The Roman Philosopher Lucius Anneaus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was perhaps the first to note the universal trend that growth is slow but ruin is rapid. I call this tendency the "Seneca Effect."

Sunday, September 10, 2023

The Seneca Effect Blog Returns on Substack!

 


The Seneca Effect Blog is returning! You can find it on Substack at this address:

https://senecaeffect.substack.com/

After that the original location of the blog (senecaeffect.com)  was sabotaged by the Google search engine, I thought that it was useless to fight the powers that be. So, I closed the blog. 

Yet, I found that Substack seems to be immune (for the time being) to Google's curse. And, unexpectedly, the "ghost" version of the Seneca blog stationed there continued to gain followers even though it was not updated anymore. So, I'll restart publishing Seneca-inspired posts on Substack. The new Seneca blog will be a little more philosophical and literary than the old one and it will mirror also my Chimeras blog.  More technical posts will go to www.thesunflowerparadigm.blogspot.com.

And onward we go, running with the wolves!



Monday, May 22, 2023

The Seneca Blog is Closed

 



The Seneca Effect blog closes down for the reasons explained in a previous post. But the spirit and the ideas of Seneca and his modest modern follower, Ugo Bardi, continue in other forms. Ugo Bardi blogs:

And this is what Seneca has to say about our current situation







Saturday, May 20, 2023

The Seneca Effect Blog is Closing Down


The Internet is full of angry people shouting insults at each other. Take it easy, fellows, do as a good stoic would do. Accept the will of the Gods, but keep doing your duty and help others as much as you can. And have a little fun, when you can.


The moment has arrived: after about two years of posting on the "Seneca Effect" blog; I see that a cycle is concluded: look at the stats: 


Clearly, it is not possible to continue in these conditions. It is time to reshuffle, retrench, regroup, reconsider, rebuild. The "Seneca Effects" will close, and I'll transfer my writing elsewhere. For the time being, I am returning to my old blog "Cassandra's Legacy" that I had kept mothballed up to now (yes, Cassandra is returning!)

But to create a strategy for the future, first of all, I need to understand what went wrong. Why this remarkable "Hubbert Curve"? I can think of more than one reason, but essentially two: 1) The blog has been sabotaged by the search engines, Google in particular, and 2) the blog has evolved into something that readers find confusing. 

About the first hypothesis, there are surely elements of truth in it. I already discussed it in a previous post, and the majority of commenters agreed that they couldn't find the blog in the first rows of their search engine, except if they used "Bing." Apparently, Microsoft likes me, but Google doesn't. There is nothing especially conspiratorial in this. It already happened for my old "Cassandra" blog. And I, for one, bow down in front of our new memetic overlords! 

About the second hypothesis, it has elements of truth as well. The blog has evolved along with my personal views. I am normally classed together with the "catastrophists," and the idea of the "Seneca Cliff" can be seen as being as catastrophist as catastrophism can be. But my position is much more articulated than that: I see myself as a modern stoic. I accept the will of the Gods, but I consider it my duty to help people (including myself) to avoid the incoming disaster. 

The problem is that some people seem to have internalized the idea that collapse is unavoidable, and they don't seem to be able to think of a better way to face it than turning themselves into poor peasants (or dreaming the same thing thereof). My view, instead, is that we have to build a resilient society by means of renewable energy and that it is possible to do that with the currently existing technology. 

You may or may not agree with my position; the point is that many people are confused by a blog that has a title that hints at a coming collapse while it deals with ways to avoid collapse (the same problem that "The Limits to Growth" study had: few people understood what the authors were trying to do). So, they see my position as "treason" and proceed to insult me as a result. I prefer to close the blog than have readers like these.  

Apart from a number of hopeless cases of people really gone papayas, the problem is that a blog (or any kind of publication) must have a certain consistency. Many bloggers succeeded in growing their readership by always posting the same thing, only with minor variations (I have a few ones in mind, but let me not name names). That's not strictly necessary, but I understand that the aims of the "Seneca Effect" blog, as it is now, are confusing for many readers.  

So, it is time for the Seneca blog to fold over and for me to move onward. The two "souls" of the blog will find their places in two different blogs. The discussion on energy will move to the existing blog "The Sunflower Paradigm." It has been a marginal blog so far, but you can note that it is reasonably easy to find. And its readership is growing.

Then, how about my meditations on history, art, philosophy, stoicism, and the like? They might go to my existing blog, "Chimeras." Or maybe to a new blog that could be titled "Meditations" à la Marcus Aurelius?  I am still thinking about that. Suggestions are welcome. In the meantime, here is the latest post I published on Chimeras.


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After 50 years of Catastrophism, we are now facing the cliff. What would Seneca do?




The Raft of the Medusa, a painting by Theodore Géricault (1818). It seems to illustrate the way some people feel in the current situation: survival implies throwing other people out of the raft. 

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Roman Philosopher, never was a catastrophist, but he understood that in life you have to expect ups and downs. And that when things go bad, they go bad fast (festinantur in damnum). This is what I called the "Seneca Effect.

Seneca was a stoic, a person steeped in the views of his times. It was an age when people understood that their control of the vagaries of life was limited. Sickness, ruin, pain, and death were facts of life for people who had no aspirin, no life insurance, and no dentists. In the stoics' view, bad moments had to be accepted and lived as a test of your moral fortitude, not as an excuse to forget one's duties in life. Seneca, just like all of us, had his defects. But when the final moment came for him, he accepted his destiny with dignity and serenity. 

And here we are, what holds for a single person holds for humankind. We are facing a serious downturn, a decline that could be so rapid to call it a cliff. Half a century after the serious warning of "The Limits to Growth," we not yet falling, but we are on the edge. We start seeing the chasm ahead while the fog of time clears. 

Is this becoming a test of moral fortitude for humankind? Unfortunately not. Humans are dividing themselves into tribes that fight each other, so far only verbally. Some just refuse to look ahead. Others think that, when jumping from the cliff, they'll be able to fly. Others search for someone to blame. 

A mixture of ignorance and aggressivity is generating a tremendous wave of hate; at least from what I can see in the comments to another post of mine. These people seem to think they are already on the raft of the Medusa, the French ship that was wrecked at sea in 1816. Only 15 out of the 146 people stranded on the raft survived. And they did that by throwing the others into the sea and recurring to cannibalism. 

