Cassandra's legacy

How to cope with Internet spying: a tip from the Gypsies

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 20:46:00 +0000

The Gypsies (that is, the Roma) may seem like an unlikely source of inspiration for strategies to cope with the tendency of governments to spy on us over the Web. But survival is survival, everywhere and any time, and the Roma are surely experts at that. In particular, we may learn from them the strategy "non-concealment" that aims at projecting a non-threatening image to potential enemies (image from Wikipedia commons)

The Roma (whom we often call Gypsies) must know a thing or two about survival. Always a minority, not especially loved and often actively hated, they underwent all sorts of attacks, including the terrible "porajmos" (the great devouring) unleashed against them by the Nazis during the second world war. And yet, after having lived in Europe for half a millennium, they are still with us; battered and troubled, yes, but Roma as ever.

I discussed some of the Roma' survival techniques in a previous post of mine describing their practical, non-violent ways. Now, I thought that there is one further habit of the Roma that we may find interesting in view of the fact, by now unavoidable, that the government has access to all our data and to everything we do. Of course the Roma never had (and still largely don't have) this specific Internet problem; but their survival techniques can still be a source of inspiration for us in this regard.

To cope with government spying on us, we can look at the strategy that we could call "non-concealment" and that the Roma seem to practice routinely. Note how Roma campsites are always clearly visible, normally placed near roads or right inside cities. The camps are also completely open - the Roma don't seem to even dream of fortifying themselves inside. If you see a fence around a Roma camp, you can be assured that it was placed there by the Gadje (the non-Roma) to keep the Roma in and not by the Roma to keep the Gadje out. And think of how the Roma are easily recognizable when they stroll around by the way they dress. They seem to have the habit of making a point that everyone can easily know, all the time, who they are and where they are.

It is one of their survival techniques: the Roma project a non-threatening image to their nervous and aggressive neighbors. The Gadje must know that the Roma may be petty thieves, but no major threat; so they can be safely ignored. That doesn't mean that, at times, the Gadjes don't become aggressive, but it would be probably much worse if they suspected that the Roma were planning dark and dire things while hiding somewhere.

Now, let's go back to the Internet surveillance programs. What we learned recently is, actually, nothing new. You can be sure that governments never missed a chance to spy on their citizens; the Internet just gave them the possibility to do that on a massive scale. What they are doing, actually, is not so much spying on single citizens but, rather, large scale "data mining". That is, they won't (and they can't, simply because of the sheer size of the database) keep track of more than a few individuals. They do, however, identify those people who stray away from the accepted norms and select them for further investigation.

The way the system works can be understood by the story of Hasan Elahi as told by László Barabàsi in his book "Bursts" (2010). Elahi, American citizen, was detained in more than one occasion by the FBI on his returns to the US from overseas trips. One of his problems was that he had an Arab-sounding name but, more than that, it was the fact that he tended to fly a lot to foreign countries because of his artistic activities. His whereabouts brought the FBI to detain him in 2007 when he landed in New York because of what they defined as "suspicious movements after 9/11". According to Barabàsi, Elahi's movement patterns didn't fit the average patterns. He hadn't done anything wrong; he just was the nail that stands out and that gets hammered down.

Note how Hasan Elahi was behaving like a Gypsy in his nomadic habits: always in movement and never standing anywhere for a long time. And note how, as described by Barabàsi, he ended up adopting the Gypsy survival strategy: that is of projecting a non-threatening image by avoiding to conceal his movements. He started telling everyone where he was staying and where he was going, eventually developing specific Web based techniques for doing that. If you go now to Elahi's site, you can know exactly and in real time where he is and see what he is seeing there!

As you see, the Gypsy strategy is a natural consequence of being the underdog. Facing a group that is much more powerful, better armed, and not especially interested in your well being, making a stand is by all means a bad idea. Facing your government and their surveillance apparatus, as Orlov correctly argues, the worse thing to do would be to conceal your Web identity, hide behind firewalls, encrypting your data, and the like. If you do that, you'll be immediately classed among those who have something to hide and you risk being singled out for an in-depth investigation (or much worse). Getting off-line doesn't help, either. First of all, you can't really do that unless you normally live in a forest with the rest of your tribe. Second, the very fact that you tend to stay off-line makes you, again, suspicious if you belong to a cultural group (e.g. middle class Westerners) whose members are likely to use such services as Facebook and the like.

So, your best bet to cope with Internet spying may be to adopt the Roma's "non-concealment" strategy. That is, disclose everything yourself about your identity, your whereabouts, and your ideas. After all, many of us (middle class Westerners) criticize our governments but none of us, normally, has the power of doing anything that would seriously threaten them. If we avoid giving the impression that we are plotting something in secrecy, then the best strategy for the powers that be (and that control the Internet) is to leave us to our harmless antics: e-petitions, blog rants, Facebook chats and all the rest..

Of course, we can't be certain that the non-concealment strategy will always protect us. All strategies for survival are just plans for the future and reality may turn out to refuse to conform to plans. But this strategy may be our best bet (and possibly the only one) for coping with government spying in the present situation, at least while we wait for the Internet to collapse together with its masters (as Orlov, again, points out).

So, it is funny to think that our wonderful new communication technologies may be turning all of us into Gypsies; something that brings a whole new meaning to what we call the "law of unintended consequences". But, after all, the Gypsy way is just one of the many ways of being human and maybe it is not such a sad destiny to try it, even for the proud Gadje of today.

Presentation of "The Plundered Planet" in Berlin on June 10

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 14:04:00 +0000

For those of you who happen to be in Berlin or nearby; this presentation of the book "Plundering the Planet" will be held at the "Urania" scientific society, Kleiststraße 13-14, 10787 Berlin, on June 10, at 7:30 pm. It will be in English with simultaneous translation in German provided. Announcement and details here.

"Plundering the planet" in pills

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:03:00 +0000

The Berlin presentation of the new report for the Club of Rome, "Plundering the Planet" seems to have gone well and there is a lot of interest in the new book, at least for those who can read it in German! At present, I am giving interviews to the German media (in English!) and I am developing a certain "sense" for what journalists find useful for their reports. I found that you have to condense in single statements concepts that take entire chapters to be developed in the book. So, here is a selection of these statements; it is "Plundering the Planet" in pills.

- Debating about the amount of mineral reserves left is like balancing your checkbook while stranded on a desert island.

- So far, we have been thinking of mineral reserves as of soldiers lined up for battle: the more of them, the better. Saddam Hussein was thinking the same when he invaded Kuwait.

- Everybody knows that higher prices create more resources. Marie Antoinette was saying the same thing about bread and cake.

- The market can make extraction profitable, it cannot make it cheap.

- Thinking that new technologies can create mineral resources is like thinking that you can make pizza without flour, an innovative GMO yeast is enough.

- The cheapest extractive technology is the one you don't need to use.

- Drilling more is useless (the more you drill, the faster you deplete the resource), drilling deeper is no good (mineral deposits exists only near the surface), drilling the seafloor is a bad idea (most of it is geologically too young to have mineral deposits), drilling asteroids is silly (too expensive; besides, asteroids have no mineral deposits). Ah..... also printing more money doesn't help.

- Pollution is just another cost of mineral production; but one that will be paid by someone else.

- Some people say that running out of oil will save us from global warming. Perhaps. And perhaps running out of money will save you from your addiction to crack. More likely, though, you'll start getting your highs by sniffing cheap glue.

- Debating about the "energy transition" is like debating about getting old. The problem is that you don't have a choice.

- The energy transition is not just a good idea, it is the consequence of the laws of physics.

- We'll either manage the transition, or we'll be managed by the transition.

- Give fossil fuel to a man and he will have energy for one day. Teach a man how to make renewable energy and he will have energy forever

- Prediction is always difficult, especially when it has to do with the future. But if the future cannot be predicted, at least we can be prepared for it.

A new report to the Club of Rome: "Plundering the Planet" by Ugo Bardi

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 15:48:00 +0000

From the site of the Club of Rome.

Launch of the new Report to the Club of Rome by Ugo Bardi in Berlin on June 6th

The Club of Rome, in partnership with WWF Germany, the Worldwatch Institute and the German Association of the Club of Rome invites to the launch of

PLUNDERING THE PLANET

HOW TO MANAGE THE EARTH’S LIMITED MINERAL RESOURCES

The new Report to the Club of Rome by Ugo Bardi

Thursday, 6th June 2013, 11.30h – 13.00h

(Registration with refreshments begin at 11.00h)

Hotel Aquino, Tagungszentrum Katholische Akademie

Hannoversche Straße 5b, 10115 Berlin-Mitte, Germany

PROGRAMME

Ernst-Ulrich von Weizsäcker (Co-President of the Club of Rome)

Ugo Bardi (Author of Plundering the Planet)

Eberhard Brandes (CEO of WWF Germany)

Maja Göpel (Head of the Wuppertal Institute Berlin)

Erik Assadourian (Senior Fellow of the Worldwatch Institute)

Ian Johnson (Secretary General of the Club of Rome)

Questions and answers

The number of seats is limited.

The launch will be followed by a snack lunch starting at 13.00h.

The German edition of the new Report to the Club of Rome Plundering the Planet – How to Manage the Earth’s Limited Mineral Resources will be published by the oekom Verlag

ISBN-13: 978-3-86581-410-4, Munich, 2013

Background

Ugo Bardi offers a fascinating inspection into the geological history of our unique planet. The inspection makes us shiver about the gigantic forces moving tectonic plates. He explains how concentrations of metals resulted from such movements. We realize that it is the high concentration of deposits that determine the availability of metals, fossil fuels and other chemical elements and compounds.

It is against this geological background that humanity has to reflect the way of dealing with the limited treasures of our Planet. In the early phases of human history, the treasures may have appeared limitless. Limited were rather the human capacities to access the treasures. One can interpret human history as the growing capacity to access the treasures – thereby steadily increasing prosperity.

After centuries of ever more successful prospecting and exploitation of mineral resources, we have come to the point where we have to restrain ourselves because, after all, resources are not infinite.

A milestone in this debate was the publication of the first Report to the Club of Rome in 1972, The Limits to Growth. This put forward scenarios of possible development paths of humanity between 1972 and 2100. For the first time it presented a quantitative model of the path of the world’s industrial civilization as a function of the reduced availability of mineral resources.

As already stated in The Limits to Growth, we are not going to “run out” of minerals in the near future, but we are facing higher costs for extraction and exploitation. Also the amount of energy needed for a ton of pure metal is increasing as we have to rely on less highly concentrated ores. Hence, the real limits may lie in the availability of energy.

Fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) are mineral resources (of organic origin) but also represent energy resources allowing us to extract inorganic minerals. Fossil fuels have been our main source of energy for the past two centuries and have been the main factor that created the birth of the industrial revolution and the development of our present civilization.

Common sense would suggest that we start managing natural resources in a sustainable way by moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources and by decoupling economic growth from resource consumption. We would do better to avoid being deceived by the current hype of shale gas, shale oil and tar sands. They may postpone the time of real scarcity by some thirty years, but at the same time, they aggravate the problem of global warming and are likely to lock us ever deeper into industrial processes, infrastructures and consumption habits that are unsustainable in the long term.

In this Report to the Club of Rome, Ugo Bardi has now taken a look at the history, present day activities and the future of mining. He takes great care to emphasize that the world will never run out of mineral resources, but it faces an increasing depletion of “cheap” oil and high grade ores, leaving us with lower grade ores, which are more expensive to extract, more damaging to the ecosystem and more polluting. I see the book as a very valid sequel to The Limits to Growth and also as a wake-up call for a new and sustainable civilization.

Ethics of the E-Cat

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Mon, 27 May 2013 13:11:00 +0000

I said in a previous post that the story of the E-Cat has lost all interest for me in scientific terms. However, it is still interesting as a probe of the way the human mind works and for the several ethical and professional issues it raises. So, here is a letter from professor Guglielmi of the University of Bath which addresses some questions to the authors of the latest E-Cat report. It is published here with professor Guglielmi's kind permission.

From: Dr. Alessio Guglielmi
To: Drs. Giuseppe Levi, Evelyn Foschi, Torbjörn Hartman, Bo Höistad, Roland Pettersson, Lars Tegnér, Hanno Essén

Dear Doctors Levi, Foschi, Hartman, Höistad, Pettersson, Tegnér and Essén,

I have read your recent manuscript `Indication of anomalous heat energy production in a reactor device containing hydrogen loaded nickel powder´ on arXiv and I am very perplexed.

You are aware that several alleged technical mistakes have been pointed out, such as omitting control on DC current input (which has been acknowledged by Prof. Essén in a recent interview) and assuming that the output heat is released by a perfect black body (this assumption is contested by Prof. Gianni Comoretto, for example). The picture that emerges, and I am sorry if this sounds offensive, is that some crucial measures have not been taken seriously enough on a discovery that, if genuine, would alter the history of mankind.

However, I have an issue that appears to me even more important, because it concerns the very essence of your continued activities on Rossi's device. Our job as researchers is to advance knowledge, and to do so whatever we investigate must be reproducible by other researchers, so that the knowledge we generate becomes established and we can move forward. This seems at odds with your behaviour. You went to the workshop of a private individual who claims to be solving half of mankind's problems, and performed measures on a device that you could not fully control and that is not available to other researchers. Therefore, your manuscript does not contain any reproducible experience. So, how does it advance knowledge? What do we learn?

This brings me to asking another natural question: who will profit from the release of your manuscript? You do realize that Mr Rossi sells distribution licences and that he needs to convince customers to order some of his plants. There is no doubt that your manuscript will help that market, but is this something that academics should do? Is our job to help a private sell his stuff in the absence of solid, reproducible evidence?

In other words, I wonder whether you are adhering to the scientific method and I wonder whether what you are doing is legitimate for academics. Others questioned your technical ability, but I think that the ethical questions that I am posing here come before, also because they are more understandable by the layman. I trust that you appreciate my frankness, and I hope that you can prove my concerns unjustified.

I am forwarding this letter in copy to several persons who are following this matter: Ugo Bardi (Professor of Chemistry, Univ. Florence, blogger), Dario Braga (Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, University of Bologna), Sylvie Coyaud (Scientific Journalist, Il Sole 24 Ore), Camillo Franchini (blogger, former Supervisor of the CAMEN nuclear plant) and Giancarlo Ruocco (Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, La Sapienza, Rome). Whoever wishes to publish this letter is welcome to do so, of course, and I hope that also the answer could be given public form.

Could you please forward this letter to Dr. Foschi, whose address I could not find?

Best regards,

Alessio Guglielmi
University of Bath
http://alessio.guglielmi.name

E-Cat: fool me n-times.....

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Sat, 25 May 2013 10:53:00 +0000

The E-Cat keeps returning. Initially I had found it intriguing, then sort of fun (also here). Eventually, I had lost all interest in this ever-repeating story of unverified and unverifiable claims.

However, the recent publication on ArXiv of a series of tests on a new version of the E-Cat has generated a flurry of questions arriving into my mailbox. So I figure I could briefly comment on this subject, here.

Basically, the new ArXiv report is nothing new: it is the same style and substance of earlier reports from Rossi. It is true that it has at least a veneer of scientific correctness, but it falls apart after just a cursory examination. The new tests have the same problems of the earlier ones: poor experimental set-up, inadequate instrumentation, lack of reproducibility, and, more than all, the impossibility for external observers to verify the characteristics of the experimental set-up.

If you want to read an in depth criticism of these latest results, you can look at the post by Ethan Siegel of "Starts with a Bang". If Rossi and his followers want to revolutionize physics, they have to do way better than this.

Now, as I said, the story of the E-Cat keeps repeating itself. This is the n-th claim of success of a long series that has led to nothing verifiable and that has become rather boring. What's not boring in the story is the question of why these claims find so much resonance with people everywhere. It is important to understand this point, because our survival in the coming decades depends on whether we'll find good solutions for the problems we face; from mineral depletion to climate change. And good solutions need good science. Let's not forget that.

The Song of the Gallic Rooster

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Sun, 19 May 2013 10:15:00 +0000

Post by from "The Oil Crash" - Translation from Spanish by Max Iacono

As another example of the complex relation of mineral depletion, the economy, and the tendency of grabbing what is left, one way or another, this article by Antonio Turiel sheds plenty of light on the difficulties that the nuclear industry has in obtaining a steady supply of uranium

by Antonio Turiel

"All told," I say, "I would say that if France has invaded Mali, it’s for the uranium. You know that don’t you?"

"Of course I do! Everyone knows it."

Night was falling, cold, rainy and dark, over Bordeaux. I found myself looking at my friend, once my boss. He was looking at the ground and then continued in a calm voice:

"France has 89 nuclear power stations, 59 of which are commercial. 83% of the electricity produced comes from nuclear sourcing. We can’t do without uranium."

I didn’t say anything and we continued walking. I had lived for several years in France and at the time I didn’t quite understand how to interpret the curious display of cynicism and pragmatism with which the French public accepted certain kinds of barbaric actions which their government committed in the name of “La France”.

*******

For a few weeks, France has been at war. Several thousand soldiers and dozens of armored vehicles have been deployed to the battlefront in Mali. The objective: to prevent the advance of the Islamic front which has rebelled in the north of the country after the fall of Gheddafi in Lybia, and also due to the fear that the country could transform itself into one of the various nests of Jihad which is threatening the western world. Or at least this is, broadly speaking, the official explanation.

