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."
Showing posts with label collapse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label collapse. Show all posts

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!



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, March 20, 2023

Putin Must Die! How to make sure that the war will not end soon





As a comment to the recent decision of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, I propose here an excerpt from the chapter titled "The Evil Side of Collapse" of my book, "Before Collapse," (2019). In the book, I argue that there is a way to reduce the impact of systemic collapse that I call the "Seneca Strategy," which consists in accepting an unavoidable decline in order to soften a later crash. Conversely, there exists also an "anti-Seneca" strategy that consists in forcing the system to resist decline at all costs. The result is that the collapse is postponed but, when it comes, it is rapid and disastrous. It may be applied in a military conflict when the objective is the utter and total destruction of one's enemy. It consists in making it clear to enemy leaders that they will be treated as criminals if they surrender so that they will keep fighting to the bitter end. It was applied by the Allies during WWII, as I briefly discuss here. 



From "Before Collapse,"  di Ugo Bardi, Springer 2019 (*)


In military matters, there exists an “anti-Seneca” strategy that consists in disregarding Sun Tzu’s principle of minimum effort, aiming instead at continuing the war all the way to the complete military defeat, or even the annihilation, of the enemy. Such a plan could be based on ideological, political, or religious considerations leading one or both sides to believe that the very existence of the other is a deadly threat that must be removed using force. In ancient times, religious hatred led to the extermination of entire populations, and there is a rather well-known statement that may have been pronounced after the fall of the Albigensian city of Béziers, in Southern France, in 1209. It is said that the Papal legate who was with the attacking Catholic troops was asked what to do with the citizens, which surely included both Catholics and Albigensian heretics. The answer was, "Kill them all; God will know His own." 

That war, just like most modern wars, was an “identity war” where the enemy is seen as not just an adversary, but an evil entity to be destroyed. These wars tend to be brutal and carried on all the way to the total extermination of the losing side. In some cases, though, wars may be prolonged simply because they are good business for some people and companies on both sides.

A possible case of this kind of “anti-Seneca” strategy may be found in the campaign that was started in the US in 1914 to provide food for Belgium during the First World War. The campaign is normally described as a great humanitarian success, but in the recent book Prolonging the Agony (2018),  the authors, Docherty and Macgregor, suggest that the relief effort was just the facade for the real task of the operation: supplying food to Germany so that the German army could continue fighting until it was completely destroyed. This interpretation appears to be mainly speculation, but we can't ignore that Belgium was occupied by the German army at that time, and so it could be expected that at least part of the food sent there would end up in German hands. 

Something more ominous took place during the Second World War. By September 1943, after the surrender of Italy, it must have been clear to everybody on both sides that the Allies had won the war; it was only a question of time for them to finish the job. So, what could have prevented the German government from following the example of Italy and deciding to surrender, maybe ousting Hitler, as the Italian government had done with Mussolini? We do not know whether some members of the German leadership considered this strategy, but it seems clear that the Allies did not encourage them. One month after Italy surrendered, in October 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, signed a document known as the “Moscow Declaration.” Among other things, it stated that:

At the time of granting of any armistice to any government which may be set up in Germany, those German officers and men and members of the Nazi party who have been responsible for or have taken a consenting part in the above atrocities, massacres and executions will be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done … and judged on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged.

… most assuredly the three Allied powers will pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusors in order that justice may be done. … <else> they will be punished by joint decision of the government of the Allies.

What was the purpose of broadcasting this document that threatened the extermination of the German leadership, knowing that it would have been read by the Germans, too? The Allies seemed to want to make sure that the German leaders understood that there was no space to negotiate an armistice. The only way out left to the German military was to take the situation into their own hands to get rid of the leaders that the Allied had vowed to punish. That was probably the reason for the assassination attempt carried out against Adolf Hitler on June 20th, 1944. It failed, and we will never know if it would have shortened the war.

Perhaps as a reaction to the coup against Hitler in Germany, a few months later, on September 21, 1944, the Allies publicly diffused a plan for post-war Germany that had been approved at the Quebec Conference by the British and American governments. The plan, known as the “Morgenthau Plan,” was proposed by Henry Morgenthau Jr. secretary of the Treasury of the United States. Among other things, it called for the complete destruction of Germany’s industrial infrastructure and the transformation of Germany into a purely agricultural society at a nearly Medieval technology level. If carried out as stated, the plan would have killed millions of Germans since German agriculture, alone, would have been unable to sustain the German population. The plan was initially approved by the US president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

Unlike the Moscow declaration that aimed at punishing German leaders, the Morgenthau plan called for the punishment of the whole German population. Again, the proponents could not have been unaware that their plan was visible to the Germans and that the German government would have used it as a propaganda tool. President Roosevelt's son-in-law, Lt. Colonel John Boettiger, stated that the Morgenthau Plan was "worth thirty divisions to the Germans." The general upheaval against the plan among the US leadership led President Roosevelt to disavow it. But it may have been one of the reasons that led the Germans to fight like cornered rats to the bitter end.

So, what was the idea behind the Morgenthau plan? As you may imagine, the story generated a number of conspiracy theories. One of these theories proposes that the plan was not conceived by Morgenthau himself, but by his assistant secretary, Harry Dexter White⁠. After the war, White was accused of being a Soviet spy by the Venona investigation, a US counterintelligence effort started during WW2 that was the prelude to the well-known “Witch Hunts” carried out by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. According to a later interpretation⁠, White had acted under instructions from Stalin himself, who wanted the Germans to suffer under the Allied occupation so much that they would welcome a Soviet intervention. It goes without saying that this is just speculation, but, since this chapter deals with the evil side of collapse, this story fits very well with it.

There is no evidence that the Morgenthau plan was conceived by evil people gathering in secret in a smoke-filled room. Rather, it has certain logic if examined from the point of view of the people engaged in the war effort against Germany in the 1940s. They had seen Germany rebuilding its army and restarting its war effort to conquer Europe just 20 years after it had been defeated in a way that seemed to be final, in 1918. It is not surprising that they wanted to make sure that it could not happen again. But, according to their experience, it was not sufficient to defeat Germany to obtain that result: no peace treaty, no matter how harsh on the losers, could obtain that. The only way to put to rest the German ambitions of conquest forever was by means of the complete destruction of the German armed forces and the occupation of all of Germany. For this, the German forces had to fight like cornered rats. And it seems reasonable that if you want a rat to fight in that way, you have to corner it first. The Morgenthau plan left no hope for the Germans except in terms of a desperate fight to the last man.

We do not know whether the people who conceived the plan saw it in these terms. The documents we have seem to indicate that there was a strong feeling among the people of the American government during the war about the need to punish Germany and the Germans, as described, for instance, in Beschloss’s book The Conquerors. Whatever the case, fortunately, the Morgenthau plan was never officially adopted, and, in 1947, the US changed its focus from destroying Germany to rebuilding it by means of the Marshall plan.

There have been other cases of wars where there was no attempt to apply the wise strategy proposed by Sun-Tzu, who suggests always leaving the enemy a way to escape. Nowadays, wars seem to be becoming more and more polarized and destructive, just like the political debate. Once a war has started, the only way to conclude it seems to be the complete collapse of the enemy and the extermination of its leaders. The laughter of the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, at the news of the murder of the leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011 is a case in point of how brutal these confrontations have become. It is hard to see how the trend in this direction could be reversed until the current international system of interaction among states that created it collapses. At least, it should be clear that the anti-Seneca strategy is an especially inefficient way to win wars.