But we are not there yet. There is still space for avoiding the sandbanks. We still can do our duty to live and help others living. Be a good stoic; do not lose hope, and do not fall into cruelty. 



Sunday, May 14, 2023

Renewables are not a cleaner caterpillar, they are a new butterfly. A Discussion with Dennis Meadows

 

Dennis Meadows (left in the image) and Ugo Bardi in Berlin, 2016


A few days ago, I received a message from Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of the 1972 study "The Limits to Growth," about a previous post of mine on "The Seneca Effect." I am publishing it here with his kind permission, together with my comments, and his comments on my comments. I am happy to report that after this exchange we are "99% in agreement."


Ugo, 

I read with interest you review of the Michaux/Ahmed debate. Normally I greatly benefit from your writing. But in this case it seemed to me that your text totally avoided addressing the central point - replacing fossil fuels as an energy source with renewables will require enormous amounts of metals and other resources which we have no reasonable basis for assuming will be available. It is not true that peak oil was presented principally as a prediction. Rather critics of Hubert's original analysis misrepresented it as an effort to predict in order to ridicule it -  just as Bailey did for the Limits to Growth natural resource data from World3. I was struck that your critique of Michaux did not contain a single piece of empirical data - the strong point of his research. Rather you engaged in what I term "proof by assertion."

I am personally convinced that there is absolutely no possibility for renewables to be expanded sufficiently that they will support current levels of material consumption. I attach the text of a memo I recently wrote to other members of the Belcher group stating this belief (*). 

Best regards Dennis Meadows

_____________________

Dear Dennis, 

first of all, it is always a pleasure to receive comments from you. It is not a problem to be in disagreement on some subjects -- the world would be boring if we all were! Besides, I think our disagreement is not so large once we understand certain assumptions. 

Let me start by saying that I fully agree with your statement that "there is absolutely no possibility for renewables to be expanded sufficiently that they will support current levels of material consumption." Not only is it impossible, but even if it were, we would not want that!

So, what do we disagree about? It is about the direction to take.  The fork in the path leads in two different directions depending on the efficiency of renewable technologies: Path 1): renewables are useless, and Path 2): renewables are just what we need

I strongly argue for Path 2) in the sense that we definitely do NOT need to "support current levels of material consumption" to create a sustainable and reasonably prosperous society. But let me explain what I mean by that.  

First, in my opinion, the problem with Michaux's report is that it underestimates the efficiency of renewable technologies. He says that renewables are not really renewable, just "replaceable." He, like others who use this term, means that the plants that we are now building will not be replaceable once fossil fuels are gone. In this case, creating a renewable infrastructure will be a waste of resources and energy (Path 1). 

This view may have been correct until a few years ago, but it is now obsolete. The recent scientific literature on the subject indicates that the efficiency of renewable technologies (expressed in terms of EROI, energy return on energy invested) is now significantly better than that of fossil fuels. Furthermore, it is large enough that the materials used can be recycled using renewable energy. There is a vast literature on this subject. On the specific question of the EROI, I suggest to you this paper by Murphy et al. You can also find an extensive bibliography of the field in our recent paper,  "On the history and future of 100% renewable research." 

Of course, not everything is easy to recycle, and a future renewable infrastructure will have to avoid the use of rare metals (such as platinum for fuel cells) or metals that are not rare, but not abundant enough for the task (such as copper, that will have to be largely replaced by aluminum). That is possible: the current generation of wind and PV plants is mostly based on abundant and recyclable materials. Doing even better is part of the natural evolution of technology. What we can't recycle, we won't use. 

There is a much more fundamental point in this discussion. It is the very concept that we need renewables to be able to "replace fossil fuels," in the sense of matching in quantitative terms the energy produced today (in some views, even exceeding it in order to "keep the economy growing"). This is impossible, as we all agree. The point is that renewables will greatly reduce the need for energy and materials to keep a complex civilization working. If you think, for instance, of how inefficient and wasteful our fossil-based transportation system is, you see that by switching to electric transportation and shared vehicles, we can have the same services for a much smaller consumption of resources. This concept has been expressed by Tony Seba in a form that I interpret as, "Renewables are not a cleaner caterpillar-- they are a new butterfly"

That doesn't mean that the geological limits of the transition aren't to be taken into account; the butterfly cannot fly higher than a certain height. Then, it may well be that we won't be able to move to renewables fast enough to avoid a societal, or even ecosystemic, crash. On this point, please take a look at a paper that I co-authored, where we used the term "the sower's strategy" to indicate that the transition is possible, but it will need hard work, as the peasants of old knew. But staying with fossil fuels is leading us to disaster (as you correctly say in the document for the Balaton group) while moving to nuclear fission simply means exchanging a fossil fuel (hydrocarbons) for another fossil fuel (uranium). Going renewables is a fighting chance, but I believe it is the only chance we have.   

There is an even more fundamental point that goes beyond a certain technology being more efficient than another. Going renewables, as Nafeez Ahmed correctly points out, is a switch from a predatory economy to a bioeconomy.  Our industrial sphere should imitate the biosphere that has been using minerals from the Earth's crust on land for the past 350 million years (at least) and never ran out of anything. As I said elsewhere, we need to do what the biosphere does, that is:

1. Use only minerals that are abundant.
2. Use them sparingly and efficiently.
3. Recycle ferociously. 

If we can do that, we have a unique opportunity in the history of humankind. It means we can build a society that does not destroy everything in order to satisfy human greed. Can we do it? As always, reality will be the ultimate judge. 

Ugo


__________________________________________________________________
The answer from Dennis Meadows

Ugo, 

Thank you for sending me your article. I agree that the main difference of opinion lies in the direction to take. I am reminded of the defining characteristic of professors - two people who agree on 99% and spend all their time focusing on and debating the other one percent. Because I largely agree with you, my only relevant comment on what you say is that you have overly limited our options: 

So, what do we disagree about? It is about the direction to take.  The fork in the path leads in two different directions depending on the efficiency of renewable technologies: Path 1): renewables are useless, and Path 2): renewables are just what we need

I would not choose either path; rather I believe it is time to quit focusing on fossil energy scarcity as a source of our problems and start concentrating on fragility. The debate -renewables versus fossil - is a distraction from considering the important options for increasing the resilience of society.

