should be worried only about pollution. Raworth doesn't link the concept of the circular economy to recovering non-renewable resources; she proposes only in relation to abating pollution, with the corollary that it also brings about also better social equality. This is not wrong; it is true that a cyclical "regenerative" economy would be able, in principle, to reduce or eliminate pollution. Still, it is curious how the question of mineral resources is so conspicuously missing in the book.

Kate Raworth is described in the book flap as a "renegade economist", but she still reasons like an economist. The idea that the price mechanism will make depletion always irrelevant is old and it goes back to the 1930s, when the so-called "functional model" was presented, stating exactly what Raworth describes. The idea is that market factors will always re-adjust the system and magically make depletion disappear. By now, the functional model is deeply entrenched in the standard economic thought and there seems to be no way to dislodge it from its preheminent position.

The interesting point is that not only economists tend to dismiss depletion as irrelevant. In recent times, the whole "environmental movement" or the "Greens" have taken exactly the same position. All the debate about climate change is normally based on the supposition that minerals, and in particular fossil fuels, will remain cheap and abundant for the current century. If this is the case, it makes sense to propose to spend untold amounts of money for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) rather than for renewable energy. It goes without saying that, if this assumption turned out to be wrong, the whole exercise of CCS, if it were undertaken at the necessary scale, would turn out to be the greatest resource misplacement of resources in human history, possibly even worse than nuclear energy.

Why is that? As a puzzle, it is difficult to solve. In principle, resource depletion and its negative effects would seem to be easy to understand. Easier than the complex chain of physical factors that leads from the emission of greenhouse gases to disastrous events such as sea level rise, heat waves, hurricanes, and the like. Maybe it is just a question of the lifetime of memes. The meme of depletion started before that of climate change and it is now in its downward trend. Whatever the case, we seem to be locked in a view of the world that misses some fundamental elements of the situation. Where this special form of blindness will lead us is all to be seen. 

Getting back to Raworth's book, despite the criticism above I can also say that it is worth reading for its broad approach and the wealth of concepts it contains. Its discussion on how the science of economics came to be what it is nowadays is, alone, worth the price of the book. Although it misses part of the problem, it may open up new views for you.



(*) You may also have noticed that the concept of "overpopulation" is missing in the doughnut. On this point, Raworth maintains in the text that if people are given the possibility of having a life free of deprivation, they won't reproduce like rabbits - a concept on which I tend to be in agreement; even though its practical implementation in the current world's situation is problematic, to say the least.

(**) The idea of a "zero growth" or "steady state" society would seem to be a fundamental feature of a circular economy, but it is barely mentioned in the book

Hydrogen powered planes: can they save the airlines?

Not exactly the same thing as the current generation of planes! To run on hydrogen, the airlines would require a completely new generation of planes. (source)

Years ago, a Ukrainian colleague told me about a plan that the Soviet Union had for their military presence in the Mediterranean Sea. Because of the long supply lines from the home bases, they were thinking of using their nuclear-powered battle cruisers to produce hydrogen in order to fuel their warplanes.

I have no way to verify whether this story is true or not; I couldn't find any trace of it on the Web. But it is not unreasonable that the idea of hydrogen fueled warplanes was seriously taken into consideration in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union still had dreams of being a superpower. In any case, nothing came out of it and there are good reasons for that: a hydrogen-powered plane is an engineering nightmare for several reasons that are well described in a post by S.H. Salter that Sam Carana published on his blog a few months ago. The full post is reproduced below.

If running a warplane on hydrogen is a nightmare, doing that with the civilian airlines is much worse. Salter makes it clear how complex and difficult the task is. Hydrogen was a good fuel for the Space Shuttle, but the shuttle was not a passenger plane and it carried a gigantic external tank full of liquid hydrogen. This is because hydrogen is a good fuel in terms of weight, but it is bulky. In a passenger plane, the fuel is carried mainly in the wings, but there is just no way to do that with compressed or liquid hydrogen without completely redesigning the whole plane. And that implies replacing the whole fleet of the civilian airlines.

In a little more than a century, we went from the flimsy planes of the Wright brothers to the current generation of wide-body aircraft. The lifetime of the present planes is supposed to be around 30 years or more and it took seven years to deliver the first Airbus A380 (in 2007) from when the decision was taken to design and produce it. And the A380 makes use of proven technologies - it is just one of a long line of aircraft that have been developed and tested over more than 50 years. How long would it take to rebuild the whole airline fleet? Can we afford to do it? Will we have to ground the airlines before it is too late to avoid the worst disasters of climate change?

So, it is easy to write books about the upcoming "hydrogen based economy," assuming that all technical problems can be solved by throwing a little money at them. It is not so easy. Then, of course, there are other renewable fuels that could be used instead of hydrogen, but I will discuss that in another post, but let me tell you that things are not much better. Making a "sustainable plane" is a technological nightmare, at least if we pretend from it the performance we pretend from the current generation of planes.