(*) This is a lightly edited text from an early version of the book. 

Sunday, February 12, 2023

The Empire Strikes Back: Down with those Silly Environmental Policies!




I defined this image as "The most amazing graph of the 21st century," and I argued that the rapid inversion of the declining trend of crude oil production is the cause of the US government's currently aggressive foreign policy. But the vagaries of oil production in the US haven't ceased to amaze us. We are now seeing a desperate attempt to keep oil production growing, even at the cost of dumping everything done so far in terms of "green" policies to mitigate climate change and ecosystem disruption. It is a major historical change. 


Sometimes, things change so fast in our world that we are left bewildered at seeing the rapid disappearance of the world we had thought was normal. The Covid pandemic was a case in point. It changed our habits, how we see ourselves and others, and affected our fundamental rights. In less than a couple of years, it propelled us into a "new normal" that became the way things are and have to be. 

The wave of rapid changes is not over. Now, change is sweeping through energy and environmental policies, and not in a good direction. A recent article in "The Epoch Times" reports about a document approved by the House Natural Resources Committee with the title, "GOP-Led House Panels Shift Gears, Go Full Throttle for Domestic Energy Production." It is a true tsunami poised to propel us into another kind of "new normal." Here are some excerpts.

"Republicans made it clear that many initiatives passed under the Biden administration promoting electric vehicles, carbon capture, green energy, and environmental protection are on the proverbial chopping block.

"Among the proposals that will dominate the committee’s and its subsidiary panels’ agendas in the coming months are bills prohibiting restrictions on hydraulic fracking without congressional approval, expanding natural gas exports, repealing the IRA’s Green House Reduction Fund, and amending the Clean Air, Toxic Substances Control, Solid Waste Disposal, and National Gas Tax acts.

"Within the tranche of proposed legislation on the committee’s “unleashing American energy agenda” are bills calling for permitting reform, promoting development of “critical minerals,” and prohibiting the import of Russian uranium. 

"Current energy policies not only degrade the economy but imperil national security... We are exporting wealth from here in the United States, many times to our adversaries, because of a not-in-my-backyard mentality,

"Grijalva’s proposed amendment to incorporate a statement that the impacts of climate change be weighed in evaluating proposals was defeated on a 21–15 party-line tally."

And more like that.

Let's try to unravel this set of ideas. We can start with the key sentence: "prohibiting restrictions on hydraulic fracking." It means that the Republicans want to ramp up the production of natural gas and crude oil at all costs, and the hell with "Climate Change" and "environmental protection." These silly ideas came from those scientists who think they deserve a salary just because they spend their time scaring the public with invented catastrophes that never arrive. Who do they think they are? 

The Republicans seem to be riding a wave of public opinion that sees environmental policies in a bad light. Indeed, most people were never enthusiastic about making sacrifices for a nebulous entity called "the environment." But, today, the public's trust in science has taken a considerable beating from the Covid crisis, and it is becoming more and more difficult to convince people to act in the name of a "science" that they see with increasing suspicion. Independently of individual opinions, when things get tough, most people tend to agree that there is no space for niceties and luxuries, as environmental policies are usually perceived. 

Apart from dumping regulations, neither the Republicans nor the general public seem to be able to see the glaring contradiction in what they are planning to do. Increasing oil and gas production means that more oil and gas will be used and exported. But once oil is produced and burned, it is gone. Then, the country will be impoverished, having lost some of its natural resources. (Unless, of course, you think that oil and gas are an infinite resource.... and that's precisely what the US elites think.). This is a classic case of hastening one's own doom, but it is normal. It happens all the time. 

Besides, there is an even more worrisome point in these ideas. Can fracking production be actually increased? The sentence about prohibiting restrictions on hydraulic fracking actually smacks of desperation. During the past 10 years, an incredibly rapid increase in oil production was obtained without the need for such a radical legislation. So why is it needed now? It may be a way for senators to show their determination, but it is more likely that the fracking industry is in trouble, unable to recover after the drop caused by the Covid pandemic. 

Let's see some recent data from "Peak Oil Barrel." 


You see that the US oil production collapsed in 2020 due to the Covid epidemic. Then, it restarted growing but has yet to return to the record level of Nov 2019. During the years of fast growth, up to 2019, it had grown more than 1 million barrels per year, a nearly 10% increase. It was a rate never seen during the whole history of US oil production. But, during the current recovery, it has declined to about half that value. The forecasts see a further reduction to nearly zero growth so that the 2019 record may not be breached before December 2024 -- if ever. Note also how production went down for about 6 months before the Covid shock. Something was rotten in Texas already by then. 

What's happening? One thing is clear: the US oil industry can no longer sustain the incredible growth rate that had been the rule up to 2019. We may well be close to the second (and final) peak of oil production in the US (as also noted by others)

So, as in the old Chinese malediction, we live in interesting times. An empire that does not expand is a dead empire, and the American Empire needs energy to keep its expansion going. A war, after all, is just a continuation of the economy by other means: the market is the battlefield, and "programmed obsolescence" is assured by the competitor's products. During the past decade, the US empire has accumulated considerable economic potential through the "fracking miracle." This potential has been turned in large part into a military potential. It is now time to dissipate this potential; it is the primary reason for what we see in the world nowadays. It is a concept explored in depth by Ingo Piepers.

The American elites understand what's happening. Hence, the effort to prop up the oil industry at all costs. So, will the Empire succeed in surviving for some more years? The current war is not being fought on the battlefield but on the oil fields. The side that runs out of fuel first will be the loser. 

In the long run, anyway, the winner will also lose: at some moment, production by fracking will not just decline: it will crash in one of the most brutal Seneca Cliffs ever witnessed by humankind. But do not despair: humankind has been thriving before the age of oil, and it may well do the same afterward. It will just be a very different world for those who will survive to see it. 


Below is a post I published in 2015, where I compared the growth of shale oil production to that of cod fishing in the Atlantic. In both cases, producers were blinded by a false sensation of abundance generated by production growth. They didn't realize that the faster you extract it, the faster you run out of it. 


The shale oil "miracle": how growth may falsely signal abundance. 

Originally published on "Cassandra's Legacy,  February 24, 2015




Oil production (all liquids in barrels per day) in the US and Canada. (From Ron Patterson's blog). Does this rapid growth indicate that the resources are abundant and that all the worries about peak oil are misplaced? Maybe not...


Sometimes, we use a simple metric to evaluate complex systems. For instance, a war is a complex affair where millions of people fight and struggle. However, in the end, the final result is a yes/no question: either you win or you lose. Not for nothing, General McArthur said once that "there is no substitute for victory."

Think of the economy: it is an immense and complex system where millions of people work, produce, buy, sell, and make or lose money. IEventually the final result is a simple yes/no question: either you grow, or you don't. And what McArthur said about war can be applied to the economy: "there is no substitute for growth."