Dennis Meadows




___________________________________________

A minor point. You say, "It is not true that peak oil was presented principally as a prediction." I beg to differ. I have been a member of ASPO (the Association for the Study of Peak Oil) almost from inception and part of its scientific committee as long as the association existed. And I can say that one of the problems of the approach of peak oilers was a certain obsession with the date of the peak. That doesn't disqualify a group of people whom I still think included some of the best minds on this planet during that period. The problem was that few of them were experts in modeling, and models are like weapons: you need to know the rules before you try to use them. By the way, you and your colleagues didn't make this mistake in your "Limits to Growth" in 1972; correctly, you were always careful of presenting a fan of scenarios, not a prediction. Later on, Bailey and his ilk accused you of having done what you didn't do: "wrong predictions." But that was politics, another story. 

_____________________________________________________

(*) Statements about being realistic about technology, alternative energy, and sustainability
Dennis Meadows

April 11, 2023 message to the Balaton Group

Dear Colleagues,

I have often described politics as the art of choosing which of several impossible outcomes you most prefer. It is important to envision good outcomes. It may be useful to strive for them. But it is important to be realistic. The recent discussion about technology, alternative energy, and sustainability are based on several implicit assumptions, which I believe are unrealistic. At the risk of being an old grump, and recognizing my own limited vision, I list here some statements that I believe from the study of science, history, and human nature to be realistic.

#1: There is no possibility that the so-called renewable energy sources will permit the elimination of fossil fuels and sustain current levels of economic activity and material well- being. The scramble for access to declining energy sources is likely to produce violence. 

#2: The planet will not sustain anywhere close to 9 billion people at living standards close to their aspirations (or our views about what is fair).


#3: Sustainable development is about how you travel, not where you are going.

#4: The privileged will not willingly sacrifice their own advantages to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor (witness the US.) They will lose their advantages, but unwillingly.

#5: The rapidly approaching climate chaos will erode society's capacity for constructive action before it prompts it.


#6: Expansion and efficiency are taken as unquestioned goals for society. They need to be replaced by sufficiency and resilience.

#7: History does not unfold in a smooth, linear, gradual process. Big, drastic discontinuities lie ahead - soon. 

#8: When a group of people believe they must choose between options that offer more order or those affording greater liberty, they will always opt for order. 

Unfortunately so, since it will have grave implications for the evolution of society’s governance systems. Dictators will always promise less chaos than Democrats.

Thursday, May 11, 2023

What if Lemmings had a King? Practical Uses of Monarchy


Most people seem to think that kings and queens are little more than useless parasites. Yet, I think they could be useful in some circumstances. Especially if you are a lemming

The story that lemmings commit mass suicide by jumping from a cliff is a legend created by a 1958 Walt Disney movie. It is not true, but if it were it would be the result of a "Nash Eequilibrium," a condition in which no individuals can deviate from their current behavior without suffering a penalty. If all the lemmings run in the same direction, none of them can change their individual course. And the result is that all lemmings die. Incidentally, the Nash Equilibrium can be seen as part of the concept of "Seneca Cliff" -- the cliff occurs because everyone keeps running toward it.

The problem also exists in human societies. Once society has decided to take a certain course, and when the decision is cemented and reinforced by propaganda, most people find themselves stuck in a classic Nash equilibrium. They may well understand that the current choices are leading everybody to the cliff, but no single player can change his/her strategy without suffering stiff penalties. We are seeing that happening over and over in history, and it may be happening right now with the whole human civilization. Are there ways to avoid falling into the cliff? Maybe yes. 

Let me give you an example. Take a look at these data: 

Total losses during WWII (From Britannica)

Germany: 4.2 million 
Italy: 400,000

Germany suffered a factor of ten more losses than Italy (and some sources say many more than that). Why? I can argue that the reason was mainly one: Italy had a King, Germany didn't. That made it possible for Italy to surrender early enough to avoid the worst. 

This story of how Italy surrendered to the Allies is not well known outside Italy, so let me give you some details. In 1943, it must have been clear to everyone that the war was lost for Italy. Yet, the Fascist propaganda continued to bombard Italians with optimistic slogans about the unavoidable final victory. With Mussolini being "always right" by definition, nobody in Italy could change his/her position on the war without personally paying a stiff price: being accused of treason. Italians were like lemmings running toward the cliff. Many of them could see the cliff, but none of them could stop the collective motion toward disaster.

There was only one person in Italy who could break the rules of the game: King Victor Emmanuel III. For him, intervening to stop the war was dangerous, but not doing that was even more dangerous:  the defeat of Italy would likely cause the end of his dynasty. In July 1943, the Allies invaded Sicily, and the military situation was rapidly deteriorating. The King acted together with some influential members of the fascist regime. Mussolini was voted out of power by his own Fascist Grand Council, and the day after, he was arrested on direct orders from the King. On September 8th, the Italian government officially surrendered to the Allies. 

Unfortunately, the King badly botched the operation. He should have acted much earlier and much more decisively. Instead, while he was running away from Rome, the Italian army was left without orders, and it disbanded, while the Germans rapidly took over most of the country. The Fascists reorganized themselves in Northern Italy and fought on, while some of the members of the Grand Council who had voted against Mussolini were shot. And the King didn't save his dynasty, either. A more decisive action could have resulted in Italy being rapidly occupied by the Allies, perhaps trapping a large German force there. Maybe, the war could have ended earlier than when it did. And, maybe, Italy would still have a King (not necessarily a good thing, but, who knows?). 

Yet, despite the many mistakes that King Victor Emmanuel made, it is likely that, without his intervention, Italians would have suffered much more than they did. With half of Italy fighting with the Allies, a certain degree of moderation in carrying out military operations was necessary on the part of the Allies. That avoided, for instance, the kind of scorched earth raids that the Allies carried out against German cities. Nor was Italy ever targeted with extermination plans such as the "Morgenthau Plan" that would have killed tens of millions of Germans if it had been put into practice. 

Would all that have happened without the intervention of the King? Maybe, but it would have been much more difficult. In Germany, one year later, a group of army officers tried to follow the example of Italy and depose Hitler by assassinating him. But the plan failed: the conspirators had no support, and almost all of them were executed. A good example of the harsh law of the Nash Equilibrium.