Gheddafi had kept himself in power thanks to mercenary units formed starting with various Tuareg desert tribes, and these mercenaries, -upon the fall of the Lybian dictator, -and together with the training and military equipment they had received,- took refuge with their cousins in Mali. In Mali and in Niger, for several years and periodically from time to time, various armed groups rebelled calling for and seeking better living conditions for the Tuareg. However this time their military capacities were considerably more significant. In just over a year the Tuareg took control of two thirds of the country and without Mali’s weak and corrupt army being able to do much to stop them: That the problem has the character of a civil war is evidenced also by the fact that not just a few of the various army units switched sides, something also indicating that Mali’s government does not have the unconditional support of its population.

In fact before France began its bombings on the 11th of January, both factions had agreed to a cease fire and were negotiating a peace accord. Nonetheless, France pretended to present the internal conflict as a battle for democracy and against Islamic fundamentalism and organized a coalition of African countries as a defense force. And this, so as not to appear like the old colonialist power which interferes in the affairs of its ex colony. And it even managed to secure a UN resolution to justify the intervention. But the support of its allies was nonetheless lukewarm. Other than some words of support from the United States and some cargo airplanes from its European allies, France found itself alone in its fighting in Mali, while the African coalition force is yet to arrive. The fact is that France started to deploy its troops without waiting for anyone else as soon it found itself facing the real possibility that the government of Mali could fall, and that the Tuareg could come to power.

What is driving France in this manner in Mali? It is neither petroleum nor gas, primary resources whose potentially exploitable quantities in the country are not significant, and which also easily could be obtained elsewhere. Nor is it the precious metals that the country is rich in. Rather, what is driving France to act at this time is uranium and, moreover, from a double perspective, that is, both short-term and long- term.

In the long term exploiting the uranium mines in Mali will be fundamental to satisfying the Gallic hunger for uranium on which depends its entire industrial model - one of which they are also often proud, given that they consider the nuclear energy which is produced as indigenous (notwithstanding the fact that the base fuel, uranium, is obtained outside the country)

The quantities of uranium in Mali are significant but not spectacular, -(if one considers that at Falea there are roughtly 5,000 tons of natural uranium which is equivalent to recharging ten times – once every 18 months- a nuclear power plant of one Gigawatt capacity, and that the exploration phase for additional uranium is not even yet complete) But in any case, these mines will be indispensable in the future. And in the short term, the aspect for which Mali is crucial for France is for the transportation of uranium from Niger – not to be confused with Nigeria. This is indeed truly fundamental for French industry: One third of the uranium which is consumed in the old metropolitan country comes from the territory of Niger. And the uranium resources of Niger are truly important and significant and are among the largest in the world….

France has suffered many setbacks in Niger, which just like Mali , is one of its old colonies. Throughout the years the governments of Niger have been rather docile and have allowed the extraction of their uranium at low cost and without having to include or internalize the costs of the environmental damage that extraction generated. The majority of the mines are open-pit surface mines which degrade the living conditions of the peoples of Niger nearby, who often have been placed under military influence or control whenever that became necessary. This has generated frequent revolts, strikes and increasing difficulties for the exploitation of such mines, also due to the armed persecution on the part of separatist groups near the border with Mali. In fact certain experts are of the opinion that behind the precipitous French action there was also the need to reinforce the security of the mines, and the observable facts tend to confirm this directly.

To the difficulties of exploiting Niger’s uranium which already existed for some years, now also can be added the more recent competition in the field with China, which has obtained various mining concessions in Niger and is expanding rapidly its own operations in that country. Incapable of competing with such a powerful country, the French company Areva opted for seeking collaboration and partnership in some mining projects, also in an attempt to lower its costs. And this is fundamentally because the resource which it desperately needs is becoming ever more scarce, expensive and dangerous to extract in addition to now also having to be shared.

All of this scarcity on the part of our cousins on the other side of the Alps (the original article was in Spanish) takes place in a general global context which is not at all flattering or encouraging: Uranium is becoming more rare and scarce. At the moment a relative stagnation is occurring in its extraction. : According to data from the World Nuclear Association, 2012 is the the second year in a row during which global extraction has decreased. (54,660 tons in 2010, 54,610 in 2011 and 54,221 in 2012) Even if such oscillations of production which are observable in the historical data -coupled also with the Fukushima disaster- have decreased slightly uranium demand, there continues to be a considerable difference between the uranium which is extracted and that which is consumed; the latter having been up to now covered by the re-cycling of uranium from Russian nuclear warheads that were being dismantled in keeping with the Megatons to Megawatts program. Unfortunately that program will run out precisely this year, in 2013, and will not be renewed or continued, and therefore we also can expect a deficit of uranium whereby one easily can foresee a fairly serious scenario of fresh problems in its supply; and perhaps even the precipitous arrival of the feared “peak uranium”. And it is within this ever more tense and tight market for uranium that France is now playing out its own “raison d’etre”.

This war by France is yet another of the various wars for resources, similar to other preceding ones, and to others which will follow it. The only thing which differentiates it from those which surely will follow it, is the extent of desperation by the aggressor. The Industrial France which arose again with force in the twentieth century, is now agonizing. Its financial condition is not nearly as good or as healthy as is thought, and probably will become prey to the same vultures which have not stopped observing and watching Spain, even if at the moment the opposite is being pretended.

France is playing with an important part of the survival of its industrial model in trying to assure its supply of uranium from Niger and Mali. If it were now to fail, the vacillating economic and industrial fabric of France would not be able to allow itself another war. This war is the Song of the Proud Gallic Rooster. Perhaps its last.

Cheers, AMT

The Seneca effect visually shown

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:27:00 +0000

Here is a perfect example of the phenomenon that I called the "Seneca Effect" and which is at the origin of many types of collapse.

"It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid." Lucius Annaeus Seneca 4 AD – 65 AD

h/t Grinzo See also "The Frog that Jumped out"

The frog that jumped out

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Wed, 08 May 2013 12:24:00 +0000

Dear readers of "Cassandra's legacy"

let me introduce to you a new blog; the result of an effort of mine and of some friends. It is titled "The frog that jumped out" and is dedicated to communication on climate change.

After several years of debate on climate change, it seems clear that telling the truth is not enough. We must develop effective strategies that take into account the reasons of the diffuse skepticism and rejection of the message on climate. That's the objective of the new blog that takes its name from the old story of the frog that didn't jump out while being boiled alive. We must jump out before it is too late! To do that, we must understand the risk and that's a problem of communication.

The new blog is a modest effort made without funds or external support. It starts small, but we hope it will have some success: there are many excellent blogs dedicated to the science of climate change, but not so many dedicated to communication on climate change.

The new blog will publish the posts on climate that formerly appeared on "Cassandra", which now will be dedicated to other subjects related to sustainability. If you like the frog blog, I hope you'll consider diffusing the link to your contacts.

yours

UB

Gypsies at the peak

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:01:00 +0000

As part of a mini-series on Gypsies, after having discussing "survival tips" from them, here is an article that originally appeared on February 25, 2010 in The Oil Drum: Europe

The Roma (or Rroma) of Italy are probably the poorest fraction of the residents in the country. They normally live in segregated camps, in trailers or in self built sheds. Only about half of the 150,000 Roma in Italy are Italian citizens; in most cases, they have no stable job and live a very precarious existence as the target of hatred and of open racism. The image above, from Excite Magazine, shows the Roma camp in the suburb of Ponticelli, in Naples, as it was before it was burned to the ground by a mob in 2008.

Here I am, in front of the whole class. Romani men and women; about 20 people; all coming from the same camp, nearby. They are in their late 20s and early 30s, and they have dressed up for the occasion. Not that they can afford expensive clothes, of course, but the men look smart in their informal attire. The women like to dress in bright colors. They wear the almost obligatory long skirt, as well as earrings and necklaces. They seem to be very happy to have found a way to leave the routine of the camp where they spend their time cooking and looking after young children.

Over the past few months, a group of teachers have been lecturing to this group as part of an initiative of the county government. The idea is to help them gain skills that could be useful for them to find a job and integrate better in society. So, we told them how to manage a cooperative, how to manage their personal finances, safety in the workplace, garbage collection and recycling, permaculture, how to surf the web and much more. They have absorbed most what we told them with ease. After having seen them listen attentively to two hours of lessons on the biological carbon cycle and ask intelligent questions afterwards, I was impressed. My college students can't take that much without falling asleep or becoming totally stoned. So, I told myself; why not peak oil? And here I am.

Telling people about peak oil takes different approaches depending to whom you are talking to. I understood long ago that most people can't read even a simple Cartesian graph. Graphs are a language and they never learned it. If you show them the bell shaped curve, they'll see it as a hill or a mountain of some kind. They'll feel that it is hard to climb up and easy to descend. Not the way peak oil should be understood.

The Roma I'll be talking to are at one of the extremes of the spectrum in terms of culture. None of the men went beyond 3rd or 4th grade of schooling; most of the women never went to school at all. The men can usually read, but rarely can write; the women can neither read nor write. They don't read newspapers and don't watch the news in TV. They love movies and spend lots of time chatting. It is from these sources that they gather most of what they know. What would be a good way to explain peak oil to them?

Communication is never one way. If I want them to understand me, I must understand them as well. So, for this talk, I have developed an extreme version of the presentation that I give when I know that the people listening are not at the top level in terms of scientific literacy. It is all based on vivid images shown on screen; pictures of oil wells, for instance. No graphs, no text, and no numbers. I have to rely on my voice, on my ability to catch their attention.

So, I tell them of peak oil based on the example of a person. When we are born, I say, we are small, but with time we grow and we can do more things. But we also become old. In time, we can do less and less and, eventually, we must die. In a way, I continue, it is the same with oil. When oil is young, there is a lot of it. As it gets older, we use it up and there is less and less of it. We must work harder to get as much of it as we used to. It is the same with many things you are doing - haven't you noticed that you must work harder? They look at me and nod. They understand the concept.

From here on, I show them pictures of oil fields, of oil refineries, of tankers and of everything related to oil. I tell them that gasoline for their cars comes from crude oil (they knew that, but vaguely). I tell them that the tires of their cars are made from crude oil (they didn't know that, and it makes them worry). I tell them that it takes oil to power the trucks that bring food to the supermarkets. This makes the women worried; they are in charge of the task of preparing food for the family.

When I speak to the Gadje (the non-Roma) there is always at least someone in the audience who sleeps through the talk or who is clearly not listening. But the Roma are all awake and listening. The message is getting through, I can see that. I tell them about the future, about what to expect when there will be less and less oil available. There will be fewer jobs, fewer opportunities, less money and less food. Even welfare payments, on which many of them rely for survival, may disappear. It will be a hard time for everyone. They clearly understand the problem. They remember where they come from-- former Yugoslavia. They are used to hard times.

When the talk is over, they ask me questions. How much is gasoline going to cost? I tell them that it will be more expensive, sure, but that may not be the problem. The real problem will be to find it. Long lines at the gas stations, very probably. They understand the point: apparently it was the way things were in former Yugoslavia. They ask me what kind of car is best to buy and to use. I know that there doesn't exist a Mercedes that a Rom won't like, and when I tell them that they should buy a cheap car with a good mileage, they are not happy. They ask me what they should do. I say that they should try to adapt and be flexible. They nod; that is a strategy that they know very well. In the end, they ask me if the end of the world will be in 2012. I laugh, they laugh, too. But they seem to be relieved: they were a little worried.

In the days that follow, I inquire with the social workers and with the Roma themselves. What was the impact of my talk? Everyone tells me that they have been discussing what I said; that they have been impressed. But I didn't expect anything to happen and, indeed, that's the final outcome. Nothing changes in the life of the camp.

When you present peak oil to middle class people, the reaction may be denial or mobilization. But rarely you see people who have understood peak oil who are indifferent to it and there are good reasons for that. If you are middle class, you can see right away how peak oil can hurt you. You depend on a salary and, if your job vanishes because of peak oil, you'll be in deep trouble. You have to pay your mortgage, your health insurance plan, instruction for your children, and all the rest. Peak oil can destroy you. But, as a middle class person, you may think that you can prepare for peak oil, that you have spare resources to do something about it. Probably it is a wrong perception but it may lead you to do such things as installing solar panels, insulating your home, buying a smaller car, that kind of thing. If, instead, you think that you don't have that kind of resources, or you don't want to use them in this way, your reaction may very well be to shut off the concept from your consciousness as much as you can.

But think of your situation as a Romani person. You have no stable job; so you can't lose it. You don't own a house, so you can't be evicted. Nobody will give you credit, so you'll never be in debt. You have no retirement plan, so you rely on your children for support when you'll be old. It is true that you depend on welfare, but you also know that you can live with very little. Finally, you live in a close-knit community formed of family clans. You quarrel with your neighbors and relatives all the time but you know that in a difficult situation, they'll help you if they can.

Peak oil will be hard on the Roma, just as it will be on us, but they have a fighting chance of surviving it. In several ways, they are already post peak.

A few days after my talk on peak oil, a Rom of the camp, one of the married men, tells me something like this (I am trying to report it maintaining the rhythm of it)

You see, professor, I think you were right with your lesson. Yeah, you told us that things are not going to be so easy as they used to be. Right, we saw that, too. It is what's happening. You know, I remember when we came here from Yugoslavia. I was a child; I was 10 years old but I remember that very well. It was so different, here. We saw so much wealth: lights and cars and houses and stuff in the supermarkets. Yeah, we had never seen anything like that. In Yugoslavia there was nothing. And so, we were all very happy, but I think we made a big mistake. You know; I remember my grandfather. He was a good man; he could work metals; he could fix pots and pans and sharpen knives. So, he told me that I should learn his job; but I didn't want to. I was very young; I wasn't that smart but, see, professor, I think we all made the same mistake. Many of the old folks could do things. Like singing or playing instruments, buying and selling horses. But we can't do that any more. We didn't want to learn. We saw all this wealth, here, and we thought that there was no need of working so hard. If there was so much wealth; why couldn't we share a little of it? We didn't want to be rich; we just wanted a little - enough to live in peace. And we thought it would last forever. But, you are right, professor, it is not going to last forever. And now we are in trouble.

I find that impeccable. Isn't that the same mistake we made with crude oil?

Survival tips from the Gypsies

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:31:00 +0000

Image: Romani camp set on fire by an angry mob in Torino, Italy, on dec 10, 2011- from "La Stampa."

Years of contact with the Roma, whom we also call "Gypsies," have changed in many ways my view of the world. Not that I could penetrate more than superficially a culture that I found to be the most alien I even encountered and of which I don't speak even one of the many dialects. But I think I absorbed enough that I could try a personal interpretation of the ways of the Gypsies: how they managed the amazing feat of surviving for more than half a millennium in Europe, within an often hostile society. Don't take this text of mine as a an attempt to glorify the Roma - I understand the problems they are facing. But I also recognize that there are many ways of being human and that the Roma have chosen a specific one and, for this, they deserve respect. Perhaps, from them we can learn something useful for the hard times that are coming.

In December 2011, a 16 year old Italian girl living in a suburb of Turin reported that she had been raped by two Gypsies coming from a nearby camp. Apparently, she was readily believed and soon an angry mob of some 500 people marched toward the camp armed with clubs and torches.

When the mob arrived to the camp, they found it completely empty of people. The Gypsies (better said, the "Roma") had left in a hurry, taking with them all their valuables. So, there was nothing left to do for the mobsters but to vent their rage by breaking windows, smashing furniture, and setting some of the shacks on fire. Later on, the firemen put out the fires and the girl confessed that she had invented everything. She had been afraid of telling her parents that she had lost her virginity with her boyfriend. (You can read the story here, in Italian).

You may wonder about how it can be that a story that seems to belong to Middle Ages took place in a (theoretically) modern country such as Italy in 2011. But what impressed me most is not the stupidity of my fellow countrymen or the naivety of the girl. It was the reaction of the Roma.

Suppose you come to know that a mob armed with clubs and torches is marching toward your home. I don't know about you, but my first reaction would be to wait for them shotgun in hand. That would be - I think - the typical reaction of middle class Westerners. We tend to see our home as our castle; worth making a stand for.

But the Roma of the story didn't reason that way. And they did the right thing: they fled. Suppose, instead, that they had tried to defend their homes. It was later learned that some people in the mob had guns. Can you imagine what could have happened? Considering how these stories are normally reported in the press, it is likely that the Roma would have ended up being described as the culprits.

When the smoke cleared, instead, the right and the wrong side of the clash were evident for everybody. So, the Roma could come back to repair their shacks, having avoided the worst. I think it is an interesting example of how you can be surprised by a culture and a way of thinking that suddenly reveals itself as truly different.

After some years of contacts with the Roma who live at just a few hundred meters from my office, I came to understand a little of this culture which I think I can describe as the most alien I have ever encountered. It is a culture that draws on more than half a millennium of experience in a difficult and hostile world; from the time they started arriving in Europe, slowly migrating from their country of origin: India. We may not like the way of behaving of the Roma and their stubbornness in resisting integration. But the fact that they survived and thrived for such a long time means that they have been doing something right.

So I tried to put together a few "tips for survival" placing myself in the role of a Rom, as much as I am able to, being myself just a humble Gadjo. I am not sure that my notes can work as a survival manual, but at least they it should provide some food for thought. (I apologize in advance to my Roma friends for any misinterpretation I made and I am ready to correct my text with their help.)