But complex systems have ways of behaving, surprising you that can't be reduced to a simple yes/no judgment. Both victory and growth may create more problems than they solve. Victory may falsely signal a military might that doesn't exist (think of the outcome of some recent wars....), while growth may signal an abundance that is just not there.

Look at the figure at the beginning of this post (from Ron Patterson's blog). It shows the oil production (barrels/day) in the US and Canada. The data are in thousand barrels per day for "crude oil + condensate," and the rapid growth for the past few years is primarily due to tight oil (also known as "shale oil") and oil from tar sands. If you follow the debate in this field, you know that this growth trend has been hailed as a great result and as the definitive demonstration that all worries about oil depletion and peak oil were misplaced.

Fine. But let me show you another graph, the US landings of North Atlantic Cod up to 1980 (data from Faostat).

Doesn't it look similar to the data for oil in the US/Canada? We can imagine what was being said at the time; "new fishing technologies dispel all worries about overfishing" and things like that. It is what was said, indeed (see Hamilton et al. (2003)).

Now, look at the cod landings data up to 2012 and see what happened after the great burst of growth.

This doesn't require more than a couple of comments. The first is to note how overexploitation leads to collapse: people don't realize that by pushing for growth at all costs, they are destroying the very resource that creates growth. This can happen with fisheries just as with oil fields. But, also note that we have another case of a "Seneca Cliff," a production curve where the decline is much faster than growth. As the ancient Roman philosopher said, "The road to ruin is rapid." And this is exactly what we could expect to happen with tight oil.

Monday, January 23, 2023

Ugo Bardi: Traitor to Catastrophism. (or, why collapse is not an event, but a process)


You, Reginald, three times traitor you: Traitor to me as my temporal vassal, Traitor to me as your spiritual lord, Traitor to God in desecrating His Church. (T.S. Eliot, "Murder in the Cathedral") 


About ten years ago, my friend and colleague Massimo Nicolazzi wrote that the inversion of the declining trend of oil production in the US could not be neglected any longer. I commented by saying that it was a short-lived flare that couldn't last for long.

It turned out that Nicolazzi was right and I was wrong. By now, the growth of the US oil production curve has been lasting for more than ten years and is still ongoing -- it was not just a short-lived flare. Of course, it cannot last forever but, for the time being, it changed everything. For instance, it propelled the American Empire back to the path of world domination that the Neocons theorized in the 1990s. 

Does that mean that Hubbert's "peak oil" theory is wrong and must be discarded? Of course not. It only means reinforcing some of the basic rules of complex systems. For instance, the one that goes, "complex systems always surprise you," and also, "never take an example as a rule."

So, when dealing with collapse (that I call the "Seneca Cliff), we should always remember that collapse is not an event; it is a process. Collapses have a history, they are the result of the interaction of several factors, and the same processes that generate collapse can also generate its opposite, which I tend to call the "Seneca Rebound." It is normal. There is nothing definitive in the universe, and collapses exist because the old must leave space for the new. 

Recently, for another unexpected change, I identified a new trend: the rapid growth of renewable energy production worldwide. A trend that can be well described by some recent studies in terms of the EROI (energy returned for energy invested) of renewables having become several times larger than that of fossil fuels. No wonder we are seeing -- or we'll soon see -- a revolving door effect in energy production. Fossils are out, and renewables are in. History rhymes, as it usually does!

Then, just like Nicolazzi's statement about tight oil was hated by peak-oil hardliners (including me), my statements on renewables were understood as a mortal offense by catastrophistic hardliners. You can't believe how nasty their comments have been: apart from branding me an incompetent, an idiot, and ignorant of the basic laws of physics, catastrophism seems to be strictly linked to conspirationism, so people have been writing that I cannot tell the truth because I am blackmailed by the powers that be (no, really, someone wrote exactly that!). 

The problem is the science of complex systems is never black or white. It doesn't allow for absolute truths, nor is it sympathetic to people choosing between complacency and panic (the two functioning modes of human beings according to James Schlesinger). The science of complex systems is, well, complex, and it needs a little mental flexibility to be understood. Not that it takes superhuman mental capabilities, not at all. It is just that you need to free yourself from the schematic way of reasoning that's normally imposed on all of us by the media. 

I tried to explain these points in my book "Before Collapse" -- which has been recently translated into Spanish. Jorge Riechmann wrote a preface to the Spanish edition where he does an excellent job of summarizing the main points of the book. He calls me "a very optimistic collapsologist," which may be a good definition as long as you understand that it does not mean that collapses do not exist. They do. It is just that we have to learn to live with them. 

 

The preface of the Spanish version book "Before Collapse," translated into English. The English version can be found at this link


Collapse Better (Notes about an optimistic book on collapses)

By JORGE RIECHMANN

(Published as an introduction to Ugo Bardi's book Antes del colapso, published by Los libros de la catarata in 2022). 


1 At the height of the June 2022 heat wave, French anthropologist Sylvain Perdigon recalled how in 2014 a French TV "weatherwoman" presented the hypothetical weather forecast for August 18, 2050 as part of a campaign to alert about the reality of climate change. Now her forecast of extreme temperatures for that distant day had become the actual forecast for mid-June 2022.[1] The weather forecast for 2050 is now the real one.

As far as the ecosocial crisis and climate tragedy are concerned, everything is systematically going systematically worse than expected, as Ferran Puig Vilar often reminds us. For example, the damage that climatologists expected to become visible in the middle of the 21st century is already here with us. "Humanity seems to be bent on playing a deadly game of Russian roulette where the Earth's climate is a loaded weapon," writes Professor Ugo Bardi in this book.

2  We are living an end of the world. Not the end of the world: Mother Earth will still be there. The basic levels of life on Gaia[2] - bacteria, archaea, fungi, algae, lichens, and many kinds of plants - are extraordinarily resilient. But the world as we have known it - the familiar and easily habitable Earth of the Holocene - is unraveling before our eyes; and the desperate efforts of many people to cling to that familiar - and now entirely unrecoverable - normality do not alleviate our situation, but rather aggravate it.

It is not the end of the world - it is not the death of Gaia, it is not the end of life on planet Earth - but it is the end of our world. What does one do in such a situation?

3. For example, read Ugo Bardi. People close to Libros de la Catarata already know the Florentine professor: it was an excellent idea to translate and publish in 2014 his book The Limits to Growth revisited, a thorough and clear-sighted analysis of that very important 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, the first of the reports to the Club of Rome. Now that it is fifty years since the publication of that pioneering work (using the modeling of the world system thanks to system dynamics), which allowed us to understand the tendency to overshoot followed by collapse that characterizes industrial societies, it is a good time to recover that first book by Bardi in Spanish - and it would be an excellent accompaniment to the one you now hold in your hands, dear reader, curious reader.[3][4] The Limits to Growth Revisited, the first book by Bardi in Spanish, is an excellent accompaniment to the one you are now holding in your hands.

4.  Ugo Bardi, theorist of complex systems (those systems that exhibit strong feedback effects, he defines at a certain point in this book),[4] has been reflecting for more than a decade on the "Seneca effect" starting from a first intuition in 2011;[5] in the spring of 2017 he published The Seneca Effect: Why Growth is Slow but Collapse is Rapid (Springer, 2017); then, in 2020, Before the Collapse, this second book on the Seneca effect that is now translated into Spanish. If one had to call someone a collapsologist in the proper sense, for his commitment to an understanding as objective and rational as possible of this kind of phenomena, it would be Professor Bardi, from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florence.