So, would kings be useful to lead us out of the several impasses in which we find ourselves stuck? Maybe they could. For instance, I am sure that there are many people on both sides of the war in Ukraine who want to stop the madness, but they are trapped in another Nash Equilibrium. Only a king could say, "Stop!" as King Victor Emmanuel did in 1943 in Italy. Unfortunately, no Kings are directly involved in this war, so we can't expect that to happen. 

So, returning to the kings of old might not be such a bad idea. Are any ladies around willing to don a scuba suit and offer a sword to passersby from the depth of a lake?



____________________________________

Two years after that King Victor Emmanuel had Italy surrender to the Allies, the Emperor of Japan did the same. It was much too late to avoid horrendous losses, with a total of about two million casualties and most of the Japanese towns torched to cinders. But it can be argued that it would have been worse for the Japanese if they had fought to the end, as the Germans did. 


Sunday, May 7, 2023

Is the Energy Transition Feasible? The Future as a Garden of Forking Paths

 

"El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" (J.L. Borges)

Recently, Simon Michaux argued that the transition to renewable energy is not possible for the lack of sufficient mineral resources. This conclusion was criticized by Nafeez Ahmed in a recent post. As usual in our polarized world, that led to a heated discussion based on opposing views. My opinion is that both Michaud and Ahmed are right but they see the question from different points of view. If you allow me, Ahmed is more right because he shows that the future is not running on a fixed path. Rather, it is a garden of forking paths. If we choose the right path, the transition is possible and will lead us to a better world. 

Do you remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? It tells you that you shouldn't cry wolf too many times but also that the wolf will eventually come. It illustrates how our destiny as human beings is to always choose extreme viewpoints: either we are too afraid of the wolf, or we believe it doesn't exist. Indeed, Erwin Schlesinger said, "human beings have only two modes of operation: complacency and panic.

This dichotomy is especially visible in the current debate on the "Energy Transition" that recently flared in an exchange between Simon Michaux and Nafeez Ahmed, the first maintaining that the transition is impossible, the second arriving at the opposite conclusion. In my modest opinion, Michaud's work is correct within the limits of the assumptions he made. But these assumptions are not necessarily right. 

Models may be perfectly correct, but still unable to predict the future. 

If you really believe that they can, you are bound to make enormous mistakes -- as we saw in the way the recent pandemic was (mis)managed. Let me give an example: the story of the "peak oil" movement.

When I stumbled into the peak oil concept some 20 years ago, I thought it was a great idea. I am still thinking it is an incredibly insightful view of how humans exploit natural resources, and I keep studying the subject, as you can read at this link. But you also probably know that peak oil is unpopular nowadays. I have had referees criticizing our work just because it mentioned the term "peak oil." As if we were submitting a paper to "Nature Astronomy" where we argued that the Earth is flat." Why that? 

There was nothing wrong with the peak oil concept. It was based on sound models, and it was proposed by some of the best oil geologists in the world. The problem was that the models didn't allow deviations from the stated path. They didn't take into account how the oil extraction system could rearrange itself to react to the scarcity of resources. Even oil extraction is a garden of forking paths, and the system can choose one or another depending on the circumstances. In this case, it chose a path that led to the exploitation of shale oil resources and that delayed the peak by more than 10 years. 

Shale oil resources were not taken into account in the input data of the model. So, over and over, the peak was announced to be arriving in a specific year, and it didn't: the earliest estimates had it in 2005. Today, in 2023, we may be finally peaking, but we don't know for sure. Many peakers argue that the peak did arrive, but only for "conventional" oil. Sure, the surgery was successful, but the patient died. No wonder that most people, including the referees of scientific papers, are now convinced that peak oil was a hoax. 

The peakers' mistake is typical of the way the role of models is misunderstood. The peak oil models are great to let you understand the cycle of resource exploitation and that you have to expect the peak, sooner or later. But you are making a big mistake if you think they can predict the date of the peak. Instead, that's exactly how the peak oil models were used. I did that, too, regrettably, but we learn from our mistakes (except in politics, of course). 

Models are there to understand the future, not to predict it. 

The future is a garden of forking paths. Where you go depends on the path you choose. But you still need to follow one of the available paths. 

______________________________________

Now, let me try to examine Michaux's work and Ahmed's rebuttal in light of these considerations. I went through Michaux's report, and I can tell you that it is well done, accurate, full of data, and created by competent professionals. That doesn't mean it cannot be wrong, just like the peak oil date was proposed by competent professionals but turned out to be wrong. The problem is evident from the beginning: it is right there, in the title. 

Assessment of the Extra Capacity Required of Alternative Energy Electrical Power Systems to Completely Replace Fossil Fuels 

You see? Michaux assumes from the start that we need "extra capacity" from "alternative" energy in order to "completely replace" fossil fuels. If the problem is stated in these terms, the answer to the question of the feasibility of the transition can only be negative. 

Alas, we didn't need a report of 985 pages to understand that. It was obvious from the beginning. The limits of mineral resources were already shown in 1972 by the authors of "The Limits to Growth," the report sponsored by the Club of Rome. We know that we have limits; the problem is which paths we can choose within these limits. 

This question is often touched on in Michaux's report when he mentions the need to "think outside the box" and to change the structure of the system. But, eventually, the result is still stated in negative terms. It is clear from the summary, where Michaux says, "The existing renewable energy sectors and the EV technology systems are merely steppingstones to something else, rather than the final solution." This suggests that we should stick to fossil fuels while waiting for some miracle leading us to the "final" solution, whatever that means. This statement can be used to argue that renewables are useless. Then, it becomes a memetic weapon to keep us stuck to fossil fuels; an attitude which can only lead us to disaster. 

Nafeez Ahmed perfectly understood the problems in his rebuttal. Ahmed notes several critical points in Michaud's report; the principal ones are underestimating the current EROI of renewables and the recent developments of batteries. That leads him to the statement that renewables are not really "renewable" but, at most, "replaceable." Which is simply wrong. The EROI of renewables is now large enough to allow the use of renewable energy to recycle renewable plants. Renewables are exactly that: renewable. 