10 TIPS FOR SURVIVAL FROM THE GYPSIES

1. In battle, the best strategy is flight. (The golden rule). Many centuries of survival in an often hostile world taught the Roma that making a stand in conditions of inferiority is not the way to go. That doesn't mean that the Roma are meek as individuals or family groups. On the contrary, they can be aggressive and occasionally engage in noisy internecine fights. But, in general, they tend to avoid conflicts with the Gadje, fleeing if necessary. There are no reports of the Roma as an ethnic group having been ever involved in a war and only a few Roma are known to have ever served in Gadje armies or fighting organizations. It is an attitude that seems to be still valuable today, as shown by the case of the attack against the Roma camp of Torino (Italy) in 2011, where the rapid flight of the Roma avoided a violent clash that could have turned very bad for them.

2. Don't carry and don't use weapons. This rule derives directly from the golden rule (the best strategy is flight). If you are the underdog in a conflict, escalating it is a very bad idea because, most likely, the weapons you brought to the fray will be used against you. The Roma seem to have been practicing this strategy during all their history as wanderers and they still stick to it today. Even though some of them may be engaged in illegal activities, it is extremely rare to read reports of a Rom carrying or using weapons. The concept of having a "right to bear arms" is almost unthinkable to them. On this point, they are well in advance in comparison to Western Gadje.

3. Cherish your mobility. This rule is a consequence of the first two. If you are unarmed and you are the weaker side in a conflict, you can't be a sitting duck; you have to be mobile. For centuries, the Roma have been using this strategy. Their life has been on the road and it remains so such even today, although they don't use any more their old horse-drawn carts; much preferring motor cars (and there doesn't seem to exist a Mercedes that a Rom doesn't like). So, the Roma don't seem to be particularly interested in switching their trailers and mobile homes for regular apartments, even though sometimes they are invited (or even forced) to do so by local administrations. But things change and vanishing in the background is becoming difficult in a world which is becoming more and more regulated and controlled. Today, the Roma are often segregated in camps that look more and more like open air prisons; a situation that they must grudgingly endure.

4. Travel light in life. Modern Roma seem to have inherited from their ancestors the concept that they have to be always ready to pack up and scramble on short notice. One of the results of this attitude is that a Romani home (be it a shack or a trailer) doesn't show any of the typical clutter of Gadje's homes. That's not just because the Roma are poorer, but mainly because they seem to apply some kind of "Feng Shui" rules in the sense that they ruthlessly throw away everything that is not not strictly needed. As a consequence, normally the inside of a Romani home is truly spic & span, unlike the situation of not a few Gadje's homes. On the other hand, the Roma don't seem to use the same care in maintaining the exterior of their homes. Again, if they are always ready to flee, what sense would it make to take care of the communal lawn? So, a Romani camp often looks like it was bombed just a few days before. That is usually the only thing seen by the Gadje who visit the camp, and surely that is not so good for the public image of the Roma. But, on the other hand, there are not so many Gadje interested in visiting Romani camps.

5. Cultivate creative obfuscation. If you are perpetually in danger of being ethnically cleansed, you'd better be careful in avoiding to give information to your more powerful neighbors. The Roma seem to take this idea as a stimulus to develop a linguistic smokescreen that makes everything vague. If you happen to be chatting with Romani people, you'll notice that it is never clearly stated who is doing what, when, and how. Appointments are always very elastic (to say the least) and if you are invited for dinner by a Romani family you are sure to arrive always too late or too early. In addition, the Roma seem to be positively jealous of their language and won't provide much help for your attempts to learn it. All these features do bring some advantage to the Roma even today, although not in terms of endearing them very much to the Gadje. It is, however, part of being Roma.

6. A man's family is his refuge. A Rom man becomes really a man only when he is married and has children, and the same is true for a Romni, a woman. But the family for the Rom is best seen as a "clan" that includes a large number of relatives in a maze of relationships and obligations. It is on this network of family members that the Roma rely for their needs when times are bad. The clan provides support, defense, entertainment, and emergency help. All that is fundamental for people who don't have a job, a retirement fund and, in many cases, no medical assistance. The problem is that tradition encourages families to have children and the Roma often have up to five or six per couple. That used to be a good strategy in the hard times of old, when just a fraction of a family's offspring would survive to adulthood. Today, instead, having many children creates a host of practical problems additional to the many that the Roma already have. Of these problems, one is that the Gadje tend to disapprove the Roma for adopting a strategy, large families, that they themselves had been adopting up to not long ago. That may change with a new generation of Romnie who often state that they have no intention of burdening themselves with so many children as their mothers did. Whether the "demographic transition" will take place with the Roma is to be seen, but one thing is sure, anyway: the Roma greatly love their children.

7. What you learned to do yourself, can never be stolen. The Roma have always been excellent craftsmen. They worked as potters, blacksmiths, horseshoers, and jacks of all trades. Even today, a Rom can build - alone - a complete shack using scrap wood and he can do it well enough that the roof doesn't fall on the heads of the family. It doesn't leak when it rains and it is even cozy in winter, with the stove that warms it nicely! Unfortunately, however, modern Roma have also lost most of the specific abilities of their ancestors: there is no need anymore to repair old pots and pans and most mechanical objects are being manufactured in ways that make them impossible to repair. Still, the Roma maintain a remarkable flexibility and adaptability. They are quick learners: should there be again a need for people who can repair a broken umbrella; the Roma can re-learn how to do that.

8. Catch the occasion when you see it. Living perpetually on the road, often fleeing powerful enemies, the Roma have learned to be flexible, resourceful, and always ready to catch the opportunity of the moment. It may be this characteristic that makes them magnificent traders - they have a nearly unbelievable ability in understanding what is valuable and what is junk and they exploit it to the utmost. Of course, there often remain legitimate doubts about the source of the objects they trade and it is true that some Roma pursue a career as petty thieves. Whether that is part of the Romani traditional ways is debatable, but it is sure that the number of Roma who are actually engaged in illegal activities is greatly overestimated by most Gadje. For one thing, it is more and more difficult to steal anything in a world of sensors, alarms, electronic cards, and hidden cameras. But "illegal" is also a question of definition. For instance, one of the traditional activities of the Roma was collecting scrap metal for recycling, something that they saw (and still see) as a perfectly legitimate activity. However, governments started creating laws and regulations that transformed this kind of waste collection into an illegal activity. That pushed most of the Roma who specialize in this field into the shadow world of the "parallel economy," where they still manage to collect metals by exploiting their creativity and adaptability; but under much more difficult conditions.

9. Be jealous of your identity. The Roma stubbornly refuse to be integrated in the society of the Gadje and they jealously guard their language and their traditions. That seems to to be a common attitude still today, despite the fact that many Romani children go to school and despite the presence of TV sets and Internet connections in Romani homes. In this respect, the Roma behave like the Jews, although they don't see their identity in religious terms (they have normally adopted the religion of the region they find themselves in). Also, unlike the Jewish tradition, the Romani one is not written. It is completely oral and that may be a reason why the Roma don't seem to be especially interested in learning how to read and write. What the Roma need to know, they keep inside their heads, unlike most Gadje who are increasingly lost in a tsunami of information that they can't control any more. Emphasizing ethnic identity is a useful concept to maintain cohesion in the Romani community, but it may backfire by generating a convenient target for that fraction of Gadje who are inclined toward racism and ethnic hatred; of which there seem to be plenty today, just as there were in the past. During the second world war, the Roma suffered an attempt of extermination similar to that of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Today, pogrom-like attacks against the Roma seem to be rare, but they still occur at times. Anyhow, if the Roma managed to survive the Nazis, they can probably survive anything.

10. Be a free spirit. In old times, the Roma's preferred occupation was as musicians and their famed ability with musical instruments was not just a way to make a living; it was also a way to celebrate the fleeting beauty of the world. Today, only a few Roma have maintained this skill in a world where music has become mostly a product of the entertainment industry. However, the Roma still cherish their freedom and normally refuse to submit to the slavery of a time card. That doesn't make it easy for them to find jobs in a world that emphasizes reliability, efficiency, and control - the result is that most of the Roma living in Wester countries seems to be condemned to a condition of extreme poverty. Maybe in the old times the Roma were happy with their carefree life "on the road", but today in Roma camps there are cases of depression, mental illness, and unhappiness. However, it is difficult to say whether on the average the Roma are more stressed by their condition of poverty than their neighboring Gadje are stressed by their daily fight with mortgages, rents, evictions, unemployment, and the like. What can be said for sure is that freedom, for anyone, is not only a choice but also a cost.

Can these tips be useful for us, the Gadje? Surely, right now the way of life of the Roma looks hopelessly outdated. Nobody needs any more people able to repair umbrellas, to trade horses, to sing songs, and - more than that - nobody seem to conceive the possibility that someone might not want to live the way modern Gadje live. But the world always changes and the virtues that have made the West so powerful and successful may one day become obsolete. Dmitry Orlov notes in his book "The Five Stage of Collapse" how the Roma thrived with the collapse of the Soviet Union. When hard times come to us, I bet that the Roma will still be around and maybe they will teach us a thing or two.

* In the most common Romani dialect, the term "Rom" has "Roma" as plural, while "Romani" is an adjective.

Climate change: the Fiesole example

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 16:55:00 +0000

Fiesole, a small town near Florence, Italy, is being affected by climate change just as every place on earth. Here, I report of an initiative to bring the problem to the citizens' attention and motivate them to act on it. In this occasion, I tried to use some strategies that I took mainly from a document on climate change by Peter Sandman, a professional risk management expert. Among these strategies, Sandman suggests that you should tell the truth about the situation, but you should not try to make people feel guilty or scare them. You should emphasize concrete measures and actions that bring results which, in the case of climate change, means to consider mitigation as something just as important as prevention (and perhaps more). It is a test but, so far, it seems to be working in Fiesole. Here is an elaboration of the talk I gave at the meeting.

Good morning, everybody. First of all, let me say that it is very nice to be here, all together speaking about climate change. I have to thank the administration of our town for having organized this meeting and also thank the citizens who found the way to spend a whole Friday morning on this subject.

It is something new: climate change is one of those things that you don't hear about so often, recently. It used to be mentioned much more in the past but, now, there seems to be some sort of conspiracy of silence on it. In TV, you hear about all sort of strange stuff, from the thing called "Spread" to debt, bonds, the stock market and all the rest. It is like if there were nothing of importance in the world but the financial system.

Yet, I think that all of us have been noticing that there is something else that's happening in the real world. You see, I am not a specialist in climate science; although I have done my best to study the subject. But I also think that there is no need to be a specialist to notice what's happening. Let me just show you this image:

I am sure that you can recognize this building: it is what is left today of the "ghiacciaia" (ice storage building) of Monte Senario; not far from where we are today. You also surely know that, a century ago, people would discharge tons and tons of winter snow into the belly of that cavernous building in order to make ice. Then, they would sell the ice in Florence, during the summer.

Of course, that wouldn't not possible today. This winter, we barely saw snow in Fiesole. Even two years ago, when we had a big snowstorm, it lasted just 2-3 days and then the snow melted away. So, today, at best you would be able to collect enough ice in winter to make a few ice cream cones in summer - if you are lucky. Things have changed a lot, indeed!

Now, if all the problem was that we can't make ice any more; well, we could say that it doesn't matter: we have refrigerators! But climate change takes other forms and creates other effects. Let me show you this picture, taken last summer in Fiesole:

I have been picking figs from trees in summer for all my life. But I had never seen figs drying up on branches before ripening. This is something totally unusual and it matches with other changes in the vegetation around here. Many people have noticed how the Fiesole valleys are becoming yellow in summer. That's not usual: if you think about that you can surely remember that, up to a few years ago, Fiesole remained green all over the summer. Now, this is a big change: it may be related to temperatures, to the drought, or to pollution. But it is a change we can't ignore.

And that's not all. As you know, last year we had two major fires in the valley. Let me show you a picture of the fire that nearly destroyed the village of Monte Rinaldi.

I was coming home that day and, as I passed in front of the hill, I saw gigantic flames erupting. I can tell you: it was scary. So, I went home, I took my camera and I went back there to take pictures. Fortunately, by then the big flames were almost gone. But it took several hours and two helicopters to extinguish the fire. Apart from all other considerations, think how expensive it has been to keep those two helicopters flying for so long! And it is a cost that we all have to pay as citizens.

Of course, you can't attribute a single event, a fire in this case, to global warming. Yes, but I have been living in this valley for more than 40 years and I remember one fire large enough that it needed a helicopter to be put down. Maybe there were others I don't know about but, this year, as you know, we had two big fires near Fiesole in a single year. That should tell us something.

So, what's happening? Changes; big changes. And not just droughts and fires. Today we tend to use the term "climate change" rather than "global warming", as it was the use until not long ago. That is because the effects of global warming are much more complex than it seemed to us at the beginning. It is not just that temperatures are a bit warmer; it is the whole climate that changes in ways that are unpredictable. Last year we had a terrible drought, this year it has been raining for six months almost without interruption. Climate is becoming chaotic. The people who are specialists in this subject can tell us why, but we all see the consequences.

Among the consequences of climate change, we have floods and snowstorms. Let me show you a picture of the big snowstorm of two years ago in Fiesole.

Beautiful, sure. But we must remember that snow was so common in our town decades ago and people must have been used to it. Today, when we have two days of snow, it is disaster! Nobody knows any more what to do. Things do change!

It is the same for rain; it has always rained in Fiesole but, now, when it rains, it rains hard and it creates big problems. You remember what the Regional commissioner for agriculture was telling us just before my talk? He said that every year we have something like three billion Euros of damage per year due to weather phenomena. Not all that can be attributed to climate change, of course, but a good fraction, yes.

So, I think we don't need climate scientists to tell us that our climate is changing. We can see it with our eyes. And we don't need to enter into one of those nasty discussions on whether it is real, it is human caused, it is all a big hoax and all the rest. You may think as you like on this subject; maybe it is not so bad as some people say. Maybe someone is making money on it. Maybe it is not our fault or, at least, not completely. We could discuss about these possibilities until our jaws fall on the floor. But the point is that we are all seeing the change and we cannot ignore it.

And the point is that it all fits with what the specialists had been telling us. Look at this picture:

Look at the red line. It is the average temperature of our earth according to the most recent study. It starts going up rapidly more or less when we started burning coal, about two centuries ago. And, as you see, the temperature at the time when the big ice building in Monte Senario was in operation was about half a degree (centigrade) smaller than it is today. So, just one half of a degree is enough to bring big, big changes. So, think of what could happen for two-three degrees of increase, as scientists say it is likely to happen if we continue burning fossil fuels - as we seem to be bent on doing.

Now, look at this image:

It is the world as it could be in 2030-2039 according to a study by "UCAR". The red areas of the map indicate drought. Be careful about this point: it is a "drought index"; It doesn't just mean that it rains less. It means also that rain comes in the wrong moment and it causes more damage than help. Look at the Mediterranean region: it is not just red, it is violet. So, the droughts we had been seeing around us make sense - it is something that was expected and that's expected to increase in the coming decades. We are possibly in the worst place in the world in terms of future droughts.

So, you see what we are facing. It may not be politically correct to say what I am saying, but we are all adults. We don't like it when we discover that people are "sugaring the pill" for us. I think we have to tell things as they are. We have to face a future, in the coming decades, when we'll have more droughts, more fires, more heat waves and more sudden floods and, possibly, heavy snowstorms. This is what we'll be seeing no matter what we do as citizens of Fiesole and no matter what will be done at the level of governments and international treaties. Climate change is with us to stay; at least for a few decades. We are seeing it; we will see more of it in the future.

So, when we think of our town, we think of something like this; green and beautiful:

But here is the same place, seen from a different angle, after the fire of last year. For how long will we have a green Fiesole?

You see that we have a problem. A big problem. So, what do we do? Well, the first step in order to solve a problem is to recognize that it exists and the fact that we are all here, today, means that we recognize that climate change exists and that we need to do something about it. This is a big step forward.

You see, I think that the climate problem is solvable. But we need to get together and do something about it. Much can be done at the international level, by means of treaties to reduce emissions and move to cleaner forms of energy. But, in order to have these treaties we need to build up a consensus that these treaties are needed. And consensus starts locally - it starts with people, and we are people! So, our first task, I think, is to start building this consensus here, in Fiesole. Think about that: we are doing it right now! I see that you are nodding. You see? It is not so difficult to start acting on the climate problem!

I was looking at your faces when I was showing you those projections of future droughts and fires. I know, it is scary to look at the future and the temptation is to turn away your eyes or to scream something like "it is not true, it is a hoax, a scam, a trick, whatever". But now that you know that are acting, that you are doing something, you feel better, don't you?

This is a little trick that I learned from a Swedish psychologist named Lennart Parknas. He wrote a beautiful book on how to motivate people into action. He says that action is fundamental: you cannot do anything to solve a problem unless you are convinced that you can do something to solve it. It is what Parknas defines as being "empowered." Climate change is a big problem, but the methods for solving big problems are the same as those for solving small ones. You need to know that you can solve them in order to solve them.

Of course, there is a lot more that we can do in addition to get together in a room and nodding at what someone else says. Let me tell you that I have been discussing this point with our administrators and there are plenty of things that we can do together. One is to protect our territory from fires: we don't want more fires like those of last summer. We need surveillance but, more than all, we need preparation. You probably know that the fire of Monte Rinaldi was started by a guy who thought it was a good idea to burn dry leaves in his garden in a hot day of August. He wasn't prepared, but nobody told him, apparently, that it wasn't such a good idea. You see? We are not prepared, not just that guy. We need to work on that!