The strong interconnection between the subsystems of a complex system can lead, as a result of the impact of a perturbation on one or some of these nodes or subsystems, to the collapse of the entire network. Thus, the development of complex systems often responds to what Professor Bardi calls the Seneca mode: it is an asymmetrical process, where growth is slow and decline is very marked. Catastrophe comes much sooner than our intuition would expect and tends to catch us unawares.

You will also be dealing, in these pages, with Seneca's precipices, Seneca's bottlenecks, and Seneca's rebounds: the Cordovan philosopher gives a lot of play in the hands of the Florentine physical-chemist.

5.  If in a book the word overshoot appears already in the preface, as it does here, we have an indication that it is probably going to talk about essential things.

And speaking of ecological overshoot followed by collapse, I would like to point out here what seems to me to be an internal contradiction between the explanations proposed by our author. At one point he argues that "if the American elites have decided that there is no hope of saving the whole world, the logical thing to do is to go into 'deception mode' and let most people die": that is why Donald Trump and the Republican Party are climate deniers. It is not that they ignore the reality of basic biophysical facts, but that they accept a large-scale genocide from which the elites will be spared. At a later point, however, the Florentine professor suggests otherwise: "No one seems to understand that the problem, today, is not one of expanding their country's borders, but of ensuring the physical survival of their citizens in the face of potentially disastrous events related to climate change and ecosystem collapse." So where does that leave us: ignorant elites or genocidal elites?

6. Bardi insists many times that "collapse is not a mistake, it is a characteristic feature" of complex systems in the Universe we inhabit (p. 40). While we cannot avoid many collapses (and every complex system will collapse, given enough time), we can at least try to prepare for them and collapse better. Before the Collapse (a title that suggests a double meaning: before the collapse, yes, but also facing the collapse) is a good guide for that journey, and the frequent touches of humor with which the author de-dramatizes his subject of study, in itself - it is not necessary to insist on it - very dramatic, are appreciated. Along with humor, the broad contextualization (ultimately in a cosmic and Big History context) is another resource that helps to de-dramatize.

7. Something very appealing about Professor Bardi is his interdisciplinary appetite. An appetite that finally takes shape in a very broad culture, not only on chemistry and physics matters but also on humanistic subjects (with special emphasis on history): his work offers many materials for that Third Culture (building bridges between natural sciences, social sciences and humanities) that Francisco Fernández Buey was asking us for.[6][7].

8. Collapse is not a failure of complex systems, insists the Florentine professor, but a feature of their mode of functioning: the Universe is like that. Would this be a pessimistic position? But pessimism is forbidden in our ranks! If one does not manifest at least a sufficiently muscular optimism of the will, one risks severe reprimands.

Well: against the compulsory optimism to which so many prescribers would like to subject us left and right (because pessimism, it is often said, demobilizes and works as a self-fulfilling prophecy), Bardi's rational effort to understand the dynamics of collapse is very much to be welcomed. (I confess that, having disastrously exhausted the cycle of emancipatory mobilization of 15-M movement (the Spanish "indignados", the "outraged"), hearing the adjective "illusionary" in contexts of political debate makes my guts churn rather than lift my spirits). And for those who prefer not to think of any kind of collapse without sanctifying themselves, you already have the energetic and counter-apocalyptic Rosi Braidotti, or the more proximate Zamora Bonilla.[7] 

9. Bardi is a very optimistic collapsologist. Anyone who has followed his involvement in the debates on energy transitions over the last decade knows this. This optimism manifests itself for example in an article such as "The Sower's way: a strategy to attain the energy transition",[8] his particular Parable of the Sower also evoked in this book, full of confidence in the technical possibility of a smooth transition to renewable energy sources. However, his socio-political realism leads him to temper this technological optimism: such a transition would be possible, yes, but it is extremely improbable judging by the political course our societies are following.

The CIA director and US Defense Secretary James Schlesinger is credited with an observation that Bardi takes up several times in this book: human beings would have only two modes of operation, complacency and panic. To disprove him, it would be necessary that our processes of reflection and deliberation allow us to truly prepare ourselves (on a socially significant scale) for a future whose configuration we will never know, but whose structure of ecosocial collapse is today very discernible. The entire effort deployed in this work is intended to provide us with intellectual tools for that task.


10. Along with the story of the Roman Empress Galla Placidia, Japan in the Edo period is a second great positive historical example from which we can learn in thinking about transitions to sustainability. "What the story of Edo Japan tells us matches what we know about complex systems: they tend toward stability. In other words, our current fixation on growth may just be a quirk of history destined to disappear in the future when we are forced to live within the limits of the Earth's ecosystem." However, warns Bardi in 2020 in words that take on a somber resonance in 2022, "there is one condition we urgently need for this: peace, as the Edo experience tells us." Far from progressing a pacification of international relations that would allow us to cope with the processes of ecosocial collapse underway, on February 24, 2022 the invasion of Ukraine by Russia accelerated a generalized militarization that precipitates us in the opposite direction to where we would need to move.

In these fateful times, El País editorializes with exaltation about the European Union as a "new geopolitical power" (March 1, 2022). David Rieff, on the next page, also stresses that "Europe is entering a new era of hard power". Where we would need gaia-politics and an unprecedented level of international cooperation, the old geopolitics of destructive competition between nation-states and the blocs they are shaping is deepening: a world of "Combatant Empires" (Rafael Poch de Feliu) [9] And the general framework is an ecocide that includes in its bosom all kinds of promises of genocide.

The already very bad world we had is being transformed, before our wide-open eyes, into a much worse one. "It should never have come to this" could be the answer to almost everything that is happening to us. But we are already there, and from there it is up to us to act now... Recalling, for example, these verses by Brecht:[10]

When the war begins/ your brothers may be transformed/ and their faces may no longer be recognizable/ but you must remain the same/ they will go to war, not/ as to butchery, but/ as serious work. Everything/ they will have forgotten. But you/ must not forget anything.// They'll pour firewater down your gullet/ like the others. But you/ must remain sober.


11. Bearing in mind all the play that the so-called Spanish "senequismo" has given in the history of ideas in our country (with outstanding contributions such as those of Ángel Ganivet or María Zambrano), and how at times the Roman Stoic philosopher born in Cordoba has come to embody the sage par excellence in the Spanish popular imagination (in such a way that the expression "he is a Seneca" is used to praise the wisdom of someone), it is not bad that the common thread of Bardi's reflection is precisely a thought of the Cordovan philosopher. Namely, what Seneca said about collapse in one of his letters to Lucilius: "It would be a consolation for our weakness if things could be restored as soon as they are destroyed; but the opposite is true: growth is slow, but ruin is swift."[11] We will decline, but we could collapse.

We will collapse, but we could collapse better. Bardi outlines a Seneca strategy that can help us in this: accept that change is necessary and that, in many cases, opposing it leads to a more rapid collapse. Accepting the inevitable will allow us to better prepare ourselves to collapse (and perhaps even avoid collapse): "Seneca's strategy is not to oppose the tendency of the system to go in a certain direction, but to steer it in such a way that collapse does not have to occur. The key to the strategy is to prevent the system from accumulating so much tension that it is then forced to discharge it abruptly." Towards the end of the book, a notion of eco-stoicism is suggested,[12] just before recalling the stimulating and novel story of Galla Placidia, the last Roman empress.