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From Sam Carana's blog

Can we Design Hydrogen-Fuelled Aircraft?

S H Salter, Engineering and Electronics, University of Edinburgh.EH9 3JL.

The collection of temperature measurements by David Travis following the 3-day grounding of all US civilian flights after 9/11 showed the astonishing effect of jet exhaust on the environment. If burning hydrocarbon fuel in the stratosphere ever becomes a criminal offence, the aviation industry will have an interesting problem. A possible solution is the use of hydrogen as a fuel. Is this technically possible?

The Airbus 380 carries 250 tonnes of fuel with a total calorific value of about 1013 joules. Fuel is stowed in wing tanks but this would be a volume of about one eighth of the fuselage. The calorific value per unit mass of hydrogen is about 3.5 times that of jet fuel and so the weight of hydrogen for the same range would be only about 70 tonnes. Unfortunately the ratio of density of jet fuel to un-pressurized hydrogen is about 9000, so the design problem is how to reduce the volume ratio by about 2500. If we compress hydrogen to reduce its volume by a factor of, say, 100 we still have a fuel volume of 25 times the liquid fuel one or 3.2 times the fuselage volume. The cube root of 3.2 is 1.47 so by increasing all three fuselage dimensions by this factor we could have an aircraft with enough volume for all fuel in the fuselage but no passenger space. An increase by a factor of about 1.6 in both diameter and fuselage length would give enough volume for passengers provided they did not feel unhappy about being close to so much hydrogen.

The immediate reaction against the proposal will be triggered by embedded folk memories of the Hindenburg. Any use of hydrogen will need careful public relations. The Hindenburg survival rate was 64%, much better than crashes of modern conventional aircraft. Deaths were caused by jumping not burning. People who stayed aboard until the wreck reached the ground were unharmed. It is likely that the fire started in the fabric dope rather than the hydrogen. Because spilt hydrogen moves rapidly upwards there is much less risk than from a liquid fuel or heavier-than-air gases like butane or propane which regularly cause devastating explosions in boats and buildings. Furthermore the heat radiated by the invisible hydrogen flame is much lower than that from carbon particles in hydrocarbon flames. We can argue that hydrogen is actually safer than jet fuel, petrol and hydrocarbon gases.

We can spend the 180 tonne fuel weight-saving on gas storage bottles in the form of a low-permeability skin surrounded by wound carbon fibres. A helical winding of aluminium sheet with a low diffusion coefficient for hydrogen looks good. It can be made with the linear equivalent of spot welding. The axial stress in a thin-wall tube under pressure is only half the hoop stress, so we can use the gas tubes as fuselage strength-members. Once the fuselage bending moments are known, we can choose the wrap angle of the windings to give the right balance of directional strength. One structure might be a bundle of nine tubes in a hexagonal array with six full of hydrogen and three containing passengers. A cross section is sketched in the figure. Other configurations are being studied.

The smooth stress paths of the gas bottles would be badly disrupted by the conventional design of landing gear. Can we get rid of it? The requirements for processing the variable energy flows from renewable-energy sources have led to the development of new high-pressure oil machines using digital rather than analogue control of machine displacement. These machines have very high conversion efficiencies and very easy interfaces to computers (see http://www.artemisip.com/ ) . The extremely accurate control of very large energy flows allows many new applications. One of these involves replacing the landing gear of large passenger aircraft with a ground vehicle. Please suspend disbelief until you have considered the following facts:

1. The landing gear of the A380 weighs 20 tonnes, say, 200 passengers. This weight is carried round the world for many hours and then used for only a few minutes on each flight.
2. The landing gear occupies a substantial volume of the internal space. The volume restriction limits the travel of the landing gear and so increases acceleration forces.
3. The requirement for openings compromises the structural integrity of the fuselage and adds weight, even more passengers.
4. Landing gear must perform with very high reliability despite the weight penalty and extreme temperature cycling.
5. The full weight of the aircraft must be passed to the ground through highly stressed points.
6. Gas turbines are very inefficient for moving aircraft on the ground at slow speeds.
7. On the A380 the shape of the landing gear doors and opening spoils the aerodynamic fairness. 
8. There is a severe design conflict between tyre weight, tyre life and braking performance.

An alternative might be to provide the function of the landing gear by a special-purpose ground vehicle. It would of course have to have VERY reliable links to the aircraft ground approach electronics so as to be in exactly the right place and moving with the right velocity underneath an aircraft on final approach. However there would be no weight, volume or temperature compromises.