Fire prevention is an example of what's called "mitigation" of the effects of climate change. Of course, mitigation doesn't solve the climate problem at its roots (that's called "prevention"). But mitigation has this big advantage that it gives us something real and practical to do. And if we prevent fires, we have a win-win situation. We do something good in itself, but we also create awareness of the climate problem around. We create consensus, which is what we need.

That doesn't mean we cannot do climate change prevention, here in Fiesole - we can, of course. We have to go in parallel with such things as renewable energy, better efficiency in many areas, from home heating to transportation. But the most important thing is to work at attaining consensus that the climate problem exists and in order to attain consensus we need to be all empowered. We need to act and we are doing it.

So, the fact that you are all here tells me that we have a chance to do something good and even give the example to other towns and cities! We are a small town, of course but, after all, all things big started small!

Climate change: it's happening here!

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 22:09:00 +0000

The "ghiacciaia" (ice storage building) of Monte Senario, not far from the town of Fiesole, Italy, as it was about a hundred years ago. It was used to store snow in winter that then was sold as ice in summer. The building is still there but, today, the winter snow that you could throw into that cavernous storage system would barely be enough for a few ice cream cones. It is a visible demonstration of the effects of climate change in this region, but many more things have changed and are changing right in front of people's eyes. The citizens and the administrators of the town of Fiesole discussed about these changes in a meeting organized on Friday 12, 2013

There is some hope, after all. Consensus is building up about climate change. Denial might not be such a terrible obstacle and we may still have a chance to do something before it is too late. It is a sensation that came to me with the meeting on climate organized today, Friday 12, 2013, by the administration of my town, Fiesole.

Not a meeting of scientists; not of activists. It was a gathering of ordinary people: farmers, employees, professionals, students, local politicians. They had come to listen to a small group of experts telling them, for once, not about remote or abstract ideas, but of the concrete reality of climate change. Of course, polar bears have their problems, poor critters, but the talk was about what's happening here; how climate change it is affecting agriculture, the economy of the town, and everyone's life.

And, for once, politicians, experts, and the public agreed on everything. They said it loud; no fear of being politically incorrect: climate change is here and now! It is not something we read in the newspapers or we hear in TV. It is in our town; it is here that things are changing, we see the change every day.

It was a small miracle for a quiet Friday morning. Everyone could suddenly realize that they were not alone in thinking what they were thinking. Everyone had noticed the same things: that springs are drying up, waterfalls are disappearing, plants are withering, and leaves are getting yellow in summer. Now, that's real weird: Fiesole is not California: summer, here, has always remained green. Up to a few years ago.

And no climate denialists. Had there been one around, he would have to face up real people - he would have had to show his face; he couldn't hide behind a nickname; he wouldn't be able to play the usual games. There was just no space for denial - it would have been denying reality. It would have been denying what people had been seeing with their very eyes.

A refreshing moment, an epiphany of understanding. You see, the Internet is a toxic environment. People with no faces and no names throwing sentences at each other as if they were stones. How the hell did we get caught in this idea that we can discuss anything in this way? And think we can ever agree on something? Can't happen: people with no faces can't agree on anything. We need to look at each other in the eyes - then things change.

I don't know if these meetings are the only - or even the best - way to go. But I am sure that we are not getting anywhere with the endless Internet slugging we have been engaged in, up to now. We need to look at each other in the face to understand that climate change is not only real; it is here, it is coming. If we do that, we'll see that consensus is building up about the need to do something to stop the disaster before it is too late. The next step in Fiesole will be to work on that.

_________________________________________________________

I wish to thank to the administration of the town of Fiesole for organizing this meeting. In particular the vice-mayor Giancarlo Gamannossi, the mayor Fabio Incatasciato, and the Tuscan commissioner for agriculture and forestry, Gianni Salvadori. And thanks to the speakers: Toufic El Asmar (FAO), Federico Spanna (AIMAT) and Cristiano Bottone (Transition Town Italia). Finally, thanks to all those who managed to spend a whole Friday morning discussing climate change, despite the many more things they surely had to do.

From left to right, Gianni Salvadori, regional commissioner for agriculture and forestry, Fabio Incatasciato, mayor of Fiesole and Giancarlo Gamannossi, vice-mayor; who organized the meeting.

Cristiano Bottone, of Transition Town Italy, speaking at the Fiesole meeting and asking the question, "We knew from the 1970s about climate change, how is it that we didn't do anything up to now?"

The public at the "Basolato" hall in Fiesole. We had a nearly full house at the meeting. Not bad for a Friday morning!

Jorgen Randers: what the future will be

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:42:00 +0000

Jorgen Randers presented the Italian version of his book, "2052," in Rome on April 5 2013. What follows is a summary of what he said in that occasion. I apologize in advance for what I may have missed or misinterpreted of Randers' one hour long talk, but I think that this text describes the gist of his speech.

Presenting his book, "2052", Jorgen Randers starts with a bold statement: "I will not tell you what the future could be, but what the future will be". You would think that this shows quite a bit of hubris but, if you follow Randers' reasoning, you'll see that he has a point.

Randers is one of the authors of the famous "The Limits to Growth" report to the Club of Rome. Published in 1972, the book caused quite a stir and was widely misinterpreted as a prophecy of doom. It wasn't so and, in his talk, Randers summarizes what he and the others did. They didn't make any prophecy but, rather, they created a 'fan' of 12 different scenarios for the future of the world up to 2100. Some of these scenarios involved decline and collapse of the economy, some involved stabilization and prosperity. Whether one or the other set of scenarios would unfold depended on whether humankind made the right or the wrong choices in dealing with pollution, resource exploitation, and population growth.

One problem with the "The Limits to Growth" was that the authors never specified by what mechanisms humankind could develop the consensus necessary to make the right choices, which all involved some sacrifices in the short term. After 40 years of work, Randers has arrived to a conclusion: there are no such mechanisms. The right choices were not made and never will be.

Today, Randers says, there is no more a fan of good and bad scenarios: there is only one; and it is not pleasant. It can only be the decline of our society, constrained by overpopulation, declining resource availability, and widespread damage caused by pollution and climate change. The start of the decline may come earlier or later; collapse may be faster or slower, but the shape of the future is determined.

Randers maintains that there is a simple way to describe the reasons that are taking us to this unpleasant future: people always make the choice that involves the least costs in the short term. The problem is all there: as long as we always choose the easiest road, we have no control on where we are going.

Imagine you are lost in a forest. Would you think that always choosing the easiest path in front of you could take you home? But this is what we are doing: even though we should know that this is not the way to go where we would like to be. We are unwilling, for instance, to invest in renewable energy as long as fossil fuels are even slightly less expensive and we can neglect their external costs in the form of pollution and climate change. But this choice is based on short term consideration and it will cause us terrible long term damage.

Why are we unable to do better? Here, Randers proposes that "short-termism" is deeply ingrained in people's minds and is reflected in our democratic decisional system. He has been accused to be against democracy, but he maintains that he has nothing against democracy: the problem is that democracy is the result of human short-termism. He makes the example of an enlightened politician who decides to introduce a carbon tax. Soon, voters discover that the carbon tax is making gasoline and electricity more expensive. As a consequence, that politician won't be re-elected. It is simple and it happens all the time.

Of course, you might object that if the public were to be educated about climate change, then people would accept a carbon tax - actually they would clamor for it. Maybe; but Randers is skeptical. He says that he has spent decades of his life training generations of decision-makers in sustainability and ecosystem science. And he has seen those trained generations taking exactly the same wrong decisions that the previous, untrained, generations were taking.

Human nature is difficult to overcome. Randers recounts how he and his colleagues had been discussing about the size of a natural disaster that would wake the public to the reality of ecosystem destruction. Then Hurricane Katrina came and, later on, Sandy. Both where disasters as big as they can be. But they fell flat as wake up calls: the public didn't react. Today, three Americans out of eight still think that global warming is a hoax.

Randers has seen the enemy and the enemy is us.

Climate change: stating the problem

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:24:00 +0000

Here, Dan Gilbert states very nicely what are the problems that prevent the diffusion of the concept that climate change is an imminent danger and that we should do something about it.

The video goes back to a few years ago and the problems remain the same, today. It is time to start thinking of solutions!

(h/t Alexander Ac)

Peak eggs debunked

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 11:06:00 +0000

The Easter Egg hunt seems to be a source of plenty of insights about the global petroleum situation. On this subject, see also my Easter post of last year. Image above from "bitrebels".

April 1st 2013.
from Cassandra's Legacy

Today, a press release from the egg industry commented on the traditional egg hunt of this year's Easter, denying that "peak eggs" took place last year.
"Eggs are still abundant," maintains the industry's press release, "and the new technology of egg fracking is creating a "new age of eggs" that will last decades". The press release adds that the concept of "peak eggs" is only the result of fear mongering on the part of a small group of pseudo-experts who have been shown to be in error many times in the past.

Sources close to the Easter Bunny also answered to a number of questions, specifying that, yes, it is true that it was sometimes more difficult for children to collect fracked eggs from the ground; but that should not detract from the advantages that the new technology is bringing to us.

The same sources also stated that the worries of some environmentalists about the consumption of fracked eggs are misplaced. The industry won't disclose the chemicals used in egg-fracking, but maintains that the results of the process are totally safe for human consumption; adding that the blue color (sometimes green) of the yolk is wholly natural. Also, the fact that fracked eggs have been sometimes observed to spontaneously catch fire should be seen as a bonus in terms of easing the preparation of omelets.

According to industrial sources, fracking methods show great promise in the creation of new foodstuff and will soon be extended to new fields. Fracked chicken, for instance, shows promise for the burger industry and tests are in progress.

The mind of the denier

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:58:00 +0000

In the controversy on climate change, sometimes the debate gets real ugly. Nevertheless, even the most heated exchanges give us a way to learn something. Image above, from Tel Aviv University.

In Italy, we have a say about food: "what doesn't kill you, fattens you(*)." Transferring this little piece of wisdom to on-line discussions, we could say that "what doesn't sway you, makes you wiser." That is, you can learn something useful even from the nastiest attacks on science in the debate on climate change. Here is one example: a comment actually published in a blog (h/t Alexander Ac).

.... [Climate change] is a social construct, not a scientific theory, and it's meant to transform the society and bring advantages to those who push this idiocy.

As a scientific theory, it's complete bunk. There doesn't exist a glimpse of scientific evidence that the climate could realistically evolve in a harmful way at the global scale in the future that is shorter than the millennium time scale where the ice age cycles gradually become important.

It's immoral for people like you to lie to everyone else. It's immoral for people like you to get salaries for these lies and would-be scientific research that is neither scientific nor research. It's immoral for you to threaten the industrial civilization that's been built for 500 years. It's immoral for you to support political pressures that could prevent the poor people and poor nations from using the fossil fuels, the most reasonable and cheapest resource that decides whether their lives are human or miserable paths towards premature death.

It's immoral for you to contaminate the Internet in general and my blog in particular with your dishonest pseudoscientific gibberish and abuse the fact that hardcore scammers and fraudsters are not being executed quickly yet. It's hypocritical for you to use the achievements of the modern technology including the Internet and combustion engines even though you're superficially fighting against all these things. It's unethical for you to spread all these fearful lies in front of children who can't immediately see that you're despicable untrustworthy greedy lying bastards and who lose sleep because of all the scary shit that you're spitting everywhere.

These were just examples of the reasons why people like you are immoral bastards.

Interesting text, isn't it? But never mind the nastiness; it gives us a glimpse on how the mind of the denier works; at least of that kind of deniers who are active participants of the debate.

Note, first of all, how this text can hardly be the work of a paid disinformer, as it is implied by the often used term "fake skeptic". Most likely, as I argued previously, the author is a true believer. Consider that he posted this comment on his personal blog where he discloses his full name and he even shows his face in the front page. Now, how much would you want to be paid to put your reputation at stake in this way? And who would want to pay you so much?

Then, note how climate science is described as something designed to "bring advantages to those who push it". This is the typical conspiratorial mindset of climate deniers, as described in studies by Lewandowsky and others. It doesn't mean that people who reason in this way are stupid or evil; it is a way they have to process information. Most likely, they inherited from their ancestors a higher than average degree of paranoia which, in the remote past, was useful in some conditions. We may all suffer of paranoia (and we do when we think that deniers are paid disinformers), it is a matter of degree.

In the end, this text is a confirmation of what I argued in a previous post of mine. That is, the more you argue with people who suffer of a conspiratorial attitude, the more you fall into what I called "Desdemona's trap." That is, you are just reinforcing their attitude and convincing them that you are part of the great conspiracy. They feel threatened and they react aggressively. In this case, even with not so veiled death threats ([people like you]... are not being executed quickly yet).

So, how do we react? First, about death threats. In order to be effective, a threat must be accompanied by a credible firepower (rhetorical or real), as any respectable Mafia boss can tell you. Otherwise it backfires. In the climate debate, intimidation has been used with remarkable success to attack climate scientists, as in the "Climategate" case. However, it may well be that the denialist position is gradually losing traction and, as a consequence, rants like this one are backfiring on deniers (and that's a good thing!).

The main point, in the end, is that we are dealing with an attitude characteristic of a small minority of people. Our job is not to argue with them, it is to pass the message to the people (the majority) who don't suffer of the same degree of paranoia. Most people are not active deniers. They are simply in a position of "passive denial" regarding climate change - they know that it exists and it is dangerous, just they can't realize how dangerous and imminent it is. With them, the message can be passed. It takes time, but it can be done.

(*) In Italian: "quello che non ammazza, ingrassa"

Desdemona's trap: facing denial in the climate change debate

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:59:00 +0000

The plot of Shakespeare's "Othello" can tell us something on how to face denial in the climate change debate. In the figure, we see Desdemona in an interpretation by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

In Shakespeare's "Othello" we see a fine example of how easily people's minds can be manipulated. In the play, evil Iago convinces Desdemona, Othello's wife, to plead with her husband for her friend, Cassio. She doesn't know that, at the same time, Iago had planted in Othello's mind the suspect that she was having an affair with Cassio. So, the more Desdemona pleads for Cassio, the more Othello becomes convinced that she is betraying him. The result is a self-reinforcing chain of misunderstandings that eventually leads to disaster.

Othello, clearly, suffered of what we would call today a "conspiratorial mindset". It is not uncommon as a trait of human personality. Jared Diamond, in his book "The World Until Yesterday," maintains that "constructive paranoia" is a survival-oriented genetic trait. Indeed, it may be better to be afraid of a non-existing danger than to walk unaware into a trap. But, if paranoia may have been an asset in the dangerous world of hunters and gatherers, in our world exploiting paranoia has become an easy way to to manipulate people's minds; governments do that all the time. But governments are not the only players in this game and a paranoid mindset may also be the main factor that generates the commonly termed "denialist" attitude in the debate on climate change.

"Denialism" is a form of refusal to accept reality that occurs in many fields of knowledge, but that takes an especially virulent aspect in the climate change debate. People who actively engage in the denial of the validity of climate science and of its results are often defined as "deniers" or "fake skeptics." They rarely have scientific credentials in the climate field, or even in science in general and their statements are only superficially scientific. They seem to be focused on the idea that scientists are not just in error with their conclusions but rather are engaged in a plot to spread lies about climate in order to gain prestige and money.

Studies by Lewandowsky and his coworkers show that deniers often have a strong conspiratorial mindset; that is, they tend to believe more than the average person in conspiracies such as "chemtrails," "abiotic oil", assorted 9/11 legends, fake lunar landings, and the like. So, it seems that deniers process information on climate change according to the structure of their specific "cognitive mechanism" which is dominated by the conspiracy concept. Their own constructive paranoia is playing a trick on them, bringing them to the conclusion that climate change is a huge conspiracy that sees climate scientists and governments teaming up in order to trick humankind into submission and slavery (1).

That doesn't mean that there are no powerful lobbies spreading disinformation in the web and in the media - they do exist. And we also have evidence of individual scientists and professionals paid to spread lies around. However, there is no evidence that individual climate deniers of the kind who spend time "trolling" on the web are paid for what they do. We can't exclude that some of them could be, but it matters little. Think about that: how much would you want to be paid to help destroying the world (including yourself)? No payment would be enough, unless you really believed that climate change is an evil conspiracy to enslave everyone. Then, the PR companies that manage denial campaigns for the fossil fuels lobby simply exploit this attitude, without the need of actually paying them.

Once we understand the mindset of deniers, we see how easy it is for scientists to fall into Desdemona's trap. Normally, scientists have been trying to use scientific arguments to defend their points, without realizing that the more they plead for the reality of climate change, the more deniers see their beliefs reinforced. For their conspiracy oriented minds, every rational argument brought into the discussion becomes further proof of the ongoing conspiracy (think of Desdemona's situation!).

At the same time, people who have a scientific mindset find the behavior of deniers completely impossible to understand in rational terms. As a consequence, they tend to think that they are facing professional disinformers. That means, of course, falling even more into Desdemona's trap. If these accusations are explicitly expressed (and sometimes they are) deniers will see their beliefs even more confirmed. These contrasting positions lead to a self-reinforcing loop in which the participants from each side become more and more entrenched in their opposite beliefs.