12. Seneca also wrote: "Live each day as if one day were your whole life". Not bad advice for times as difficult as ours. Of Bardi we can also say: this guy is a Seneca!



Notes

[1] Tweet of June 15, 2022: https://twitter.com/sylvaindarwish/status/1537181101357256704

[2] It is worth remembering here that Ugo Bardi is one of the scientific defenders of the Gaia theory: see for example his essay "Gaia exists! Here is the proof" on the blog Cassandra's Legacy, 4 August 2019; https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2019/08/gaia-exists-here-is-proof.html . For his idea of Gaia as a holobiont, see for example https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2020/06/gaia-is-one-of-us-onward-fellow.html

Bardi, whose intellectual effervescence cheers us up and sometimes overwhelms us a bit, recently started a new and stimulating blog on the Proud Holobionts (see e.g. https://theproudholobionts.blogspot.com/2022/06/survival-of-fittest-or-non-survival-of.html ). The introductory text of that blog reads:

We are all holobionts: groups of organisms that help each other. As humans, we could not survive without the microorganisms that populate our bodies. But all living creatures on Earth are holobionts, and the ecosystem itself is a giant holobiont (which some call 'Gaia'). The holobiont concept can also be used for real and virtual non-biotic structures, enterprises, states, ideas, and ideologies, as well as the behavior of ideas ('memes') on the World Wide Web. The term holobiont was pioneered by Lynn Margulis in 1991. She was also co-developer of the Gaia concept.

[3] Bardi recalls part of his analysis of The Limits to Growth in the first chapter of this book, "The Science of Doom: Shaping the Future".

Allow me a small digression. The denialism of biophysical limits that prevails in the dominant culture can be well studied through two exemplary cases: what may be called the "Georgescu Roegen affair" and then "The Limits to Growth affair" in the 1970s (regarding the former, see our book Bioeconomics for the 21st Century. Actualidad de Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, edited by José Manuel Naredo, Luis Arenas and Jorge Riechmann in Catarata, Madrid 2022). And then, from the 1990s onwards, the refusal to confront global warming, which is spectacularly illustrated by the "Nordhaus case", is impressive. William Nordhaus, one of the most belligerent economists against The Limits to Growth from 1972, was awarded the so-called "Nobel Prize" for economics in 2018. In his acceptance speech in Stockholm, this neoclassical economist suggested that the "optimal policy" to address climate change would result in "acceptable global warming" of about 3°C by 2100 and 4°C by 2150! Climatologists (and scientists from other disciplines), unlike neoclassical economists (who unfortunately have come to dominate their discipline, cancelling out rivals who advocated more reasonable economic theories), believe that global warming of this magnitude would be catastrophic (probably incompatible with the mere survival of the human species). This is the madness of the BAU (Bisnes Comodecustom)...

[4] "A system is complex if, and only if, it exhibits strong feedback effects. Every day we are confronted with complex systems: animals, people, organizations, etc. It is not difficult to understand what is complex and what is not: it depends on whether the reaction to external perturbations is dominated by feedback or not. Think of a rock compared to a cat..."

[5] See his blog https://thesenecaeffect.blogspot.com/

[6] Francisco Fernández Buey, Para la Tercera Cultura (edited by Salvador López Arnal and Jordi Mir), El Viejo Topo, Barcelona 2013.

[7] Good commentary in Asier Arias, "¿Quién son los contra-apocalípticos?", in the handcrafted compilation of texts in the digital magazine 15/1515 issue -8 ½, Spring 2022, p. 69-77. Also at https://www.15-15-15.org/webzine/2021/09/11/quienes-son-los-contra-apocalipticos/

[8] Ugo Bardi, Ilaria Perissi, Denes Csala and Sgouris Sgouridis: "The Sower's way: a strategy to attain the energy transition", International Journal of Heat and Technology vol. 34, Special Issue 2, October 2016; DOI: https://doi.org/10.18280/ijht.34S211 ; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316337020_The_Sower's_way_to_strategy_to_attain_the_energy_transition.

[9] See for example Rafael Poch, "Lo que nos van explicando sobre la guerra," ctxt, May 1, 2022; https://ctxt.es/es/20220501/Firmas/39740/Rafael-Poch-Rusia-Putin-ucrania-guerra-origen-otan-europa-estados-unidos-imperios-combatientes-consecuencias.htm

[10] Bertolt Brecht, Más de cien poemas. Hiperión, Madrid 2005, p. 211.

[11] I give the translation of Francisco Navarro, Epístolas morales de Séneca, Madrid 1884, p. 370.

[12] We could speak of a Taoist eco-stoicism that is articulated in considerations like this: "Like all human beings, the Stoics had their limits, but I believe that Seneca and others like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius understood a fundamental point that most of their contemporaries forgot, just as we often forget. It is that complex systems are best handled by 'going with the flow' rather than trying to force them into the shape we want. This can actually make things worse, as another modern-day philosopher, Jay Forrester, told us when he talked about 'pushing the levers in the wrong direction'."

Sunday, December 25, 2022

A Christmas Post: The Miracle of Renewables



The "Seneca Effect" has been a little gloomy, recently. So, for a change of pace, here is the translation in English of a post that I wrote for the Italian newspaper "Il Fatto Quotidiano," also reproduced in my blog "The Sunflower Society". Because it was published in a newspaper, it is simplified and short, yet it says what's needed to understand the revolution we are going through that will change the world in the coming years. If you are interested in the source of the data,  you can find them on Lazard.comSo, Merry Christmas, and never despair. Sometimes, miracles happen! 

“And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.” (Luke 2:9-10)


Miracles are not so frequent and, if one has serious health problems, it is not probable that a swim in the Lourdes pool will solve them. However, it is also true that sometimes things change quickly, opening up new possibilities. That's what's happening with renewable energy. Talking about a "miracle" is a bit much, I know, but recent technological developments have made available to us a tool that until a few years ago we didn't even dream of having. And this could solve problems that once seemed unsolvable.

For years, I've been lecturing about climate change and other looming worries, such as oil depletion. Usually, the people who came to listen to me were prepared for a message that was not exactly reassuring, but the question was what to do about it. At the end of the conference, a debate normally ensued in which the same things were said: ride a bicycle, turn down the thermostat in the house, install double glazing panes on the windows, use low energy light bulbs, things like that.

It was a little soothing ritual but, in reality, everyone knew that these weren't real solutions. Not that they're useless, but they're just a light layer of green on a system that continues to depend on fossil fuels to function. We have been talking about double glazing and bicycles for at least twenty years, but CO2 emissions continue to increase as before. Actually, faster than before. If we don't go to the heart of the problem, which is to eliminate fossil fuels, we will get nowhere. But how to do it? Until a few years ago, there seemed to be no way except to go back to tilling the fields by hand, as our ancestors did during the Middle Ages.