You could argue that my (and Ahmed's) evaluation of the EROI of renewables is over-optimistic. Maybe, but that's not the main point. Ahmed's criticism is focused on the roots of the problem: we need to take into account how the system can (and always does) adapt to scarcity. It follows different paths among the many available. Ahmed writes: 

...we remain trapped within the prevailing ideological paradigm associated with modern industrial civilisation. This paradigm is a form of reductive-materialism that defines human nature, the natural world, and the relationship between them through the lens of homo economicus – a reduction of human nature to base imperatives oriented around endless consumption and production of materially-defined pursuits; pursuits which are premised on an understanding of nature as little more than a repository of material resources suitable only for human domination and material self-maximisation; in which both human and nature are projected as separate and competing, themselves comprised of separate and competing units.

Yet this ideology is bound up with a system that is hurtling toward self-destruction. As an empirical test of accuracy, it has utterly failed: it is not true because it clearly does not reflect the reality of human nature and the natural world.

It’s understandable, then, that in reacting to this ideology, many environmentalists have zeroed in on certain features of the current system – its predatory growth trajectory – and sought out alternatives that would seem to be diametrically opposed to those regressive features.

One result of this is a proliferation of narratives claiming that the clean energy transformation is little more than an extension of the same industrialised, endless growth ideological paradigm that led us to this global crisis in the first place. Instead of solving that crisis, they claim, it will only worsen it.

Within this worldview, replacing the existing fossil fuel energy infrastructure with a new one based on renewable energy technologies is a fantasy, and therefore the world is heading for an unavoidable contraction that will result in the demise of modern civilisation.  ... Far from being a sober, scientific perspective, this view is itself an ideological reaction that represents a ‘fight or flight’ response to the current crisis convergence. In fact, the proponents of this view are often as dogmatically committed to their views as those they criticise. ....

Recognising the flaws in Michaux’s approach does not vindicate the idea that the current structures and value-systems of the global economy should simply stay the same. On the contrary, accelerating the energy and transport disruptions entails fundamental changes not only within these sectors, but in the way they are organised and managed in relation to wider society.

My critique of Michaux doesn’t justify complacency about metals and minerals requirements for the clean energy transformation. Resource bottlenecks can happen for a range of reasons as geopolitical crises like Russia's war in Ukraine make obvious. But there are no good reasons to believe that potential materials bottlenecks entail the total infeasibility of the transition.

... we face the unprecedented opportunity and ecological necessity to move into a new system. This system includes the possibilities of abundant clean energy and transport with diminishing material throughput, requiring new circular economy approaches rooted in respect for life and the earth; and where the key technologies are so networked and decentralised that they work best with participatory models of distribution and sharing. This entails the emergence of a new economy with value measured in innovative ways, because traditional GDP metrics focusing on ever-increasing material throughput will become functionally useless.

If you can, please, try to examine these statements by Ahmed with an open mind because he perfectly frames the problem. And never forget one thing: the future is not a single path toward catastrophe. It is a garden of forking paths. We are bound to follow one of these paths: we don't know which one yet, but not all of them lead to the Seneca Cliff. In the transition to a renewable energy system, we can adapt, reduce demand, improve efficiency, deploy new technologies, and simply be happy with a more limited supply of energy at some moments. It is only the rigidity of our mental models that make us think that there are no alternatives to fossil fuels. 


 This post was revised on May 8th 2023 to improve clarity

Friday, May 5, 2023

The Rise of Elly Schlein: How a Young, Woke, and Fashionable Politician is Shaking up Politics in Italy, and Perhaps Worldwide

 


Many times, Italy was a political laboratory that influenced the rest of the world. Just think of Mussolini and, more recently, how a government led by an obscure bureaucrat named Giuseppe Conte started the trend of nationwide lockdowns, then adopted everywhere in the world. Italy may be a backwater country, but it is a murky memetic pool brewing memetic microbes. Above, you see Ms. Elly Schlein, recently elected as secretary of the Italian "Partito Democratico," (PD) as shown in a recent interview in the Italian edition of Vogue magazine. I think you'll hear a lot about this lady in the future. 


When Elly Schlein was elected secretary of the Democratic Party (PD) in Italy, two months ago, I thought it was just a desperate attempt to revive a party that had nothing more to say in politics. But I was wrong. Elly Schlein is not the result of the convulsions of a dying organization. She is a major innovation in public relations, designed to revolutionize the Italian, and perhaps the world's, political landscape. 

Up to not long ago, politicians tended to project the image of the strong man, the "father of the country" whose decisions were always wise. That's past and gone, perhaps forever. The levers of political power have moved to the obscure lobbies that control governments, while the job of politicians is now mainly to maintain a semblance of popular participation in the governing process. In short, they all image and no substance. 

Ms. Schlein is part of this evolution. She is the tip of an innovative PR campaign launched by the PD and their sponsors, and she is using the same strategy that Silvio Berlusconi, former Italian PM, used for decades: it doesn't matter how many people hate you: what matters is how many people vote for you. 

So, Berlusconi targeted the least cultured sections of the Italian population with a personal image of a rich man who could do whatever he wanted. If you are poor, it is a figure that you may dream of imitating. Plenty of people hated Berlusconi for his image, but he consistently won elections over a political career of a few decades. 

Elly Schlein is doing something similar. She is not trying to appear to her potential voters as "one of us," but, rather, "what every one of us would like to be," at least for the target she is aiming at; that of young, left-oriented people in the West. So, she projects her image as young, independent, bisexual, globalist, feminist, and, more than all, a successful woman who can manage herself and her sexual preferences the way she wants. Among other things, she had no qualms in disclosing that she employs a "harmochromist" a sort of assistant buyer at Eur 300/hour to take care of the color combinations of the dresses she wears. In short, the perfect image of  "radical chic," now better known under the name of "woke." And the fact that she does not look like a fashion model shows that her success is the result of her skills, not her looks. 

The PR strategy of Elly Schlein has been very successful, at least up to now. Huge numbers of "leftists" rushed to their keyboards to defame her on all social media for betraying the working class because of her interview with Vogue, her fashionable dresses, and her harmochromist assistant. Remarkably, none of them realized that they were doing exactly what Schlein's PR managers wanted them to do. They wanted her to gain the attention of the media; and avoid repeating the mistake they had made with the lackluster former secretary, Enrico Letta. These good leftists didn't realize that they were making the same mistake they made with Berlusconi: the more they attacked him, the more they made him popular. Again, it doesn't matter how many people hate you; what matters is how many people vote for you. 