In the end, Shakespeare's tragedy is playing out in front of us. The fossil fuel lobby is playing the role of Iago; deniers play the role of Othello; scientists play the role of Desdemona, all totally immersed in their different roles. So far, Iago has been winning hands down playing on the naivety of both Desdemona and Othello. If the "debate" (so to say) continues in these terms, the final result can only be, appropriately, a tragedy - in this case for the whole humankind.

So, how do we avoid falling into Desdemona's trap? Well, there are a number of mistakes that we should avoid. The first is to think that we can convince deniers with scientific arguments. It should be clear that it doesn't work: the more you try to do that, the more you fall in the trap. But the true cardinal mistake that you can make when you debate a denier is to lose your temper and use sarcasm, insults or - worse - accuse him or her to be a paid troll. That's the perfect way of falling head first into Desdemona's trap. Think of the impression you give to the people following the debate who are not conspiracy oriented (2) - they will think that you are the evil guy! At this point, it is game over - you lost.

What should we do, then? Well, remember that conspiracy oriented climate deniers are a tiny minority in the world, even though they may be very noisy. So, the target of your action is not them, it is the large majority of people who are not conspiracy oriented and who haven't yet processed the information about climate change in their minds. So, the best is to avoid the confrontation with deniers (unless it is absolutely necessary) and concentrate in diffusing the concept of climate change with the public in general. For instance, let me cite from "DarwinSF"

"Our one-day elementary school project, Climate Change is Elementary, bypasses the usual negative discourse by assuming that every educated person agrees that it is a scientific "fact" that the climate is changing and that man is largely to blame. We do not confront the deniers and skeptics, we circumvent them by taking the school family directly to a vision of a clean and green future. We also focus on working with the innovators, the early adopters, and the early majority, who tend to agree with us. We ignore the late majority and the laggards, or deniers, who will only hold our program back."

See? This is the way to go. Think positive, circumvent denial, focus on reality. It is a battle that we can still win if we understand how to fight it.

_______________________________________________________

Notes

(1) There is an interesting question about the conspiratorial mentality of denialists: if they are so worried about being victims of the conspiracy set up by climate scientists how come that they are not worried about the opposite conspiracy set up by the fossil fuels lobby? This is a point that some people think proves they are paid trolls. But this is not necessarily true. As I am citing Shakespeare in this post, I could comment saying that, "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't". My impression is that the "method" lies in the mindset of denialists which is rather coherent in its various facets. Denialists see themselves as freedom fighters, independent thinkers immune to the mind-control machine that governments have set up. As such, they tend to project themselves into the figure of the "lone-scientists-fighting-against-the-establishment" and to place a lot of trust in him (rarely her). That explains, for instance, why people who are sure that oil depletion is a hoax to have us pay higher gasoline prices often fall into ecstatic joy when hearing new promises of free and abundant energy from the lone genius of the day. Indeed, many successful scams are based on the narrative of a lone individual fighting against the establishment. And, getting back to Shakespeare; think of this: how is that Othello suspects Desdemona, but not Iago? Well, because Othello projects his own personality into that of his comrade in arms, Iago, while he can't do the same with Desdemona. We humans are like that: we tend to believe what we think we understand (and Shakespeare understood humans probably better than any other human in history)

(2) Think of another facet of the plot of Shakespeare's tragedy: how the protagonist, Othello, plays the total dumbass of the story - so easily duped into destroying himself and everything around him. And, yet, Othello does not appear to us as a bumbling idiot; no; we see him as a tragic figure we sympathize with. You know why? Because he starts in the play with a big handicap, that of being black in an all-white world. The fact that Othello is black is the crucial point of the plot that, otherwise, would be simply ridiculous. Now, think about deniers in the climate debate: they start with a handicap even bigger than Othello's one. They know little or nothing about the science of climate and yet they have picked up a fight with the best experts in the field. Curiously, this handicap generates a strong psychological effect in their favor: it is called the "appeal of the underdog" (aka the "Sylvester vs. Tweety" effect). You see it used in the movie industry all the time - the final winner of the battle is always the one that looked like the loser at the beginning. So, if you are a climate scientist, be careful at avoiding to place yourself into the role of the evil guy of the movies!

___________________________

See also the blog titled "Desdemona's Despair", defined as "the clearinghouse for all of the very worst news about the future of life on Earth, such as global warming, climate change, deforestation, overfishing, acidification, oil spills, resource depletion, drought, pollution, overpopulation, dead zones, mass extinction, and doom." The reasons for the choice of the name "Desdemona" are not stated anywhere in the blog, but may well be the same that I described in this post.

It's politics, stupid!

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 11:28:00 +0000

h/t Gianandrea Giacoma

Strategies and policies for advancing the environmental agenda

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 21:33:00 +0000

This post, contributed by Max Iacono, starts from the proposals and the ideas in the site "Cognitive Works" with regard to communicating the urgency of the problem of climate change. It develops into is a complex post examining various ways to attain change in organizations, from companies to whole states.

Guest post by Max Iacono

Abstract. This post attempts to describe succinctly the relevant intellectual territory with respect to both macro and micro types of policies and strategies at both the national and the organizational levels. It also highlights similarities and differences between "policies" and "strategies". It does this to encourage those who are environmentally engaged to consider how their own environmental agendas could be advanced through the range of macro and micro policies and strategies identified, and their many variables. It also brings attention to some of the generic political and political economy obstacles which both policy-making and "strategy-making" actors and stakeholders typically face in the course of the complex and ongoing multi-actor processes of policy (or strategy) formulation, adoption, implementation and evaluation. An additional related objective is to provide an introduction and cursory review of the website "Cognitive Policy Works", identify some of the novel ways it works with policy-making actors and stakeholders, and bring attention to its excellent work on the "framing" of issues and the tacit "mental models" which may be in use.

Outline of the post

1. Introduction

2. Cognitive Policy Works

3. Strategic planning

4. Frame Analysis

5. The realm of policy and strategy

6 . Policies

7. Macroeconomic public policies

8. Sector – level public policies

9. Synergy of multiple policy areas and national public policy frameworks

10. Organizations and their strategies and policies at the organizational level

11. Organizational level macro variables and the Mc Kinsey 7-S model

12. Organisations and their strategies at functional areas of management level

13. Implementing change at national and organizational levels
14. Conclusion

1. Introduction

I was asked by a colleague to review and comment the very interesting website “Cognitive Policy Works” and provide my views and opinions, and so I did. My analysis and comments follow below. I would like to state from the outset that these are only my own personal views which I don’t consider necessarily either complete nor necessarily a correct analysis or representation of the site and of its contents. (both of which are very rich and with a good deal of complexity embedded in them). But I also would like to say that I thought the website and the work which its creators are doing seem very worthwhile and useful to me. And definitely have a role to play in various areas and aspects of environmentalism. But thinking about the site and its contents also prompted me to consider some other aspects of policy and of its various meanings and domains of application, which I then did in the second half of this post. Various policies and aspects of policy also can play a constructive role in the environmentalism agenda.

2. Cognitive Policy Works

The site "Cognitive Policy Works" starts off with a title and name that I thought engaged in a bit of a play on words. Cognitive Policy "works" can mean that the site presents some "works," that is some think pieces and articles, or tools and educational materials in "cognitive policy", in whichever ways such a concept may be defined and understood; but it also can mean that Cognitive Policy "works" in the sense that it functions and can achieve (or help to achieve) certain objectives. (including, I believe, various objectives of an environmental nature)

Regarding the second meaning, the site then makes a distinction in one of its readings between "cognitive policy" and "material policy". I think this is important because "policy" has a cognitive or intellectual dimension but it also has a practical dimension which has to do with its processes of formulation and implementation.

In other words it is a necessary condition to have the right ideas or understandings, (the so-called "cognitive policy" piece) but this is different from: a) formulating (and adopting) actual policy and b) implementing (and evaluating) actual policy. Both of which, moreover, are part of a single ongoing cycle rather than necessarily being two distinct activities which occur in sequence. And often the entire process is simply called "policy making"; that is, as current policies are being implemented, new revised policies (or the same policies) are being formulated.

The cycle almost never “stops” so that its actors can have time to prepare brand new policies calmly and from scratch, since the old ones (whether explicit or tacit) are always in the process of being implemented, and this with all of their attendant flows of effects, outcomes and impacts. Please also note that a policy cycle can be conceived in various ways but often includes also policy adoption and policy evaluation stages, as well as an initial broad policy agenda-setting phase, in addition to the more commonly considered policy formulation and policy implementation stages, for specific policies or policy areas.

And as I understand it, some of the articles and think pieces and their ideas found on the site "cognitive policy works", would form an input to the policy formulation process. Which is itself not a simple "one-time" activity but rather a process with various steps and which takes place over time and typically involves many actors and their groupings. And these include both those actors who traditionally we may consider as being “policy makers” (e.g. parliamentarians, cabinet ministers, parliamentary think tanks and special governmental policy and planning units, and etc.) as well as many others who play various types of roles. (e.g. external think tanks, lobbyists, NGOs, political parties, and also many others) .

But "cognitive policy" also could interest itself with the policy formulation and implementation processes themselves (and their steps) (in addition to the content of various policies) and thereby be able to inform and make a contribution regarding how better to achieve improved policy formulation or improved policy implementation. (for any policy, or at least for various different specific policies with different contents and objectives).

The site then has four parts each of which features various resources: Strategic Planning, Frame Analysis, Resource Center (which provides tools and methodologies with which to do those activities covered by each of the other three parts) and Training and Workshops -which identifies courses, workshops and seminars to train people in how to work with the preceding concepts, tools and methodologies.

The term "Policy" can be understood in different ways and also applies to different contexts. Typically the word is used to refer to the policies of governments (whether central, regional or local) in which instance it is typically called “public policy”. If a public policy formulation and implementation process is transparent, responsive to real needs, accountable, and follows the law, and is reasonably well regulated, and its actors are honest and not corrupt, and also are held accountable (democratically and/or bureaucratically) ex-post, one then often says that the country or region displays so called "good governance". So public policy plays a role in government and in governing, as well as in governance and its quality.

Private sector entities and N.G.O.s -and civil society institutions more broadly- (e.g. universities) also can and do have "policies". National level policy making processes (at the level of a nation or of a province or of a region or locality) have some similar but also some different characteristics from organizational level policies and strategies at the level of organizations or groups.

Coming now to the four sections or parts of the website, I found the section on Frame Analysis much more interesting (and potentially more useful) than the section on Strategic Planning.

3. Strategic planning

Strategic Planning as a concept and as a practice has been around for a very long time (and much has been written on it) and although it can help the actors who participate in organizational strategic planning processes to understand where they and their organization want to go, most often the plans themselves are "dead on arrival". Meaning that often something else ends up being done rather than the Strategic Plan which was formulated, and in some instances even formally endorsed by management and adopted. And this is because both external and internal organizational conditions and contexts are always evolving and changing, and ever more so under current conditions of advancing and accelerating globalization, including also the arrival of its many “game changers”. But that does NOT mean that such exercises are useless. I would say the contrary. They are very useful because they help their participating actors figure out much better what they want and where they stand with respect to various internal or external issues facing the organization. But then once their ideas meet reality, (which as I just indicated is also often rapidly changing) the plans often will need to be modified or adjusted with the result that the Strategic Plan and the Strategic (or actual) Execution will end up being different.

I also can perhaps usefully mention that during a period (a long time ago) when I worked at the Economic Development Institute of the World Bank (from 1990 to 1993) the Institute had established a Strategic Planning methodology and a corresponding training workshop series for N.G.O.s of developing countries and at that time the program was considered an innovation and a pilot program to be tested and then perhaps scaled up. I was not directly involved with that program but I knew the person who ran it , and we sometimes discussed its interim results. (which I believe overall were mixed and probably did not bring about sustainable organizational change) But I also am quite sure that the program has since then been revised and upgraded and improved (and scaled) many times. Knowledge Management also has become a key area of interest and activity for the World Bank as a cursory look at the World Bank Institute website quickly will reveal to anyone who may be interested.

4. Frame analysis

Returning now to Cognitive Policy Works with a focus on its relevance to environmental agendas, personally I found the material on "Frame Analysis" far more interesting (and also far more innovative) because -as the introduction to that section states- "frame analysis reveals spin and manipulation". And since the areas which we, the readers of Cassandra Legacy, are most interested in always involve PLENTY of spin and manipulation, it is useful to obtain ideas and tools and methods for countering it so that the truth about these issues can reach the wider public and so that -as a result- positive and constructive action can be taken.

So anything that can help make various policy actors (either upstream actors involved in policy formulation or downstream actors involved in policy implementation) see much better their own ideology, their own biases, their own mental models, as well as of course those of others who may not share them or who they may be trying to influence or convince to take various specific actions, can (at least potentially) be very useful. Since if one has the wrong understanding or "framing" or "mental model" of a problem or an issue (e.g. climate change) it is almost impossible to decide to implement effective actions or any meaningful change in that area.

But again the issue is most often not only one of making cognitive changes so that various people will frame important issues in a better or more realistic and productive way, (for instance the reality of climate change, or of peak oil, or of limits to growth and the carrying capacity of the planet) but rather being able to counter the political influences and the interests which bring about those wrong framings and mental models in the first place.

In other words "cognitive policy"' training is not likely to help Fox Channel to "frame" climate change differently (or to receive less funding from the Koch Brothers) nor will pointing out correct ideas necessarily change the behavior and practices of the many so-called "trolls" who often appear on blogs.

I also am assuming that the people who came up with the website are at least in part a commercial venture and therefore market and sell their various (quite useful) services which they list. And it looks to me like they may have started out with policy as it applies to N.G.O.'s (Oxfam and etc.) and then perhaps "graduated" to providing their services also to private sector entities and to governments. Or at least to participants coming also from those sectors. Probably, whether from "developed" countries or from "developing" countries; which incidentally is itself a "framing" and a "mental model issue". That is, what do we understand by "developing" or "developed"?; and given the understanding which we may have of that term, we then might proceed to attempt to bring about further “development” through various national and micro policies in quite different ways. For instance, does “development” mean creating more industry or does development mean creating more human rights or more gender equality, or much improved education of girls, or more environmental or ecological businesses and fewer polluting ones, or various other such? And what kinds of public or corporate policies will favor each type of national development, and what should be the priorities in various countries at various stages of their “development”?

And also what kinds of policies are more generally involved in development and how are they made and implemented?

5. The realm of policy and strategy

Roughly speaking we can divide the realm of policy and strategy as follows: There exist national public policies and strategies (for the 196 nation states and their administrative subdivisions that now exist in the world and which sit at the United Nations) and there also exist a broad range of organizational or company or N.G.O. policies and strategies, for the very large numbers of such organizations which also exist in the world. Each of these categories can be further subdivided into “core or macro policies” and “sector or micro policies”. All of these policies are relevant in one manner or another and to some extent or another to key environmental issues.

Influencing the policy process at organizational levels is considerably easier than influencing the public policy process at national levels but both can be done (or at least attempted). At the national level, political economy of change issues and politics are factors which I believe typically cannot be handled by "cognitive policy", or at least not by cognitive policy alone (which deals mostly with having the correct ideas) because good ideas are not sufficient to shift or change the positions of various interest groups which shape and determine actual policy. But such political economy issues also can exist at the broad organizational level and if you consider your own university as a possible example, (the colleague who asked me to review the website is also a university professor) I am sure you easily can see how internal university politics and the interests of various actor groups ends up shaping university policies or “strategies”, or at least easily may end up shaping what is actually done or not done operationally, or what emphasis is given to what types of activities (e.g. research or teaching or consulting) by the administration and by the faculty, and through such actions or inactions, also eventually will shape various educational outcomes. I chose universities and academic institutions as one example of a type of civil society organization but I believe these kinds of issues apply to all organizations and whether found in the private sector or in the civil society “sector”. (or for that matter, also in the public sector as some of its many public entities and agencies)

6. Policies

I would now try to define and exemplify the term “policy” a bit better. I ask readers to remember that this is not an academic treatise on what policy is, or what kinds of policies or strategies exist, -but only a summary-, and that many good articles and literature on policy DO exist and can be consulted by anyone who is interested in learning more about the topic.

I would reiterate the few distinctions I have made above also here. Policies as they exist (or as the term is typically being used) at the national level and policies as they exist or are being used at the organizational level. (e.g. at the level of a corporation or of a civil society organization or a public agency)

A further distinction is the one between so called “macro” policies which affect an entire country or a region, and “sector or industry level policies”, that is, of those “micro” policies which affect particular sectors, districts, neighborhoods or groups. I will start off with a basic definition of “public policy” which can be found in the Wikipedia and then I will provide a number of examples and illustrations of each type of policy. But please note that various other definitions of the term “policy” also exist, and that different definitions apply to the policies (and strategies) of organizations than those which apply to “public policy or policies”.

“Public policy is the principled guide to action taken by the administrative executive branches of the state with regard to a class of issues in a manner consistent with law and institutional customs. In general, the foundation is the pertinent national and substantial constitutional law and implementing legislation such as the US Federal code in the U.S. Further substrates include both judicial interpretations and regulations which are generally authorized by legislation.

Some scholars define it as a system of "courses of action, regulatory measures, laws, and funding priorities concerning a given topic promulgated by a governmental entity or its representatives." Public policy is commonly embodied "in constitutions, legislative acts, and judicial decisions.