But today things have changed radically. You probably didn't notice it, caught up in the debate on politics. But it doesn't matter whether the right or the left wins. Change, the real one, is coming with renewable technologies. Wind and photovoltaic plants have been optimized and scaling factors have generated massive savings in production costs. Today, a kilowatt-hour produced by a photovoltaic panel costs perhaps a factor of 5-10 less than a kilowatt-hour from natural gas (and maybe a factor of 5 less than a nuclear kilowatt-hour) (source). We used to call renewables "alternative energy," but today all others are "alternative."

Furthermore, producing energy with modern renewable technologies does not pollute, does not require non-recyclable materials, does not generate greenhouse gases, does not generate local pollution, and nobody can bomb the sun to leave us without energy. Now, don't make me say that renewables have automatically solved all the problems we have. It is true that today they are cheap, but it is also true that they are not free. Then, investments are needed to adapt energy infrastructure throughout the country, to create energy storage systems, and much more. These are not things that can be done in a month, or even in a few years. There is talk of a decade, at least, to arrive at an energy system based mainly on renewables.

But it is also true that every journey begins with the first step. And now we see ahead of us a road ahead. A road that leads us to a cleaner, more prosperous, and hopefully less violent world. I haven't stopped going around giving conferences but, now, I can propose real solutions. And it's not just me who noticed the change. In the debate, today you can feel the enthusiasm of being able to do something concrete. Many people ask if they can install solar panels at home. Others say they've already done it. Some mad (and rightfully so) at the bureaucracy that prevents them from installing panels on their roof or in their garden. You also see the changing trend on social media.

There is always someone who speaks out against renewables by reasoning like the medieval flagellants who went around shouting "remember that you must die". But there are also those who respond in kind, "good riddance, and live happily together with the other cavemen." If you have a south-facing balcony (and if your municipality doesn't sabotage your idea), you can already install photovoltaic panels hanging from the railing that will help you reduce your electricity bill. No paperwork is needed! (another small miracle). One step at a time, we will succeed!


For a general assessment of the performance of renewables compared to fossil fuels, see this recent article by Murphy et al.

Monday, December 12, 2022

The End of Europe: The Conclusion of a Long Historical Cycle.



The failure of the European Union may have started with the choice of the flag. Not that national flags are supposed to be works of art, but at least they can be inspiring. But this flag is flat, unoriginal, and depressing. It looks like a blue cheese pizza gone bad. And that's just one of the many things gone bad with the European Union. (attempts to make it more appealing failed utterly). It is the conclusion of a thousand-year cycle that's coming to an end. It was probably unavoidable, but that doesn't make it less painful. 


Europe has a long history that goes back to when the ice sheets retreated at the end of the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago. At that time, our remote ancestors moved into a pristine land, cultivated it, built villages, roads, and cities. They traveled, migrated, fought each other, created cultures, built temples, fortresses, and palaces. On the Southern coast of Europe, a lively network of commercial exchanges emerged, made possible by maritime transportation over the Mediterranean Sea. Out of this network, the Greek civilization was born, and then the Roman Empire appeared around the end of the first millennium BCE. It included most of Western Europe. (image from ESA)


As all empires do, the Roman Empire went through its cycle of glory and decline. In the 5th century AD, as Europe entered the Middle Ages, the Empire had disappeared except as a memory of past greatness. In the following centuries, the population of Western Europe declined to a historical minimum, maybe less than 20 million people. Europe became a land of thick forests, portentous ruins, small villages, and petty warlords fighting each other. No one could have imagined that, centuries later, Europeans would become the dominators of the world.

Sometimes, collapses bring with them the seed of recovery. It is what I called the "Seneca Rebound." For some reason, we moderns disparage the Middle Ages, calling the era the "Dark Ages." But there was nothing dark during the European Middle Ages. Europe was poor in material terms, but Europeans managed to create a culture of refined literature, splendid cathedrals, sophisticated music, advanced technologies, and much more. One reason for the prospering of the European culture was the presence of tools that other regions of the world lacked. One was the Latin language, used to keep alive the ancient Classical Culture and its achievements. It also helped trade and created strong cultural bonds all over the continent. Europeans also inherited the bulk of Roman law and culture, and Roman technologies in fields such as metallurgy and weapon making.  

With Europe recovering from the 5th-century collapse, new precious metal mines in Eastern Europe started pumping wealth into the continent. The result was explosive. Already in 800 AD, Charlemagne, King of the Franks, could assemble an army powerful enough to create a new Europe-wide Empire, the "Sacred Roman Empire." With the turn of the millennium, the European population was rapidly growing, and it needed space to expand. Europe was a coiled spring, ready to snap. In 1095, a burst of armies emerged out of Europe, crashing into the Near East. It was the time of the Crusades. 

Initially, the invasion of the Middle East was a spectacular success: the Christian armies defeated the local rulers, established new kingdoms, and recreated a direct commercial connection with East Asia, along the Silk Road. But the task was too huge for a still young Europe. After two centuries of struggle, the European armies were forced to abandon the Holy Land, defeated and in disarray. At this point, Europe faced again the problem it had tried to solve with the Crusades: overpopulation. The problem solved itself by means of a quick population collapse, first with the great famine (1315–1317), then the black plague. The Europe of the 13th century was so weakened that it seriously risked being overcome by the Mongol armies coming from Asia. Fortunately for the Europeans, the Mongols couldn't sustain a full-scale attack so far from the center of their Empire.    


A schematic view of the European population during about one millennium. Note the two collapses: both have the typical "Seneca-Shape," that is, decline is faster than growth. The first collapse was caused by famine and by the black plague, the second by the 30-year war, and the associated plagues and famines. 

Despite the ravages of the Black Plague, Europe re-emerged with its culture, social structure, and technological knowledge still intact. Europe didn't just recover, but it rebounded in a spectacular way. Shipbuilding technologies were improved, allowing Europeans to sail across the oceans. During their internecine quarrels, the Europeans had also turned firearms into terribly effective weapons. During the 16th and 17th centuries, they rebuffed the attempts of the Ottoman Empire to expand into Europe. The Ottomans were dealt a crushing blow on the sea at Lepanto, in 1571. Then, they were decisively defeated on land at the siege of Vienna, in 1683. With their Eastern Borders now safe, Europeans had a free hand to expand overseas. 

The 16th century saw the birth of a pattern that would persist for several centuries. European armies would invade foreign kingdoms, crush all military resistance, and replace the native leaders with European ones. Sometimes they used the local inhabitants as slaves, sometimes they wiped them out and replaced them with European colonists. The new lands were an incredible source of wealth. Europe imported precious metals, timber, spice, and even food in the form of sugar produced from sugarcane. The inflow of gold and silver from overseas stimulated the European economy, and timber allowed Europeans to build more ships. And the imports of food allowed the European population to grow and to field new armies that could conquer new lands that produced even more food.  

Nevertheless, Europe's expansion started to slow down in the 17th century. The 30 years' war, 1618 to 1648, was a terrible disaster that may have exterminated 10% of the European population. Then, as usual with wars, another outburst of plague followed. Europe seemed to have reached a new limit to its expansion. Sugar coming from overseas colonies was not enough, by itself, to sustain the need for materials to keep and further expand the European empire. Wood was needed to produce ships and, at the same time, to be turned into the charcoal needed to smelt metals. But trees were depleted in Europe and importing timber from overseas was expensive. Most of the Southern European countries saw their forests decline and their growth stall.