Of course, politics is not just a question of physical image; you have to have opinions, programs, and platforms. In this field, Schlein seems to have understood the critical point of modern politics. You may be criticized for what you said but not for what you didn't say. So, the skill of a modern politician is to be able to speak a lot while saying nothing. Schlein appears to have mastered this skill, at least from what we can read in her recent interview with Vogue Magazine. (excerpts in English). If you ever heard terms such as "cliché fest," "banality bonanza," or "vapid verbiage," consider this article as a good example of these concepts. It is all part of the image: it is the way politics works nowadays. 

So, I think we are seeing a trend. Note how Schlein's image is remarkably similar to that of the former New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Arden. 


Since politicians are a product, the industry that produces them (the PR industry) tends to imitate and repropose successful products. In a previous post, I noted how the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky adopted a dress code very similar to that of the Italian right-wing leader Matteo Salvini. About Schlein and Arden, note how both women have relatively elongated faces, a feature that is often associated with a "masculine" appearance. These ladies tend to produce an image of independence, self-reliance, and assertiveness. At present, there is no exact equivalent in the US political landscape, so far, although Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has some elements of similarity with them. Perhaps the US politician who looks like Schlein the most is Barack Obama, at least in the sense of being another expert in talking a lot without saying much.   

My impression is that starting from Italy, this kind of heavily promoted female political figures may soon spread all over the Western World. Not that anything will change; we'll just have "front persons" rather than "front men" at the top. And we keep marching toward the future, whatever it will be.

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As a further note, here is Schlein's adversary in Italy, Giorgia Meloni, leader of the right. 


She is a more traditional kind of politician: a classical "populist." She is aggressive and outspoken, but overall she projects a more "feminine" image than Schlein, and it would be hard to imagine her employing a personal armochromist. My impression is that one of the purposes of the creation of Elly Schlein's image was to prepare an anti-Meloni memetic weapon. In my opinion, if push comes to shove, Schlein will easily trash Meloni by making her look like a fruit vendor in a provincial market. But that we'll have to see.

Monday, May 1, 2023

When Science Fails: Surrogate endpoints and wrong conclusions

 


Galileo Galilei and Anthony Fauci are linked to each other by a chain of events that started at the beginning of modern science, during the 17th century. But the Science that Fauci claimed to represent is very different from that of Galileo. While Galileo studied simple linear systems, modern science attempts to study complex, multi-parameter systems, where the rigid Galilean method just cannot work. The problem is that, while it is obvious that we can measure only what we can measure, that's not necessarily what we want, or need, to measure. Tests based on "surrogate endpoints" may well be the best we can do in medicine and other fields, but we should understand that the results are not, and cannot be, a source of absolute scientific truth.


The Scientific Method

Galileo Galilei is correctly remembered as the father of modern science because he invented what we call today the "scientific method," sometimes still called the "Galilean method." It is supposed to be the basis of modern science; the feature that makes it able to be called "Science" with a capital first letter, as we were told over and over during the Covid pandemic. But what is really this scientific method that's supposed to lead us to the truth? 

Galileo's paradigmatic idea was an experiment about the speed of falling objects. It is said that he took two solid metal balls of different weights and dropped them from the top of the Pisa Tower. He then noted that they arrived at the ground at about the same time. That allowed him to lampoon an ancient authority such as Aristotle for having said that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones (*). There followed an avalanche of insults to Aristotle that continues to this day. Even Bertrand Russel fell into the trap of poking fun at Aristotle, accused of having said that women have fewer teeth than men. Too bad that he never said anything like that.

It may well be that Galileo was not the first to perform this experiment, and it is not even clear that he actually performed it, but that's a detail. The point is that the result was evident, clear-cut, and irrefutable. Later, Newton started from this result to arrive to the assumption that the same force that acted on an apple falling from a tree in his garden was acting on the Moon and the planets. From then on, science was supposed to be largely based on laboratory experiments or, anyway, experiments performed in tightly controlled conditions. It was a major change of paradigm: the basis of the scientific method as we understood it today.

The Pisa Tower experiment succeeded in separating the two parameters that affect a falling body: the force of gravity and the air drag. That was relatively easy, but what about systems that have many parameters affecting each other? Here, let me start with the case of health care, which is supposed to be a scientific field, but where the problem of separating the parameters is nearly impossible to overcome.


The surrogate endpoint in medicine

How can you apply the scientific method in medicine? Dropping a sick person and a healthy one from the top of the Pisa Tower won't help you so much. The problem is the large number of parameters that affect the nebulous entity called "health" and the fact that they all strongly interact with each other. 

So, imagine you were sick, and then you feel much better. Why exactly? Was it because you took some pills? Or would you have recovered anyway? And can you say that you wouldn't have recovered faster hadn't you taken the pill? A lot of quackery in medicine arises from these basic uncertainties: how do you determine what is the specific cause of a certain effect? In other words, is a certain medical treatment really curing people, or is it just their imagination that makes them think so?

Medical researchers have worked hard at developing reliable methods for drug testing, and you probably know that the "gold standard" in medicine is the "Randomized Controlled Test" (RCT). The idea of RCTs is that you test a drug or a treatment by keeping all the parameters constant except one: taking or not taking the drug. It is designed to avoid the effect called "placebo" (the patient gets better because she believes that the drug works, even though she is not receiving it) and the one called "nocebo" (the patient gets worse because he believes that the drug is harmful, even though he is not receiving it). 

An RCT involves a complex procedure that starts with separating the patients into two similar groups, making sure that none of them knows to which group she belongs (the test is "blinded"). Then, the members of one of the two groups are given the drug, say, in the form of a pill. The others are given a sugar pill (the "placebo"). After a certain time, it is possible to examine if the treatment group did better than the control group. There are statistical methods used to determine whether the observed differences are significant or not. Then, if they are, and if you did everything well, you know if the treatment is effective, or does nothing, or maybe it causes bad effects.  