“A policy at the organizational level is instead defined as a principle or rule to guide decisions and achieve rational outcomes. A policy is an intent, and is implemented as a procedure or protocol. Policies are generally adopted by the Board of or senior governance body within an organization whereas procedures or protocols would be developed and adopted by senior executive officers. The term may apply to government, private sector organizations and groups, and individuals. Presidential executive orders, corporate privacy policies, and parliamentary rules of order are all examples of policy. Policy differs from rules or law. While law can compel or prohibit behaviors (e.g. a law requiring the payment of taxes on income), policy merely guides actions toward those that are most likely to achieve a desired outcome”

7. Macroeconomic public policies

The main widely recognized national level so-called “macro-economic” public policies are (roughly) the following:

- Fiscal policy (also called revenue policy –or its subset of “tax policy”-, and expenditure policy –or budget policy- (including also public investment policy), and their various component policies. And the two main policies of revenues and expenditures should be viewed together. Revenue policy usually comes under the Ministry of Finance or the Treasury and budget or expenditure policy (including public investment) usually comes under a variety of core and line ministries and agencies

- Monetary policy (including interest rate policy and money supply policies and etc.) usually comes under the Central Bank which often also enjoys a certain degree of independence from the rest of government.

- Trade policy

- Exchange rate policy

Macroeconomic policies are basically those national level policies which deal with monetary, fiscal, exchange rate, and trade conditions which in turn affect economic growth, employment and inflation. And with respect to which different national or regional (e.g. EU) monetary and fiscal authorities also may have different objectives or mandates. Governments typically can shape and determine the four policies above, which then indirectly shape and affect economic growth, employment and inflation (which are effects). In other words “the levers” which governments have with respect to employment, inflation and growth are “through” the above core macro policies but also through some of the associated sector policies that now follow:

8. Sector – level public policies

Examples of six “micro” policies which typically also are quite important are:

- Education policy or policies (for primary, secondary and tertiary education, and for training and development)

- Health policies (publicly or privately provided and also regarding the balance between preventive or curative care, and the access to health care by various social groups)

- Infrastructure investment policies (for various types of infrastructure that are needed and used for various purposes and national or local objectives in both the infrastructure and the social sectors.

- Research and Development policies (usually directed at trying to improve medium and long term competitiveness and productivity)

- Active labor market policies typically to better orient and improve the quality and quantity of employment (which as indicated above, is largely a derivative effect of macroeconomic policies)

- Transport sector policies for land, sea and air and for multi-modal transport. (these can be particularly important for supply and value chains and for their logistics but also for the movement of persons and the mobility and flexibility of the labour market)

Please note that other very important cross-cutting policies such as Energy Policy, Population Policy, and Communication and Information Policy are not normally considered to be “macroeconomic” policies because they are not directly or strictly speaking “economic”. Therefore they are not typically listed as part of the above previous “macro economic policies” of a country, that is alongside with fiscal, monetary, trade and exchange rate policies. But because they typically affect the entire nation and not just segments or sectors or particular areas of it, they nonetheless can be considered to be “macro” policies, instead of being considered only as some additional micro level policies or sector policies.

Additionally the presence or absence and the nature of various other: a) industrial (or industry) policies, b) agricultural policies and c) policies regarding various services (including banking and financial services) also are very important.

9. Synergy of multiple policy areas and national public policy frameworks

There is clearly also an interaction between these types of sector or micro level policies and what happens at the national level depending on how such sector policies interact with the main macroeconomic policies. A clear example of this is the effect of the EU’s common agricultural policy both on the fiscal position of various member countries –and the foregone potential alternative use of funds and budgets- as well as on national and global trade balances; (the EU’s CAP contributed to the failure of several “Doha Rounds” ) and another example is how banking sector policies (including those for banking regulation and banking supervision, or lack thereof) –and the policies and practices of some of the major banks regarding such items as mortgages, derivatives, so called leverage, and reserve capital requirements, have affected the fiscal and macroeconomic stability position of various countries.

Institutions such as the World Bank and in a different way also the IMF construct overall “national policy frameworks” which include all the various public policies –both at the macro and the sector level-, which typically exist or that may apply to a country and to its economy and society and which also try to take into account more holistically how various policies or policy areas may interact to produce various desirable overall effects or avoid undesirable ones. “Poverty reduction strategy papers” are examples of such World Bank national policy frameworks intended specifically to reduce poverty. Such public policy national frameworks also could be designed and implemented in ways that favor other important national objectives such as equity, a reasonable widespread level of prosperity, and environmental sustainability.

As stated earlier each of the above policies and policy areas (both macro and micro) can be thought of as having a policy formulation phase and a policy implementation phase. In reality typically both these phases are ongoing simultaneously. Old policies are being implemented and evaluated while new ones are being formulated and adopted. So the distinction between these phases is often not clear or sharp. And each phase of policy is developed by many different societal actor groups (acting sequentially or in parallel) who try to influence policy formulation (according to the cognitive policy ideas they may have and/or also according to the various political and economic interests they are trying to represent and favor or promote) and who then also will assist or hinder policy implementation, and for much the same reasons or motives.

The politics and the various economic interests and the political economy of these processes, represent what could be called “the politics and processes and the political economy of policy making and implementation”. And also of “strategy making” if one is considering the organizational level which I now will discuss a bit more below.

10. Organizations and their strategies and policies at the organizational level

So moving from the national level to the organizational level, one finds various differences in the ways policy is formulated and implemented and also in what is considered to be “policy” and what is considered to be “management”. And we all often have heard –and whether this is correct or not- that “China is run more like a corporation” than the Western democracies; so these differences are in fact real and significant.

If one wishes to try to create some similar categories (or a parallel taxonomy of policies) to the one listed above for nations but for the core and sector / micro policies and strategies of large companies or corporations, one could perhaps think and proceed as follows:

The equivalent of macro economic policies at the national level could be considered to be the following “core” policies or managerial and ownership strategies at the corporate or company, or organizational level :

- The company’s (or the organization’s) basic area(s) of business and its business model(s) and what is often called the company’s “mission”

- The company’s financing strategies (equity, debt, venture capital and other forms of capital and working capital raising, and etc.)

- The company’s human resources management policies and strategies

- Company strategies on the sourcing of materials, equipment and supplies, as well as on the marketing and sales of products and services

- Technology and equipment strategies and policies.

In other words the key “analogous” “macro” or core policies of a company and of organizations which are somewhat equivalent to those of a nation would be (if one were to use the word “policy” in the same way that it is being used when talking about public policy at the level of a country or region (and it is NOT used that way, but I will come to that aspect in a minute) would be (as is the case for the macro policies of a nation) those policies and strategies which determine the fundamental elements and the basic cross cutting operational workings and characteristics of any company, and which do so company-wide.

That is, what is the basic business model of the company and what is its mission, where does the company get the money it needs to start and to operate the business, how does it recruit and manage and further develop its people, how does it handle its inputs and outputs and their respective supply and value chains and logistics, and how does it handle its throughput processes and transform materials, energy, money and know how into marketable products and services?

But let me come straight away to the fact that the term “policies” as used in the term “company policies and procedures” typically has a far narrower and restrictive meaning -which is much closer to “rules and regulations”- than it is to the meaning of public “policies” since it often refers to such aspects as the company policy on matters like security, or working hours and flexi-time for employees, or other personnel rules and regulations and procedures. But there exist however also some company –wide “policies” which can affect directly a company’s overall profitability such as a company’s quality assurance “policies” and programs. And typically there also exist such policies on company ethics, human resources, customer service and accounting which equally have company wide-effects and impacts just as macro-economic policies have country-wide impacts.

Typically, what are called “core or macro policies” at the national level are not called policies at the company or organizational level but rather are called “strategies” or areas of something called either Strategic Management; or they are the activities that come under the remit of General or “Top” Management and the layer of functional management operating directly below it. And Strategic Management as explained earlier also can be thought of as being made up of two phases i.e. a Strategic Planning phase and a Strategic Implementation phase, which can be thought of as having roughly the same relationship as that described earlier for the national level as Policy Formulation and Policy Implementation.

There is a great deal of literature on both policy-making in nations and strategic management in companies, and here I am only providing my own personal summary based on those understandings and notions which I have found useful, while also trying to draw some parallels and highlighting some differences that I hope will be interesting and thought-provoking.

11. Organizational level macro variables and the Mc Kinsey 7-S model

Another way of conceiving the main “macro” factors operating in an organization is by using the Mc Kinsey so called Seven S model which views an organization as the interaction and synergy of seven broad (or “macro”?) factors (all of which start with the letter S) and namely its: Strategy, Structure, Systems, Staff, Skills, (managerial) Styles, and Shared Values (and/or organizational culture). And please note that in a different way, these same variables also can apply at the level of a nation. That is, a nation too has a tacit or explicit economic and national development strategy, a certain administrative or governmental structure, certain fiscal and taxation and other systems, appropriately skilled human resources and processes for how to create and develop them, various political and bureaucratic “styles”, and a national political, social and economic culture.

And to both of these conceptualizations I also would add an “eighth S” namely the Situation or the context of either the organization or the nation which then will have various external dimensions such as the political, economic, institutional, cultural, competitive, technological and other broad dimensions which affect or interact with either the internal context of the organization (thereby affecting its internal 7S) or –with respect to the effects of the various dimensions of globalization- will affect and interact with the internal context (and above other 7S) of a nation.

All of these are of course only “mental models” of organizations and of nations and the actual realities are clearly more complex and also more “organic” and integrated and hence also less amenable to simple reductionist dissections and their categories. And like any other “mental model”, may have been “framed” correctly, or incorrectly or some situation-contingent combination of these.

12. Organisations and their strategies at functional areas of management level

Finally, to complete the above picture at least conceptually, the equivalent of national “sector level and micro policies” - but at the organizational level-, could be considered to be the so-called “functional areas of management” and the respective company strategies for each area. (e.g. for the marketing and sales strategy) And once again with respect to the formulation and implementation of environmental agendas both macro policies or strategies, and micro policies or strategies -and their several variables listed above- will end up playing a role.

I am listing here only what I consider to be the top ten typical company functional areas of management (each of which also will have a tacit or explicit development and implementation strategy) but there could be others or the ones I listed could be packaged differently in keeping with the preferred organizational structure and functions decided upon by an organization’s management. And these functions and their strategies can then be “green” or “ecological” or “environmental” in various ways, or not: i) planning ii) research and development iii) technology support (engineering); iv) purchasing and supply logistics v) production (of products or of services); vi) finance and accounting; vii) human resources management and development viii) marketing ix) distribution and sales ; x) administration. And cross-cutting each of these basic managerial or organizational functions are also the three levels of so-called “organizational behavior” namely those of individuals, groups or teams, and of the organization as a whole. (each of which then will have their own properties, characteristics and dynamics and various effects on the various functional areas)

13. Implementing change at national or organizational levels

When we think of trying to bring about change at either the national level (or at the global level) or at the organizational or corporate levels –for instance- in order to implement more climate friendly public policies through better national or local energy policies- (and down to their narrower specifics such as a carbon tax) and/ or through improved company strategies which would introduce more renewable forms of energy, and phase out fossil fuel energy , or implement cleaner production, we are going to come up against at least some of the above “generic policy and strategy” variables and their respective political-economy-of change realities. Complicating this already highly complex picture further, is the issue of “framing” also addressed quite well by the site “Cognitive Policy Works”.

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The above was a brief summary intended to help readers arrive at their own conceptualizations of the territory in order to better be able to navigate it and influence it towards achieving various environmental goals.

The Cognitive Policy Works site is very well constructed and presented and readers who are interested in these topics can consult it here.

For those interested in climate change in particular, (probably the top environmental issue in the world at the moment and therefore likely to be near the top of any environmental agenda, but certainly not the only issue) they can go directly here:

In addition to the climate change category immediately above other categories also are listed on the website and are available for review -and are certainly worthwhile having a look at-. And these other categories are -according to the site- those on communication, design science, economy, environment, funding, marketing, news, the political mind, poverty, progressive infrastructure, social movements, and training and workshops.

The World is a Fountain

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 10:56:00 +0000

The world is complex, variegated, convoluted, multi-faceted, interconnected, complicated, circuitous, and more. And, yet, there is a logic in the way it works.

Look at the Trevi Fountain, in Rome, it is complex and variegated, but in the end there is a logic: water always goes down. It is physics: it is the gravitational potential that makes water move.

The same is true for the whole world. Lot's of things are going on, but there is a logic: energy goes down, it degrades, it is a chemical potential driven by the second law of thermodynamics.

So, no matter how complicated the Trevi Fountain is, water always goes down. No matter how complicated is the world, chemical potentials always "go down."

This is the idea at the basis of the paper that I published in "Sustainability", titled "Mind-Sized World Models." as part of a special issue dedicated to the 40th anniversary of "The Limits to Growth"

The term "mind-sized" comes from the ideas of Seymour Papert, who said that models should be simple enough to be understandable, if one has to act on them. On the basis of this idea, I tried to put together simple, "mind-sized", models which can still tell us something of the way the world works. World Models, in short.

So, I build these models as if they were multi-level fountains, one basin, two basins, three basins, and more.

Each basin represents a stock of energy, which is dissipated in steps, going from top to bottom (in energy terms). It is a concept that I already described in a post of mine titled "Entropy, Peak Oil, and Stoic Phylosophy" but that now I examined more in depth.

Now, imagine a multi-level fountain; imagine that it is dry at start. Then put some water in the top basin. It will go down, step by step, until it reach the bottom basin, and then disappear falling on the ground. It is, in the end, what we have been doing with fossil fuels; burning them until they disappear as they become atmospheric pollution.

Here is the model for the "three-level" fountain. It is the one that gives rise to the "Seneca Effect" (When things go wrong, they go wrong fast)

This is the model that originates the "Seneca Cliff" that we may also call "collapse" and that we may experience at some moment in the future.

My paper in "Sustainability" is "open access". Here is the link

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Note: there is a tendency, recently, to say that all "free access" journals are hoaxes and that all you have to do to see your paper published in one of them is to pay some money. It may be for some journals, but surely not for all of them. About "Sustainability", I can testify that submissions go through a very serious review and that it is not easy at all to publish in it. Try and see by yourself.

Here are some thoughts of mine on "open access" science.

The dark side of coal

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 18:50:00 +0000

As part of a mini-series on the political and social effects of "peak coal" in Europe, here is a post that I published in 2010 in "The Oil Drum." Other posts published on "Cassandra's Legacy" on this subject are "Peak Coal in Britain" and "Why Italy?".

The dark side of coal - some historical insights on energy and the economy

Posted by Ugo Bardi on April 12, 2010 - 10:41am in The Oil Drum: Europe

Detail of Telemaco Signorini's masterpiece "The Riverbank" ("L'alzaia"), painted in 1864. It shows the hard work of five men pulling a heavy barge against the current along the Arno river, near Florence, in Italy. Most likely the barge was loaded with coal. In this post, I start from this image to tell the story of coal in Italy and how the fortunes of the country went in parallel with those of coal well until mid 20th century. (Click on the image for the full painting.)

I have a special emotional relationship with Telemaco Signorini's painting "The Riverbank." The area shown in the panting has changed very little from the time when the painting was made - mid 19th century - and, today, I could take you to exactly that place, in Florence, Italy. It is not far from where I was born and raised; it is the area where my family used to live for generations. Everytime I see that painting (and I have seen the original twice, in two different expositions) I can't avoid the sensation that those men, so hard working, could be ancestors of mine. "The Riverbank" is correctly considered a masterpiece; just look at it and you'll see that it is truly exceptional. Not only the composition of the figures is original; think of the contemporary French impressionists. None of them, great masters as they were, ever painted anything like that. They never seemed to be worried about the social problems of their time as, instead, Signorini was.

So, he shows us the tremendous effort of these five men pulling something unseen, but that can only be a heavy barge. Almost certainly that barge was loaded with coal. It was coal from England that had been unloaded in the port city of Livorno and that was slowly making its way up to Florence.

When "The Riverbank" was painted, in 1864, the age of coal was in full swing. Already in medieval times people had started using coal as fuel but the 19th century saw an enormous expansion of production. It was in 1866 that William Stanley Jevons said in his "The Coal Question" that, "Coal in truth stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities. It is the material energy of the country — the universal aid — the factor in everything we do. With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times."

But coal had a problem: it was not easy to transport. Coal is heavy; it is unthinkable to cart it for long distances on roads. For this reason, the first railroads were developed in early 19th century expressly to transport coal. But rails were expensive, prone to failure, and the first steam engines were so inefficient that they would use up most of the coal transported unless the distance covered was really short. These early railroads could be used only to move coal from mines to river ports, where coal was loaded on sailing ships called "colliers." Only using waterways it was possible to transport coal over long distances. Gradually, railroads and steam engines became more efficient, but wherever sea and canal transportation was available, it remained always the cheapest way of transporting coal.

In the early times of the coal age, the cost of transportation set a limit to coal diffusion. Only those mines which were near waterways could produce coal and only those areas which were accessible by waterways could use coal. That condition held in most of Northern Europe and it was there that the use of coal grew most rapidly, fueling what we call the industrial revolution. More coal extracted meant more industries, and more industries meant more coal extracted. More coal meant also more steel, and more steel meant larger and more efficient armies. Coal was the origin and the fuel of the British Empire, but Britain's production was so large that there was coal available for export. With British coal, and later German coal, the industrial revolution spred all over Europe, even to countries which had no coal mines. With imported coal, waterways were the necessary and sufficient condition for having industries. But most of Southern Europe and North Africa were cut off from the coal revolution: too dry or too mountainous for waterways.