(image from Foquet and Bradberry). (France is not shown in the figure, but it shows a pattern similar to that of England). 

Despite the troubles, the Northern European economies, (especially England) rapidly restarted to grow after the 17th-century crisis. The trick was a new technological development: coal. Coal had already been used as a fuel in Roman times, but nobody in history had used it on such a large scale. With coal, Europeans didn't need anymore to destroy their forests to make iron. That was the start of a new, successful rebound. By the early 20th century, Europe dominated the whole world, directly or indirectly.  

Europe's population according to Zinkina et al. (2017). The two drops of the 14th and the 17th century are clearly visible, although less dramatic on this scale than in the earlier work of Langer

As typical of empires, with the conquests completed, there came a time of consolidation. No more risky adventures of individual states, but a central government to manage the empire and keep it together. For the ancient Romans, it had been the task of Julius Caesar to create a strong, centralized state. For modern Europe, it was a much more difficult story: how to tame a group of quarrelsome states that seemed to spend most of their time fighting each other? 

The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles 5th (1500-1558), was among the first to try, without success. His successor, Philip 2nd of Spain (1527- 1598), tried to subdue Britain with his "invincible armada" in 1588, but he failed, too. The decline of Spain left space for other European powers to try again. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 -1821) almost succeeded, but his imperial dreams sank at Trafalgar and then froze to death in the Russian plains. Then, it was the turn of Germany. The attempt started in 1914, and again in 1939. In both cases, it was a tragic failure. Even the weak Italy had imperial dreams. In the 1940s, Benito Mussolini attempted to recreate a new version of the ancient Roman Empire in the Mediterranean Sea. Utter failure, again. 

Over and over, the would-be European Imperial powers found themselves facing an impossible challenge. In the West, Britain had no interest in seeing a European Empire arising just on the other side of the Channel. The same was true for the East, with Russia not keen to see a major power near its borders. The result was that the European armies often found themselves fighting on two sides at the same time. Then, the Mediterranean Sea was in the iron grip of the British Navy -- no way for continental powers to expand South. With the end of WW2, Europe emerged out of the struggle destroyed, impoverished, and humiliated. 

The latest (and perhaps the last) attempt to unify Europe was the European Union. The creators of the Union understood that it was impossible to unify Europe by military means, so they tried to do it in the form of an economic free zone and an elected parliament. It was a bold attempt, but it didn't work. It could not have worked. The Union faced enormous hostile forces, both internal and external. Britain and France were supposed to be balancing the German power, but when Britain left, in 2020, the Union suffered an economic defeat equivalent to the military one suffered by Germany in the Battle of Britain, in 1940. In both cases, they had tried to absorb Britain into the economic system of continental Europe, and they had failed.

The defection of Britain left the European Union with Germany dominating it. Just like during WW2, the German government never understood that throwing its weight around was not the way to endear itself with the neighboring states. The result was the growth of anti-European forces all over the continent. It was the movement called "sovereignty" that aimed to restore the power of nation-states and get rid of the EU bureaucrats. So far, this movement has played only a marginal role in politics, but it has succeeded in making the EU deeply hated by everyone who is not getting their salaries from Brussels. 

Just as it had happened in 1941, Europe is now engaged in a desperate battle on two different fronts, but the struggle is now mainly economic and cultural, not military: it is a "full spectrum dominance" war. The struggle is still ongoing, but it seems already clear that Europe is being defeated. Just like Germany had destroyed itself with a military attack on Russia in 1941, the European Union is destroying itself with its economic sanctions against Russia. Effectively, Europe is committing a slow and painful suicide. But that's how full spectrum dominance works: it destroys enemies from the inside. 

And now? It was unavoidable that Europe would cease to be an Empire. The human and material resources that had made European dominance possible are not there any longer. But it was not unavoidable that Europe would destroy itself. Europe could have survived and maintained its independence by remaining on good terms with the other Eurasiatic powers, China, Russia, and India, But, choosing to break the commercial, cultural, and human relations with the rest of Eurasia was not just an economic suicide. It was a cultural and moral suicide. 

So, what's going to happen to poor Europe? History, as usual, rhymes: do not forget that in 1945 the official US plan was to destroy the German economy and exterminate most of the German population. Fortunately, the plan was shelved, but could that idea become fashionable again? We cannot exclude this possibility. In any case, an impoverished Europe could go back to something not unlike what it was during the early Middle Ages: depopulated, poor, primitive, a mere appendage of the great Eurasian Continent. 

And, yet, Europe has rebounded more than once from terrible disasters. It may happen again. Not soon, though.


As inspiring as a blue cheese pizza gone bad


Friday, December 9, 2022

Before the Collapse: a Review

 

My book, "Before the Collapse," was recently translated into Spanish and published in Spain by Catarata. Here is a recently appeared review by Manuel Garcia Dominguez, Eleonora Arca, Guillermo Aragon Perez and Maria Teresa Lopez Franco that appeared on Nov 24, 2022 on "15-15-15." The English version is available from Springer. Translated from Spanish by Ugo Bardi. 


Why do societies, ecosystems, companies, and friendships collapse? How do we deal with a phenomenon, such as collapse, that is in itself sudden and unexpected? Can collapse be avoided? The recently published book by the chemist and professor at the University of Florence, Ugo Bardi (born in the same city in 1952), revolves around this concern: how to think about collapses and, above all, how to deal with them. The fundamental idea, which will function as the backbone of the book, will be what Seneca said about collapse in one of his letters to Lucilius: "It would be a consolation for our weakness if things could be restored as soon as they are destroyed; but the opposite happens: development is slow and ruin comes quickly" (we give the translation of Francisco Navarro, Epístolas morales de Séneca, Madrid 1884, p. 370).

First, Professor Bardi introduces a way that human beings have of knowing the world and avoiding the collapse of which Seneca speaks: the construction of models that allow us to hypothesize about future scenarios and act accordingly. These models can be relatively accurate, especially when tested empirically; but it is also quite easy for them to be misleading (as in the case of climate change denialism, for example). According to classical research, there are two ways of constructing these models: top-down and bottom-up. The first consists of observing the behavior of a system and building a model on it; while the second involves separating the system into subsystems to study their behavior and, subsequently, building a comprehensive model. Both strategies are fallible, which makes it advisable not to ask more of them than they can provide.

It is clear that models have limitations when it comes to suggesting explanations about the future, but this does not imply that they do not fulfill their function; in fact, we need models that are just good enough to provide us with a basis on which to act; there is no need to look for perfect models.

However, a crucial characteristic of complex systems pointed out by Professor Bardi is their passing through tipping points; in these, systems undergo rapid alterations that are not predictable by our knowledge of their past. Some of the most disturbing tipping points with which we are currently confronted concern climate change ("methane burp" due to thawing permafrost, for example). Public discourse has often ignored these issues, so we have no general clues as to how governments around the globe plan to deal with these phenomena. At play here are a number of cognitive errors and biases that arise when we humans are faced with the uncertainty that the future brings: (1) a representational bias that leads us to judge on the basis of stereotypes, (2) the availability of limited experience, and (3) the anchoring of our judgments to limited data regardless of their significance. In addition, groupthink plays an important role, and often makes people more fallible in their beliefs than they would be individually, by changing their behavior to conform to the group.