The contact between the landing vehicle and the aircraft would be provided by a nest of large air-filled tubes like very large, very soft V-block, running the full length of the fuselage. This would spread the weight evenly into the aircraft skin. The tube surfaces could have vacuum suckers, like an octopus, which could apply shear forces evenly to the aircraft skin. The bags could be on a frame which could have hydraulic actuators to give a much longer travel than the legs of the landing gear. Tilting this frame would remove the need for the angling of the rear underside of the fuselage required to prevent ground contact at V-Rotate. This would further reduce drag during flight. The absence of fuselage penetrations could allow safe water landings for emergency. Runways can have parallel lakes presenting a much lower fire hazard if fuel is spilt. The impact loading on the runway would be much reduced and it might even be possible to revert to grass runways with several parallel operations from any wind direction.

The ground vehicles could use Diesel engines with much higher efficiency at taxi speed than gas turbines. They could have higher acceleration during take off and higher deceleration during landing. The hydraulic transmission would also allow regenerative braking, so the kinetic energy from one landing could be used for the next take-off. All-wheel steering and the option of direct side movement would allow much better use of ground space. The ground vehicle could have many more tyres, which need have no weight or volume compromise to achieve high braking. It could have an air-knife to dry runway surfaces and remove snow. There would be plenty of time to inspect and exchange landing vehicles and they would be in use for a much higher fraction of the time. The landing vehicles could gently lower aircraft on to passive supports at each loading pier and be used for other movements while aircraft were being boarded or serviced.

Images by S H Salter, University of Edinburgh.

The volume of most aircraft wings is much below that of the fuselage and so there is not a strong reason to use gas tubes as structural wing members. However they would offer a way to offset the extra drag of the larger frontal cross-section. From the original work by Prandtl, it has long been known that sucking air from the upper surface of an aerofoil section will reduce the drag by an amount which far offsets the power needed for a suction pump. Schlichting in figure 14.9 of Boundary Layer Theory gives a graph showing a factor of more than two. An objection to suction on wings, where the outer skin is a structural member, is that perforations and slits cause stress concentrations. This should not apply to wing spars made as gas tubes supporting an unstressed skin.

It is important that using fuel does not move the centre of gravity of the aircraft. This happens automatically with fuel stowed in wing tanks. If large quantities of fuel are to be stored in the fuselage it will be necessary to have the centre of pressure of the wings close to the centre of gravity of the fuselage-engine combination. The choice of a ground-based landing vehicle suggests high wings and engine placement above the wing. In theory at least, this will give some advantage from higher air-velocity over the upper wing surface and lower noise transmission to ground level. It is much easier to service and inspect equipment if you do not have to reach above your head. Cranes lifting an engine upwards are much more convenient than forklift trucks working from below. While some change in the architecture of maintenance hangers would be required, high engines accessed from above would by no means be unwelcome to ground crew.

Gas tubes may not be ideal for connections to a low-chord wing and so the longer attachment line of a delta wing, such as used in the Vulcan and Concord and many fighter designs, should be investigated. A flat underside will relax the requirement for precision in yaw during landing. Suction may be able to offset some of the disadvantages of the delta wing as applied to civilian aircraft provided always that they can land safely after a failure of the suction system. A delta wing with a deep thickness and a leading edge made from very strong but transparent material, perhaps poly carbonate, might even allow passengers to sit in the wing enjoying a splendid view if their vertigo allows.

The range of the A 380 is 15,000 kilometres. While this may have been chosen for passenger convenience with the properties of present fuels, it is larger than necessary for trans-Atlantic flights and could allow a further volume reduction. The San Francisco to Sydney distance is only 12000 km and stops in mid Pacific could be very attractive.

Before we waste time on radical new aircraft designs and ground-based landing systems, it is necessary to confirm that burning hydrogen in gas turbines at high altitudes will be a chemically appropriate solution. If we burn hydrogen in ambient air there will be no release of carbon dioxide but there will still be the formation of nitrogen–oxygen compounds collectively known as NOXes. If these are cooled very rapidly, as in the adiabatic expansion of an internal combustion engine, they can be ‘frozen’ at the high-temperature equilibrium state with lots of very nasty acids. The lower combustion pressure and slightly slower cooling of a jet exhaust should be less severe but we want to quantify the severity of the problem. There may even be problems from ice crystals formed from the exhaust. I have asked colleagues at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research at Boulder Colorado for an opinion.

There is one engine design in which the combustion products cool slowly enough for almost all the NOX production to revert to ambient values. This is the Stirling engine originating from 1815 but abandoned because of the absence of materials with good thermal conductivity and high hot strength. Much better materials are now available. By an extraordinary coincidence, the digital hydraulic systems needed for the speed and accuracy of the ground-based landing gear can also radically change the design of Stirling engines by using hydraulics to replace the crank and connecting rods of the conventional Stirling engine. A Stirling-engined aircraft would probably have to use a ducted fan or propeller propulsion but these could still allow civilian aviation to continue in a NOX-sensitive world.

The best way to do experiments on high-altitude engine-chemistry might be from a balloon. Do we know anyone with an interest in this area?