The southernmost limit of waterways in Europe in 19th century was Tuscany, where the River Arno connected the main city, Florence, to the port city of Livorno. Already in the 18th century, the Arno River had been artificially transformed into a waterway. With this vital line, Tuscany could import coal in large amounts from England and start her own industrial revolution. It was a small revolution compared to that of the Northern European countries, but manpower in Tuscany was cheap, and it attracted capital from the rest of Europe. Just as today manufacturing is exported in the poorest areas of the world, by mid 19th century, Tuscany had become a manufacturing center--with industries mostly created and managed by Northern European businessmen.

The Grand-Duke of Tuscany of that time, Leopoldo the 2nd, was praised by everyone as a good man. He was also a politician and, as such, he tended to promise gifts to his constituency. One of these gifts was the public lighting of Florence. Already in 18th century, a public lighting system based on oil lamps had been installed, but it was dim, limited to a few places, and the lamps ran out of fuel by midnight. In 1845, things changed with the first gas lamps. Those lamps were fueled by a "gasometre", a giant tank where coal reacted with steam to form "town gas" that then was piped all the way to each street lamp (that old gasometre still stands, nearly forgotten, in a public garden in Florence). It was bright light that lasted all night; a revolution. So, thanks to coal, Florence was beautifully lighted at night. But coal had also a dark side: those people whom Telemaco Signorini shows to us laboriously pulling a heavy coal-loaded barge upstream. With time, barges were gradually superseded by the railroad. It is likely that, by the first decades of the 20th century, very few people were still pulling heavy loads upstream. But the nature of the problem had changed: coal was not infinite.

In the 19th century, coal for Italy came mainly from Britain and the commerce of coal was a strong link that connected the two countries. The Italian state had been created in 1861, uniting the statelets which had been ruling the Italian peninsula. It had been, in part, the result of the work of British diplomacy. There were evident advantages for Britain in having a strong Italy as counterweight to the French ambitions of expansion in North Africa. But the creation of Italy had not been just a cold political calculation. There was a genuine liking of the British for Italy and for Italian traditions. In some ways, Italy was a daughter country to Britain. Over the years, the British flocked to Italy; they loved the climate, the people and the relative freedom of the place. Some Italians also moved to foggy Britain, although not as tourists. The invention of fish and chips is claimed sometimes by Italians from the Tuscan town of Barga, who had emigrated to the British islands.

But the relationship of Italy and England went sour with peak coal in England, in the early 1920s. After the first world war, Italy desperately needed coal to rebuild her industries. But Britain could no longer provide coal as liberally as before. Italy started importing coal from Germany, but that was not sufficient: coal consumption in Italy stayed flat between the two world wars. Italy's economy was also dragged down by war debt, and it never really recovered after the trauma of the first world war. All that had political consequences. The sympathy for England and for everything English evaporated in Italy and the Italian press started vituperating Britain and complaining about "the coal issue". D.H. Lawrence, in his "Sea and Sardinia" (1921) tells us that the coal problem was one of the main subjects of conversation among Italians. In 1922, Mussolini and the Fascist party took power, in large part also exploiting the resentment of the population for the bad economic situation.

It is said that Mussolini made the trains run on time. Perhaps it is true, but he could do nothing to create coal that wasn't there. The crisis of 1929 was a bad hit on the Italian economy and - perhaps as a reaction - the government tried to vent the nation's frustration by invading Ethiopia in 1935. There were several official justifications for the invasion - the most common one was that Italy needed "a place in the sun" - a curious justification from a country which has plenty of sun anyway. But, clearly, the invasion was meant to be a slap in the face for Britain. It was a way to tell to the British that the Italians could have their empire, too, that they could do that alone, and that they didn't need no damned British coal for that.

It was a mistake; a colossal mistake. Mussolini hadn't understood that it was coal that made empires, not the reverse. No coal, no empire; it was as simple as that. Conquering Ethiopia, Italy had dissipated immense human and material resources and had gained a bad reputation as the rogue country of the time. All that for a piece of a dry land and the dubious honor for the King of Italy of taking the title of "Emperor of Ethiopia." That land was also strategically impossible to defend, as it would be seen just a few years later.

Britain reacted to the invasion of Ethiopia by stopping the exports of coal to Italy. That, and other international economic sanctions, pushed the already crippled Italian economy on the brink of collapse. The government reacted furiously, pushing a series of measures called "autarchy," the use of national resources only. It was mainly propaganda and some ideas that never worked, such as trying to make shoes out of cardboard and clothes out of fiberglass. The attempt to develop new coal mines could not work as a substitute for imports. The Sulcis mine in Sardinia was the main national source of coal, but it could never produce much more than 10% of of Italy's consumption between the two wars. The lack of coal and the strain of the Ethiopian war weighted on Italy's economy with almost 25% of the state budget dedicated to supporting the costs of the military occupation of the overseas colonies.

Given the situation, events played out as if following a prophecy written down long before. Italy had to rely more and more on German coal and that had political consequences. You can read the story in these paragraphs written in 1940 by Ridolfo Mazzucconi, a popular Italian journalist and writer of the time. Mazzucconi, among other things, had popularized in Italy the concept of "perfidious Albion," that had originated in France at the time of the French revolution. ( from the ASPOItalia blog.)

England ordered, with a repentine action, the suspension of the shipping of German coal directed to Italy from Rotterdam. As a compensation, England offered to replace Germany in coal shipping. But this service was subordinate to conditions such that accepting them would be to be tied to the British political interests and grievously damage our war preparations. The Fascist government responded with suitable roughness; and German coal, which couldn't come any more by sea, found its most comfortable and short road via the Brennero pass. Ths matter of coal was a healty and clarifying crisis of the political horizon. On March 9 and 10 (1940) Ribbentrop was in Rome and the visit gave rise to a clear and precise statement. The axis was intact. The alliance of Germany and Italy was continuing. A few days later, on the 18th, Mussolini and Hitler met for the first time at the Brennero pass and then even the blind were forced to see and the dim witted to understand.

You can read the same story as it was seen from the other side of the Atlantic in this article in Time magazine titled, "Hot Coal". It shows, among other things, how the Allies had completely misunderstood the Italian situation of the time. It is a tradition of fuel producers to use embargoes to try to gain political power over fuel importers but, usually, it doesn't work. In this case, Britain had tried to bully Italy into submission using the coal weapon. It was another colossal mistake that forced Italy to rely fully on German coal. It also fueled even more the resentment of Italians against Britain and that gave to Mussolini sufficient political leverage to push Italy into the war as an ally of Germany.

What followed was, perhaps, unavoidable, but it didn't have to be. It would have been enough to glance at the coal statistics for "the blind to see and the dim witted to understand" as Mazzucconi tells us. At that time, the size of a nation's economy could only be proportional to the amount of coal consumed and, by this measure, Italy couldn't even remotely match Britain. In 1940, despite having passed the peak, Britain still produced more than 200 million tons of coal per year and used most of it for its national economy and for that of the British Empire. Italy, instead, consumed just a little more than ten million tons of coal per year. The British economy was twenty times larger than the Italian one. The "blind and the dim witted" ones were all in the Italian government who grossly overestimated the military potential of the country. They were still thinking that a war was fought by peasants armed with bayonets. They had completely missed the dark side of coal.

It is said that history repeats itself; the first time it is a tragedy, the second is a farce. After the tragedy of the first world war, the second had some elements of farce. Mussolini often looked like a clown during the war and Italy took some truly farcical decisions, such as that of sending a small force of bombers and fighters to join Germany during the Battle of Britain. The absurdity of the idea wasn't so much in seeing outdated Italian biplane fighters desperately trying to battle Spitfires and Hurricanes, but in the very concept that Italy was trying to bomb a country that had been her traditional ally: Britain. There is a tradition for fuel importing countries to bomb exporting ones, but even Mazzucconi himself, with all his rethoric about the "Perfidious Albion" seems to be perplexed about this idea when he tells us of the bella fratellanza "good fellowship" between Italy and Britain. In the end, it didn't matter how clownish Mussolini looked and how stupid his military decisions were--there was nothing farcical in an unprepared army sent to its destruction and in a whole country destroyed and humiliated. It was the dark side of coal, again.

Time has passed; coal is not "king" any more. The countries destroyed during the second world war have rebuilt their economies using crude oil and natural gas. The dark side of coal, today, seems to play out more in terms of environmental damage: coal is the fuel that generates the most greenhouse gases for the same energy generated. Coal mining has also become a hugely destructive activity with "mountaintop removal" becoming a commonplace method to get at the coal seams. But coal is not any more a global commodity that leads to wars, as it was until mid 20th century. That role has been taken over by crude oil. The descendants of those men who pulled coal-loaded barges upstream in 19th century now drive shiny cars powered by oil and work in front of computer screens. But the problem of oil is the same as it was for coal: it is not infinite and there is not enough of it for everyone. It is now crude oil that makes and destroys empires. History repeats itself again and it will do that until we have fossil fuels to burn.

There are a lot of references that I used to compose this text. I'll give you here some extra data.

I published another paper on the subject of coal in Europe on the "ASPO neesletter" n. 73 of january 2007. You can find it here: http://www.energiekrise.de/e/aspo_news/aspo/newsletter073.pdf A figure taken from this paper shows the British coal production, here:
A quantitative figure showing how coal imports to Italy varied over time can be seen here, taken from a paper by Walter H. Voskuil "Coal and Political Power in Europe" published in Economic Geography, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Jul., 1942), pp. 247-258

A post in Italian that I wrote on this subject can be found at http://aspoitalia.blogspot.com/2007/01/davvero-viviamo-in-tempi-oscuri.html . It is a discussion of the role of coal in Italy between the two wars. If you can't read Italian, you may find it interesting for the illustrations.

You can find data about coal production in the Sardinian Sulcis mines at this reference (In Italian). The fact that Italy spent 25% of its budget in maintaining her overseas colonies can be found at this reference

Peak Coal in Britain

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 21:49:00 +0000

This is a paper that I published in 2007 in the issue n. 73 of the ASPO newsletter. I thought it was appropriate to reproduce it here, because in a recent post I mentioned the question of Italian politics and coal imports from Britain before and during the second world war. It is a subject that I had already touched in this early study. So, here it is, on the whole still valid after some years.

Peak Oil's Ancestor: the Peak of British Coal Production in the 1920s

By Ugo Bardi
ASPO Newsletter n. 73
Dec 10, 2006

Figure 1. British coal production from 1815 to 2004. The data from 1815 to 1860 are from Cook and Stevenson, 1996. The data from 1860 to 1946 are from Kirby 1977; the data from 1947 up to present are from the British Coal Authority (accessed 2006). The production data are fitted with a Gaussian function which approximates the Hubbert curve.

We are just a few years away from Peak Oil; the moment when the worldwide oil production will start an irreversible decline. What should we expect to happen at the peak and afterwards? History is not a direct guide, since there are no past cases of an important global commodity, such as oil, peaking.

However, there have been regional peaks which had global effects. The best known case is that of the US oil production that peaked in 1970 which brought the first great oil crisis in the years that followed. But that was not the first case of a major resource peaking and declining; there was another major peak almost half a century before: Peak Coal in Great Britain, in the 1920s.

The geological past left to Great Britain an endowment in coal unparalleled in any other region of Europe. Exploitation started in the Middle Ages and, already in early 18th Century had become an exponentially growing industry. Coal fuelled the British industrial revolution, and was also connected to political power, allowing Britain to construct the first, and so far the only, truly world empire in history.

The importance of coal is hard to over-estimate. During the period of expansion of the industry, a British miner could produce almost 250 tons of coal per year (Kirby 1977). Even taking into account that about 20% had to be used for mining more coal, the productivity of a coal miner, in energy terms, was hundreds of times larger than that of an agricultural worker. At the height of its empire, Britain employed more than one million miners (Kirby 1977). It was the superpower of the time, being challenged only by other coal-producing States. In the First World War, British coal fought against German coal: British coal won.

But coal couldn’t last forever, even for the richly endowed Britain. Already in mid 19th Century, William Stanley Jevons had predicted, in his The Coal Question (1856), that depletion would one day make British coal too expensive for British industry. Jevons did n’t state explicitly the concept of Peak Coal but, in a qualitative sense, his analysis was similar to that of Marion King Hubbert for the oil production in the United States (Hubbert, 1956). And Jevons had been right: the peak of British coal production occurred in 1913 with 287 M tons. The British coal industry struggled to maintain production but couldn’t reach that level again. The strain on the industry is also shown by the two miners’ general strikes of 1921and 1926 that caused a temporary fall of production. The downward trend became evident in the 1930s and could not be stopped.

The British production followed a classic bell-shaped curve in good agreement with Hubbert’s model, with a best fit of the distribution giving a peak in 1923, only ten years after the actual maximum. Today, coal production in Britain is less than one tenth than it was at its peak.

The peak of the British coal production was a turning point in history; never before had a major energy producing region started its decline. There are impressive analogies for the case of the British Coal Peak of 1923 and that of the American Oil Peak of 1970. In both cases, these countries were producing at peak about 20% of the world total. In both cases, the worldwide consequences were important. Before the peak, Britain was exporting about 25% of its domestic production, and this amount had been growing exponentially together with production. After the peak, exports started to decline causing a shortage of the coal in the world market. In the case of the US, oil exports were not important before the peak. But, after the peak, the US oil imports soared rapidly, leading also to a shortage in the world market.

The oil shortages in the 1970s gave rise to the price spikes causing the Great Oil Crisis. A similar spike took place in the 1920s for coal (Australian Gov., 2006) although it was less pronounced. Most likely, the coal spike was less abrupt because the price controls that had been put in place during the war were only slowly relaxed in the 1920s. Coal prices stayed high in the 1920s, but fell with the market crash of 1929.

Many regions of Europe depended on British coal, so the lack of coal was felt everywhere. Several events that followed the British coal peak may be related to the reduction of the availability of energy: the decline of the British Empire, the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as the general political upheaval of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The Italian newspapers of the 1920s and 1930s are full of insults against Great Britain for not sending to Italy the coal that Italians felt entitled to have. It reflects the kind of attitude that western countries adopted against the Middle East oil producers in the 1970s. But, if British coal was dwindling in the 1930s, German coal was still on the increase; its peak would only arrive in the 1940s. Germany never produced as much hard coal, namely the best quality, as did Britain, but in the 1930s it had the advantage that it could still increase its production, whereas Britain’s was declining.

In the 1930s, Italy abandoned her traditional ally, Britain, for Germany because only Germany could provide the coal that the Italian industry needed at a price that Italians could afford. Only later on, would they realize that the price of German coal was to be much higher than it had seemed. In the 1950s, after the turmoil of the Second World War, the problems caused by the British coal peak were solved ― for a while ― by switching to oil. Likewise, after the turmoil of the oil crisis of the 1970s, the problems caused by the US oil peak were solved ― for a while ― by switching to other productive regions. In both cases, neither the public, nor the politicians, nor the economists saw the relationships between the political and economic events of the time which were related to the peaking of oil and coal production.

In the 1930s, whole books were written on coal (Neuman 1934) but the word depletion was hardly mentioned. In 1977, Kirby wrote more than 200 pages on the history of the British coal industry during the peak period without ever mentioning the question of depletion. Apparently, people could not grasp why, while there was still coal to be extracted, production would decline. They didn’t understand that it is not physical availability that counts, but the cost of extraction that increases with progressive depletion. It was a concept that Jevons had already understood almost a century before but had not survived in mainstream economics. The case of the US oil peak was similar; peaking was generally ignored by economists, even though Marion King Hubbert had predicted it correctly. All that happened afterwards was attributed to political causes. Both peaks were soon forgotten.

Today, it is global oil production which is peaking. It is something we are all seeing, but it is not politically correct to mention the fact. Peaking is a momentous event, but it hints at a reality that most people would rather ignore: the finiteness of mineral resources. We may well ignore the global peak, too, just as most people ignored the British coal peak of the 1920s and the US oil peak of 1970. Yet, we won’t be able to ignore its effects.

References

Australian Government, the Treasury, 2006 (accessed)
www.treasury.gov.au/documents/1042/HTML/docshell.asp?URL=02_Resource_commodities.asp

Coal Authority, 2006 (accessed) www.coalminingreports.co.uk

Cook, C and Stevenson, J. 1996. The Longman Handbook of Modern British History, 1714-1995. Longman 3rd Edition. London and New York:

DOE 1993, DOE/EIA-0572 Report,

Hubbert, M.K. (1956). Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels. Presented before the Spring Meeting of the Southern District, American Petroleum Institute, Plaza Hotel, San Antonio, Texas, March 7-8-9, 1956

Kirby, M. W., 1977 The British Coalmining Industry, 1870-1946, The Macmillan Press Ltd, London and Birmingham.

Neuman A.M. 1934 Economic Organization of the British Coal Industry; Routledge.

Why Italy?

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 12:58:00 +0000

A portrait of my great-great-grandfather Ferdinando Bardi (1822-?). He fought with Garibaldi in the Italian unification war of 1860 and he was awarded the medals you see in this painting. I can only hope that my ancestor didn't kill too many people in order to deserve these medals but, apart from that, I have been wondering about what led him to fight in that war. Was it because he was paid? Was it because he was seeking adventure? Or was it, really, in the name of "Italy"? And, in that case, what would he have thought if he could have imagined the present situation in Italy?