For limited purposes, the RCT approach works, but it has enormous problems. A correctly performed RCT is expensive and complex, its results are often uncertain and, sometimes, turn out to be plain wrong. Do you remember the case of "Thalidomide"? It was tested, found to work as a tranquilizer, and approved for general use in the 1960s in Europe. It was later discovered that it had teratogenic effects on fetuses, and some 10.000 babies in Europe were born without arms and legs before the drug was removed from the market. Tests on animals would have shown the problem, but they were not performed or were not performed correctly. 

Of course, the rules have been considerably tightened after the Thalidomide disaster and, nowadays, testing on animals is required before a new drug is tested on humans. But let's note, in passing, that in the case of the mRNA Covid vaccines, tests on animals were performed in parallel (and not before) testing on humans. This procedure exposed volunteers to risks that normally would not be considered acceptable with drug testing. Fortunately, it does not appear that mRNA vaccines have teratogenic effects. 

Even assuming that the tests are complete, and performed according to the rules, there is another gigantic problem with RCT: What do you measure during the test?  Ideally, drugs are aimed at improving people's health, but how do you quantify "health"? There are definitions of health in terms of indices called QALY (quality-adjusted life years) or QoL (quality of life). But both are difficult to measure and, if you want long-term data, you have to wait for a long time. So, in practice, "surrogate endpoints" are used in drug testing.  

A surrogate endpoint aims at defining measurable parameters that approximate the true endpoint -- a patient's health. A typical surrogate endpoint is, for instance, blood pressure as an indicator of cardiovascular health. The problem is that a surrogate endpoint is not necessarily related to a person's health and that you always face the possibility of negative effects. In the case of drugs used to treat hypertension, negative effects exist and are well known, but it is normally believed that the positive effects of the drug on the patient's health overcome the negative ones. But that's not always the case. A recent example is how, in 2008, the drug bevacizumab was approved in the US by FDA for the treatment of breast cancer on the basis of surrogate endpoint testing. It was withdrawn in 2011, when it was discovered that it was toxic and that it didn't lead to improvements in cancer progression (you can read the whole story in "Malignant" by Vinayak Prasad).  

Consider now another basic problem. Not only the number of parameters affecting people's health are many, but they strongly interact with each other, as is typical of complex systems. The problem may take the form called "polydrug use," and it especially affects old people who accumulate drugs on their bedstands, just like old cars accumulate dents on their bodies. An RCT test that evaluates one drug is already expensive and lengthy; evaluating all the possible combinations of several drugs is a nightmare. If you have two drugs, A and B, you have to go through at least three tests: A alone, B alone, and the combination of A+B. If you have three drugs, you have seven tests to do (A, B, C, AB, BC, AC and ABC). And the numbers grow rapidly. In practice, nobody knows the effects of these multiple drug uses, and, likely, nobody ever will. But a common observation is that when the elderly reduce the number of medicines they take, their health immediately improves (this effect is not validated by RCTs, but that does not mean it is not true. I noted it for my mother-in-law who died at 101). 


The case of Face Masks 

Some medical interventions have specific problems that make RCTs especially difficult. An example is that of face masks to prevent the spreading of an airborne pathogen. Evidently, there is no way to perform a blind test with face masks, but the real problem is what to use as a surrogate end-point. At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, several studies were performed using cameras to detect liquid droplets emitted by people breathing or sneezing with or without face masks. That was a typical "Galilean," laboratory approach, but what does it demonstrate? Assuming that you can determine if and how much a mask reduces the emission of droplets, is this relevant in terms of stopping the transmission of an airborne pathogen? As a surrogate endpoint, droplets are at best poor, at worst misleading.  

A much better endpoint is the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test that can directly detect an infection. But even here, there are many problems. As an example, consider an often touted study performed in Pakistan that claimed to have demonstrated the effectiveness of face masks. Let's assume that the results of the study are statistically significant (really?) and that nobody tampered with the data (and we can never be sure of that in such a heavily politicized matter). Then, the best you can say is that if you live in a village in Pakistan, if there is a Covid wave ongoing, if the PCR tests are reliable, if the people who wore masks behave exactly like those who don't, and if random noise didn't affect the study too much, then by wearing a mask you can delay being infected for some time, and maybe even avoid infection altogether. Does the same result apply to you if you live in New York? Maybe. Is it valid for different conditions of viral diffusion and epidemic intensity? Almost certainly not. Does it ensure that you don't suffer adverse effects from wearing face masks? Duh! Would that make you healthier in the long run? We have no idea.

The Pakistan study is just one example of a series of studies on face masks that were found to be ill-conceived, poorly performed, inconclusive, or useless in a recent rigorous review published in the Cochrane Network. The final result is that no one has been able to detect a significant effect of face masks on the diffusion of an airborne disease, although we cannot say that the effect is actually zero. 

The confusion about face masks reached stellar levels during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, Tony Fauci, director of the NIAID, first advised against wearing masks, then he reversed his position and publicly declared that face masks are effective and even that two masks are better than just one. Additionally, he declared that the effectiveness of masks is "science" and, therefore, cannot be doubted. But, nowadays, Fauci has reversed his position, at least in terms of mask effectiveness at the population level. He still maintains that they can be useful for an individual "who religiously wears a mask." Now, imagine an RCT dedicated to demonstrating the different results of "religiously" and "non-religiously" wearing a mask. So much for science as a pillar of certainty. 


Surrogate endpoints everywhere

Medicine is a field that may be defined as "science" since it is based (or should be based) on data and measurements. But you see how difficult it is to apply the scientific method to it. Other fields of science suffer from similar problems. Climate science, ecosystem science, biological evolution, economics, management, policies, and others are cases in which you cannot reproduce the main features of the system in a laboratory and, at the same time, involve a large number of parameters interacting with each other in a non-linear manner. You could say, for instance, that the purpose of politics is to improve people's well-being. But how could that be measured? In general, it is believed that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a measure of the well-being of the economy and, hence, of all citizens. Then, it is concluded that economic growth is always good, and that it should be stimulated by all possible interventions. But is it true? GDP growth is another kind of surrogate endpoint used simply because we know how to measure it. But people's well-being is something that we don't know how to measure. 

Is a non-Galilean science possible? We have to start considering this possibility without turning to discard the need for good data and good measurements. But, for complex systems, we have to move away from the rigid Galilean method and use dynamic models. We are moving in that direction, but we still have to learn a lot about how to use models and, incidentally, the Covid19 pandemic showed us how models can be misused and lead to various kinds of disasters. But we need to move on, and I'll discuss this matter in detail in an upcoming post. 