The result of this attitude toward climate change and other current problems is the propensity to be overly optimistic and to recklessly dismiss models that would be useful to us. The Florentine chemist develops the basic ideas of the science of complex systems, an approach that brings us closer to understanding their collapse, which will come sooner or later. Indeed, Bardi insists that "collapse is not an error, it is a characteristic feature" of complex systems in the Universe we inhabit (p. 40; the translations we will give from the English original are ours).

Complex systems are entities made up of subsystems that interact with each other in ways that cannot be captured through a single equation, but require more complex models. The essential feature of complex systems is that they are dominated by feedback relationships: in reaction to an external perturbation, complex systems tend to amplify their effects (positive feedback) or mitigate them by stabilizing the system (negative feedback). This phenomenon is inseparable from complex systems as it refers to the "tendency of the elements of a system to influence each other (...). Changes in one element generated by a perturbation will affect the other elements of the system" ( p. 35). This complexity implies the inability to predict the behavior of complex systems in the manner of classical physics, which predicts the motion of its objects with simple equations (think for example of Newtonian gravity). Complex systems "never stand still, they are constantly changing" (p. 33) "because they are alive, in the sense that they are brimming with energy" (p. 34).

Complex systems have attractor states: a particular set of their parameters to which they always tend, a tendency called homeostasis. However, as a result of external perturbations and feedback phenomena, a complex system may reach a tipping point and begin to "shift," and then stabilize in a different attractor. In some cases, this will correspond to a much lower complexity than the previous attractor, in which case we would be faced with a collapse. In fact, Bardi defines the phenomenon of collapse precisely as "a phase transition leading to a state of reduced complexity, typically rapid and abrupt" (p. 34).

This tendency to rapid and abrupt collapse is related to the principle of maximum entropy production (MEP): energy tends to dissipate very quickly, which leads to collapse. This is the result of the networked structure of systems: "in a collapse, each element that starts to move in a certain direction drags other elements with it, and the result is a cascade of effects all going in the same direction" (p. 39). In this way, there seems to be a collusion between the different elements of these systems to produce, in a precipitation of events, the collapse of the interconnected network that constitutes the system. Here we must insist on one of the fundamental ideas of Professor Bardi's book: collapse is not a failure but an intrinsic characteristic of complex systems. Interconnectedness can lead to the collapse of the entire network as a result of the impact of a disturbance on one or some of its nodes. Thus, the development of complex systems often responds to what Professor Bardi calls the Seneca mode (the author has been developing his ideas for years in a fascinating blog called The Seneca Effect): it is an asymmetric process, where growth is slow and decline is very accentuated.

But what if a system actually collapses - is all hope lost? Collapse implies the passage to a state of lower complexity, but not necessarily the absolute destruction of the system in question. Thus, there may still be "life after the cliff": a new growth process after collapse, or what the author calls "the Seneca payback" reflected in the Lokta-Volterra model. This model was designed to explore the relationships between prey and predator populations, but, as Bardi tells us, it can be useful for thinking about the existence of successive cycles of growth and collapse in different types of systems. In fact, this mode of behavior tends to occur more in complex systems such as economic systems, but not so much in natural systems; one of the difficulties for a new growth is the fact that the collapse is often produced by the exhaustion of the resources that had allowed the original growth. What this mode teaches us is that collapse is not final: it may not be an end point.

The rudiments of complex systems science that Bardi develops can help us to think of the state and destiny of our civilization as that of one complex system among many others that may therefore collapse. Clearly, there is a state of affairs that points to this outcome, more serious and continuous in time than natural disasters: climate change and the crisis of energy resources. With regard to the energy crisis, as Bardi says, in the short term "the problem is how to find the necessary financial resources to keep energy production at least as stable (in energy terms) as in the past decade" (p. 128), due, on the one hand, to the lack of demand and, on the other, to the depletion of oil. This type of crisis presents the ideal conditions for wars and concomitant violence, as well as famine, epidemics and depopulation, triggering what Bardi calls a Seneca Crunch: the sum of negative factors that lead to the collapse of a system. This fact highlights the fragility of the playing field on which we move: the availability of resources or the effects of climate change can exert sufficient pressure on the complex systems that are our societies to precipitate us over a Seneca cliff.


ASCII infographic included in the first edition of 'The Limits to Growth' (Standard Scenario).

Is there any doubt that we are currently facing a Seneca-type collapse? According to Orlov, there are five stages of civilizational collapse: (1) financial collapse; (2) commercial collapse; (3) political collapse; (4) social collapse; and (5) cultural collapse. Today, phenomena typical of the financial and commercial collapse of 2008 are evident and we observe some symptoms of the political collapse, such as distrust in the political class or the polarization of society. Thus, with hope as an indispensable tool, the fundamental question we must ask ourselves may be: how do we manage the collapse?

A quick answer to this question is the instinctive solution of many politicians and businessmen to any eco-social problem: "we must fund more research" (p. 178), the paradigm of which is the possibility of generating virtually infinite cheap energy. Although at present such projects, such as nuclear fusion reactors, are still at a very early stage of research, the Florentine author allows himself a certain degree of speculation, considering the possibility of a universal mining machine or of sending pollution into space (with infinite energy no proposal seems too far-fetched). However, Bardi recalls that already in 1972 the classic study The Limits to Growth showed that, even with infinite energy available, the collapse of the world industrial system would eventually happen due to a combination of factors such as overpopulation, resource depletion, and pollution. In short: the problem is not energy, but the presence of unavoidable limits to human development.

To adequately manage collapses in a world with limits, it is necessary to develop a deep understanding of complex systems and also to have achieved a certain balance of power among the relevant actors that guarantees peace. We need, to put it in the words of Donella Meadows, to think systemically (we should congratulate ourselves on the recent publication in Spanish of Meadows' book Thinking in Systems, Captain Swing 2022): the fall off the nearest Seneca cliff and the subsequent impact, which seems to be that of the imminent ecosocial crisis, can only be mitigated by global thinking (and local action) that understands the position of individuals in the earth's ecosystem and allows us to draw up a collective action plan that ensures massive cooperation and puts us at risk.

In short, the homeostasis of the system should not be taken for granted, and only joint action, the fruit of systemic thinking, will serve to mitigate the threatening fall off the Seneca cliff. For Bardi, according to certain historical examples, this action has three requirements: (1) use only abundant resources, (2) use as little as possible, and (3) recycle compulsively (p. 204). Moreover, this strategy also favors the so-called "Seneca rebound," which implies an opportunity to imagine a different structure for the system such as, as Bardi proposes, a circular economy model that revitalizes sustainable agriculture and craftsmanship, rejecting military purposes.

In any case, if Bardi teaches us anything, it is that the future cannot be predicted and that, while we cannot avoid collapse, we can at least try to collapse better. Before the Collapse (a title that suggests a double meaning: before the collapse, yes, but also before the collapse) is a good guide for that journey, and the frequent touches of humor with which the author de-dramatizes his subject of study, in itself - it is not necessary to insist on it - very dramatic, are appreciated.