In this post, I am rapidly revisiting the history of the Italian unification on the basis of the concept that everything that exists has a reason to exist and that, therefore, some of the recent political events in Italy, from the persistence of Berlusconi to the rise of the "five star" movement have their roots in ancient history. I apologize for the brevity of this text on a subject that would require a much more in-depth analysis. But I hope it can be taken at least as a starting point to learn more on this matter.

1. Why Italy?

At school, Italians are told the standard version of the events that led Italy to become a unified state in 1861. It says that Italians fought hard and passionately for the ideal of an unified country. After a number of failed attempts, eventually, a thousand brave volunteers followed General Garibaldi in the fight against the backward and dictatorial Kingdom of Naples. With the help of many Neapolitan patriots, Garibaldi's army triumphed and that led to the unification of Italy into a single state ruled by the wise King of Piedmont. Later on, the Italian army also triumphed against groups of bandits who unsuccessfully tried to resist the unification process in Southern Italy.

However, there exists a different version of the same events that seems to be becoming more popular in Italy in recent times (let's call it the "revisionist" version). It says that the prosperous and civilized Kingdom of Naples was stabbed in the back by the attack of a band of mercenaries led by an adventurer named Giuseppe Garibaldi and paid with the gold of the King of Piedmont. By ruse and treachery, Garibaldi succeeded in overcoming the desperate resistance of the Neapolitan army and in ousting the King of Naples out of his legitimate kingdom. Afterwards, brave Neapolitan freedom fighters tried to reinstate their legitimate king, but they were ruthlessly exterminated by Piedmont troops.

These are, of course, extreme descriptions of an ongoing debate about the unification of Italy. But these views illustrate at least one of the many fascinating features of history: how easily it is to project our modern feelings on people and events of the past. Here, both the official and the revisionist version see the unification of Italy in light of feelings that were probably alien to the people who actually lived the event. But the limit of both views is not so much in their forcing those ancient events into modern patterns, but in their tendency of seeing history only from a purely Italian perspective.

Perception of history, more than history itself, shapes people's thoughts and actions. So, if we want to understand Italian events, such as the rise and the persistence of Mr. Berlusconi as prime minister and leader, we should try to understand what led Italy to become what it is today: a unified state. It was, under many respects, an unavoidable outcome of the trends of the time, but not exactly for the reasons we are told in school, nor for those we can sometimes read in terms of the revisionist version. International politics played a fundamental role in the unification as modern research is starting to show (1).

2. The black wave of coal

Starting with the 17th century, Europe started to be engulfed by a black wave. It was a wave of coal, a cheap and abundant source of energy never seen before in history. With coal, there came the industrial revolution, and with it, economic growth and military power. But the great black wave didn't arrive everywhere at the same time. Because of remote geological events, it was found mainly in Northern Europe. So the coal revolution started in Southern Britain and in parallel in Northern France.

It was not strictly necessary for a region to have coal mines to industrialize: the black source of energy could always be imported. Coal was expensive to transport on land but it could be travel easily on water. So, the need of transporting coal was one of the main reasons that led to the development of the European network of waterways that started being common in the 19th century. But there was a problem with areas which were too hot and too dry to have waterways. No waterways meant no coal and no coal meant no industrial revolution. And that, in turn, meant being left behind by the phenomenal economic development created by the availability of coal. Of the Mediterranean regions, only Northern Italy and Catalonia could build waterways. The rest was shut off from the industrial revolution.

This unbalance of economic power was to be the key factor that generated the Italian unification. The Kingdom of Piedmont (officially the "Kingdom of Sardinia") in North-Western Italy, had access to waterways and, in 19th, century it became a military and industrial powerhouse in the Italian peninsula, whereas most of the other states, especially in the south, had remained agricultural economies. This power unbalance was not in itself sufficient to create the Italian unification, but a series of external circumstances made it possible and perhaps unavoidable.

3. Mediterranean geopolitics in the 19th century.

Before the industrial revolution, the Mediterranean Sea had been in large part a Turkish lake and, in a smaller part, a backwater of the Spanish Empire. But Turkey and Spain couldn't catch up with the coal revolution: they had neither sufficient coal nor good waterways. With the 19th century, the rise of the European industrial powers had created a rapidly developing power vacuum in the Mediterranean region. Britain, France, Austria and Russia were all looking South with the idea of carving for themselves a chunk of the declining Turkish Empire (formally, the "Ottoman Empire").

Napoleon had started the fireworks with the invasion of Egypt in 1798. That attempt had failed, but it had just postponed the French plans. In 1830, France invaded Algeria. The Algerians put up a stiff resistance but they received no help from the fading Ottoman Empire and they were overwhelmed by superior firepower and numbers. This time, it was clear that the French were in North Africa to stay.

The fall of Algeria changed the Mediterranean power game. Now, what would prevent the French from carving for themselves a small Mediterranean empire? It could have included North Africa from Morocco to Egypt and, why not, also the Kingdom of Naples, another non-industrialized region that could have opposed very little resistance. None of the other world powers were in the position of stopping France; not easily, at least. Russia was too far away, Austria was bottled in the Northern Adriatic, and the British were heavily engaged in Middle East.

It didn't take much effort for British diplomats to see that there was a solution to stop the French expansion that didn't require direct military intervention. What was needed was a strong, unified Italy. As a state, Italy would remain too weak to challenge the world powers, but it would be strong enough to prevent a French invasion and to resist the attempts of France to dominate what an Italian governments would see as their country's sphere of influence in North Africa. So, the British interest in Italian unification became a driving force in Italian politics.

That was not the only factor at play in mid-19th century in the Mediterranean power game. The British plans were perfectly consistent with those of Piedmont, which aimed at expelling Austria from Northern Italy and expanding South in the Italian Peninsula. Even outside Piedmont, Italians remembered very well of the times, a couple of centuries before, when the Italian territory had been little more than a battleground for foreign powers fighting for supremacy. Many in Italy understood that only a unified Italian state could muster enough military power to maintain Italy independent from foreign rule.

And there were economic reasons, too. Italians could see that a unified country could get rid of the archaic borders and tariffs, build a streamlined transport infrastructure, and create a single currency to facilitate commerce. Again, a unified state was widely seen as the only way for Italy to fight the threat of foreign domination.

3. The unification of Italy

The converging interests of Britain, Piedmont, and of several movements of ideas in Italy led to the unification of Italy in 1861. It was the result of a series of successful military campaigns and the triumph of the coordinated diplomacies of Piedmont and of Britain. Of the world powers that could oppose unification, Austria was defeated and France was appeased with some land (Savoy and Nice) that was worth much less than the gains that Piedmont made. The other Italian states could not put up a significant resistance; they were peacefully integrated in the new state or they were rapidly swept away. That was the destiny of the Southern "Kingdom of the Two Sicilies" (also known as the "Kingdom of Naples"). It was neither the backward dictatorship nor the prosperous and civilized land described today by different visions of history. Simply, it had not industrialized and it was economically too weak to survive alone.

For some years after the unification, a stubborn resistance remained in the inland regions of what had been the Kingdom of Naples, but it was ruthlessly crushed. Then, the newly created Italian state turned out surprisingly resilient. Of course, Italy never was powerful enough to compete with the major powers, but it played its expected role in the Mediterranean region. Italy stopped French attempts to expand in Tunisia and, in 1911, Italy went on to gain a foothold in Northern Africa by defeating the Ottoman Empire and annexing the region that today we call Lybia. That created a buffer state between the spheres of influence of France and Britain in Northern Africa.

For a long time, the alliance between Britain and Italy remained strong; so much that it was referred by Italians as "Bella Fratellanza" ("beautiful brotherhood)". Italy remained a good customer for British coal and a favorite spot for British tourists and expatriates. But things were to change with the end of the Great War.

5. The decline of coal (and of Italy)

As long as Italy could import coal from England, its economy thrived and the alliance with Britain remained strong. But, with the end of the First World War, the British mines started having problems in increasing production and even to keep it to the old levels. Britain was going through its "peak coal." In Italy, this event was perceived as a betrayal and Italians simply couldn't understand why Britain wouldn't give them the coal they needed. The result was a generalized distrust that was to turn into hate against the "Perfidious Albion," as the Italian press started to refer to Great Britain in the 1930s.

But insults against the British could not be transformed into coal. Italy was becoming like a starved beast locked in a cage: it went crazy. According to the old say "whom the gods want to destroy, they first turn mad" in the 1930s the Italian government behaved as if its stated purpose was to destroy the country. A series of wars bankrupted an already crippled economy and the invasion of Ethiopia in 1936 was a hugely expensive campaign that provided little or no gains for Italy, except for the doubtful honor for the King of Italy to gain the title of "Emperor of Ethiopia." The government finished the job with the second world war, where an unprepared Italy was utterly defeated and destroyed.

After the end of the war, Italy managed to rebuild her economy on the basis of crude oil. But the oil crisis that started in the 1970s, was in many ways a repetition of the coal crisis of the 1920. Without cheap oil, the Italian industrial economy simply cannot survive and this is probably one of the reasons of the streak of craziness that pervades Italian politics nowadays. Fortunately, this time, Italy can't react to the crisis by becoming aggressive, as it happened in the 1930s.

6. Why Italy in the 21st century?

The reason why large and complex political structures, such as national states, exist is because they provide benefits that justify for their cost. But all political systems are subjected to what Joseph Tainter calls the "decreasing returns of complexity". With the decline of the resources that created the system, complexity ceases to be an advantage and becomes a burden. The result is normally that rapid decrease in complexity that we call "collapse".

Italy as a unified state is a complex political system that was created because of strategic and economic reasons valid at the time of its creation. A centralized government produced advantages in terms of territorial defense and economic integration that justified its cost. But things have deeply changed in both areas.

First, in the age of superpowers, Italy cannot maintain a competitive military power, not alone, at least. Today, the Italian military system is completely embedded in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In terms of foreign policy, Italy is embedded in the European Union and we can reasonably say that Italy does not have an independent foreign policy any more.

Then, with the growth of the European Union and the birth of the Euro, the Italian government lost the possibility of an independent monetary policy and with it most of its capability of intervening in the national economy. Being part of the World Trade Organization (WTO), then, the Italian government has further limits on what it can do in economic terms.

What is left to the central Italian government is the ability of collecting taxes and, indeed, most of the present political debate in Italy is about who should pay taxes, how much, and what these taxes should be used for. Of course, there is a general agreement that taxes should be used for such services as police, schools, roads, courts, hospitals and the like. But the Italian state is a top-heavy and expensive structure. Despite the decline of the national GdP, taxes keep steadily increasing and, today, tax revenues in Italy eat up nearly 45% of Italy's GdP (in the US it is less than 30%) at a cost for Italian citizens of about 500 billion euros (some 650 billion dollars) per year in taxes. Nevertheless, the quality of public services is perceived as declining and Italians are being asked more and more to pay for services that, once, were free. At this point, it is a legitimate question to ask where these same services could not be provided at lower costs (and possibly of better quality) by regional governments; without the burden of a centralized state systems.

As usual for governments, the Italian one doesn't know how to cut costs and reform itself. It keeps asking more money to citizens while it dreams of fabulously expensive mega-projects such as a bridge over the strait of Messina, a high speed rail from Turin to France, and many more. At the same time, the government has been unable to implement even simple gestures such as reducing the privileges of parliament members. That would have changed little in the overall state budget, but would have at least sent a signal to Italians that sacrifices were to be shared. No wonder that Italian citizens are angry and confused and that they react with voting patterns at national elections that look confusing to foreigners (and to Italians as well). Events such as the rise of Mr. Grillo's "five star" movement are the result of these feeling and of the need of a redistribution of the sacrifices that the difficult economic situation imposes.

Are we going to see Italy collapse as a centralized state to give way to regional goverments? That doesn't seem to be on the political horizon right now, but it can't be ruled out either, as shown by the diffusion of the "revisionist" view of the Italian unification. What we can say for sure is that the Italian economic crisis is getting deeper and that big changes are looming ahead.

______

1. The notes on the role of Britain in the Italian unification are based mainly on the book by Eugenio di Rienzo "Il Regno delle due Sicilie e le Potenze Europee" -Rubbettino 2012

Elections in Italy: the rise of networked politics

noreply@blogger.com (Ugo Bardi) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 12:28:00 +0000

The recent Italian elections have seen the rise of the "five star" movement founded and led by Mr Beppe Grillo (shown in the picture above). The movement is a "non party" completely structured around Internet networking. We may call it "networked politics" and it is surely a revolutionary innovation. But will it make a difference?

The Italian national elections of this week have seen a clear winner: the "five star movement," founded by Mr. Beppe Grillo, former actor now turned politician. The movement didn't gain a majority, but it managed a stunning feat by gathering almost one quarter of the valid votes in its first appearance in a nation-wide election, nearly matching the results of the main traditional parties in Italy. More than that, Grillo and his colleagues were able to make the other parties look old, useless, and worn out in their desperate attempts of gathering votes by making promises that they knew they could never maintain.

This success is all the more surprising if we consider that the national political program of the movement is contained in just fifteen pages of generic proposals. The movement is a "non party" without a hierarchy and where elected members are seen just as spokespersons for the others. Most of the movement's candidates had little or no previous political experience and none of them is a known figure in politics or culture. The movement didn't do traditional media advertising and Mr. Grillo never even appeared on a TV debate. So, most voters seem to have chosen the movement as a reaction against the old parties, perceived as staffed with thieves, sex maniacs, and all sort of criminals. At least, this is the general interpretation of the results of the recent Italian elections. But, probably, the explanation goes somewhat deeper.

When we discuss "politics" we are discussing about ways to control the government. The term "control" may sound nasty, but it is what every voter does when choosing a party or a candidate: it is a way to steer government policies along lines that one finds desirable. But a whole country is an enormously complex system and history has shown that the control of complex systems requires complex control systems. At the level of entire societies, these control systems are mainly what we call "bureaucracy," which is the main factor that makes societies resilient - that is resisting to change. However, the increasing complexity of these control systems originates those "diminishing returns to complexity" that Joseph Tainter describes as the main cause of the collapse of civilizations.

Collapse is the rapid reduction in complexity of all the structures of a society. By collapsing, a society gets rid of its complex control structures that have become a burden and are no more a benefit. It is what happened when the Roman Empire fell: it was the disappearance of the expensive Imperial Court, with its even more expensive Imperial Bureaucracy. The result was the much less expensive set of local control structures that define the period we call "Middle Ages."

However, the collapse of a society doesn't occur all of a sudden: it starts with the weakest links which may collapse without necessarily generating the cascade of events that brings down everything. So, in modern Western society, political parties may have been among the first structures affected by a rapid reduction in complexity.

Think of the communist parties of a few decades ago in Western Europe: they had militants, cadres, leaders, and intellectuals; all focused around a set of ideas written in the ponderous tome called "Das Kapital". But this kind of parties is gone. They collapsed and disappeared because of the diminishing returns of complexity. The standard political party, today, is a simple structure that specializes in vote gathering by controlling the media. It has no strong leaders, rather it has good actors. It has no well defined ideas, except a vague slant on ill-defined concepts such as "left" and "right". Basically, all what it does is transferring money from lobbies into PR firms. No wonder that voters are disaffected with these parties but, so far, they had no choice.

Now, there come Beppe Grillo and his Web adviser Pierandrea Casaleggio, who have this idea of a completely Web-structured political party. It is all built using the "MeetUp" internet platform that is used as the vehicle for information exchange and for the decisional process based on on-line voting. The result is a peer-to-peer, purely horizontal network. The five star movement is the organizational opposite of the standard political parties as they are today. The movement has a base without a leadership, traditional parties have a leadership without a base.

The great advantage of the five star movement over its competitors is its low cost. Controlling the media is extremely expensive, especially in politics; consider that the cost of the last US presidential election ran into several billion dollars, mostly spent in advertising. Mr. Grillo and Mr. Casaleggio, instead, managed this nearly unbelievable feat of almost winning the national elections in a major country without spending a single dollar in traditional media advertising. All the advertising was done by the militants in their peer-to-peer network. It is the awesome power of the Web.

The structure that Mr. Grillo and Mr. Casaleggio built may be called "networked politics" and it may be the start of a new generation of political movements that will largely replace traditional ones. But is this a revolution that will solve our problems of energy, pollution, social unrest, impending collapse and the like? Well, this is a different question.

We known that the Western society is undergoing a profound transformation driven by the reduced availability of natural resources, by the wreckage of the ecosystem, and by the increasing burden of complexity. If traditional political parties have largely collapsed, governments are still resisting change by increasing in complexity, adding layer after layer of bureaucracy. Eventually, the whole thing will crash down but, as Tainter notes, there are no mechanisms in complex societies that can be used to reduce complexity, only mechanisms to increase it.

Facing these problems, what can be done by networked politics? In the commercial sector, networks are known to be sometimes effective, but normally only on a small scale and they are usually short lived. Purely horizontal networks may be subjected to instabilities such as those described as "self organized criticality" and may undergo rapid and uncontrollable changes. These horizontal networks are themselves extremely difficult to manage. So, in politics we would require one of them to manage the gigantic, ponderous, and resilient entity that we call "government" (to say nothing of the powerful financial lobbies that lurk behind it). Not easy, to say the least.

But, who knows? In the great transition that we are living, anything can happen.