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(*) Aristotle's "Physics" (Book VIII, chapter 10) where he discusses the relationship between the weight of an object and its speed of fall:

"Heavier things fall more quickly than lighter ones if they are not hindered, and this is natural, since they have a greater tendency towards the place that is natural to them. For the whole expanse that surrounds the earth is full of air, and all heavy things are borne up by the air because they are surrounded and pressed upon by it. But the air is not able to support a weight equal to itself, and therefore the heavier bodies, as having a greater proportion of weight, press more strongly upon and sink more quickly through the air than do the lighter bodies."





  




Friday, April 28, 2023

America, the Collapsed. Why Mommy Knows Best

 


I am still reading paper books. I think they favor concentration in a way that on-screen books cannot provide. Books are also one of the few places left in the memesphere where you can say what you think without being aggressed by a band of zombies or censored by brain-drained idiots. So, during the past few years, I have been reading a series of books, most of which, I think, deserve a comment. And I'll see to publish a few; not really book reviews, but just ideas derived from the books I read. 


Why do people do things that harm themselves? It is a good question that nobody seems to know how to answer -- yet, it happens all the time. Scott Erikson tackles the question in his book, "Mommy, Why did America Collapse?" A nice addition to the catastrophist's bookshelf. 

Erikson writes in a light mood; his analyses do not pretend to be quantitative models of the collapse of complex systems, but he tells a fascinating tale in the form of a bedtime dialog between a mother and her daughter. The fascination is not in the story itself: for those of us who are hard-core catastrophists, there is not much that we didn't know before (mommy is one of us!). For those who are not catastrophists, the book will probably fail to appear convincing.

Yet, the problem is there, and many past stories show how exactly people can and do harm themselves by doing things that may appear intelligent in the short term but lethal in the long term. Throwing oneself naked into a thornbush to collect berries is a paradigmatic example, but, in a more pedantic kind of analysis, Ilaria Perissi and I noted how the fishing industry has consistently destroyed the fish stocks that made them live in our book "The Empty Sea." How could it happen? We cite several examples of how people simply trade long-term survival for short-term gains. It is the way the human mind works. We need just one word to describe it: "greed."

That's exactly the point that Erikson makes over and over in his book. It is not so much an analysis of the reasons why America did (will) collapse but how a profound failure in communication caused the collapse. More than a problem of communication, it is a problem of trust. A mother can say things at bedtime that her daughter has no reason to mistrust (unless mommy wants to sell the munchkin to the bad witch for cooking in a cauldron).  

But, apart for bedtime stories, we are always dealing with people who are trying to sell us to the canned meat industry -- often figuratively, sometimes perhaps even for real. So, if there is no trust, there is no truth. And if there is no truth, there is nothing at all. Only noise. And who has the time for bedtime stories, anyway?

No wonder America Collapsed.


Monday, April 24, 2023

Another Epochal Failure of Humankind. How people are losing interest in the things that threaten them the most.

 



In 2018, I published on my "Cassandra's Legacy" blog a post titled, "Why, in a Few Years, Nobody Will be Talking About Climate Change Anymore." It turned out to be remarkably prophetic. 


From Gallup News, April 17, 2023

The percentages of Americans expressing a great deal of worry about air pollution and the loss of tropical rain forests have each fallen seven points since 2022, while worry about extinction of plant and animal species has declined five points, and the pollution of natural waterways and global warming or climate change are down four points each. Meanwhile, last year’s 57% high-level worry about polluted drinking water is statistically similar to this year’s 55%. Each of the current readings is at or tied for its lowest point since 2015 or 2016.

People are losing interest in the things that threaten them the most. This Gallup report is not the only evidence. News and comments about climate change, pollution, resource depletion, and the like have disappeared from the major news channels, as I had predicted in a post published four years ago, in 2018

Sometimes, I am scared of my own predictions, but this one requires some corrections to my interpretation. When I published my post, in 2018, I was convinced that the decline in interest in environmental matters was mostly created by governments applying the propaganda technique called "deception by omission." That is, governments actively intervened to keep these issues away from the news. 

Nowadays, I think that active omission is just one of the causes of the trend. Another one, probably more important, is the current economic situation. People's everyday life is becoming more and more difficult in terms of money, health, safety, and sheer survival. Most of us are unable to link our individual troubles with large-scale planetary problems. And, even if we were able to, it would be correct to conclude that there is nothing we can do about these problems. So, why worry about things we can't change? 

That generates a negative loop: if a subject is not interesting to people, then the media tend to ignore it. If the media ignore a subject, then it becomes less and less interesting. So, when Gallup goes interviewing people, they answer that they don't see the big problems as worrisome. There is little need for governments to intervene to keep some problems hidden, they tend to disappear from the news by themselves. 

The apathy of the public is just one of the facets of the way the perception of global problems has evolved. An even worse side of the problem is how the collapse of the prestige of science during the Covid epidemic has led to a disastrous loss of trust in anything that has to do with science. It is true that science has become corrupt, biased, elitist, unable to innovate, a tool for scaring people, and more of the like. But it is still a shock to see people whom I esteemed as intelligent and competent in their fields going into a full-spectrum refusal of anything that has to do with "official" science. 

Plenty of people I know refuse to accept even simple things that could help them in their everyday life. Insulate my apartment? It is part of a plan to dispossess the middle class of their homes. Install PV panels on my roof? They require more energy than they will produce. Replace my gas stove with an induction one? They want us to starve!  Reduce traffic pollution? It is a trick to take our cars away from us. Saving energy? It is because they want to enslave us!

To say nothing about those who went full bonkers with the idea that the Moon landing never happened, chemtrails are real, climate change is a hoax, the virus does not exist, oil and gas are infinite, and it is all a plot to exterminate humankind. This kind of things. 

Depressing? Of course, it is depressing. The term "depressing," alone, may not be adequate. (click here for 307 synonyms of "depressing" according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary). Call it the way you like, but the fact is that in three years of Covid panic, we lost 50 years of efforts to convince people to do something about keeping this poor planet (and us, living on its surface) in decent conditions. 

Perhaps it was unavoidable, but the question is,