LifeItself

Finally I am in Saudi Arabia.  So many new impressions and new thoughts. I customarily watch here Al Jazeera International and the French News 24 Channel, and I never watch American TV.  I am simply tired of American navel gazing and the low quality of U.S.-based programming available here. Today, on Al Jazeera I saw a program about a group of Iranian and French women and men, who wanted to have a public concert in Iran.  After a long struggle, the authorities relented and the group sang.  And what a concert it was! This was the introduction by an Iranian female singer: We are the free men, who are not scared We are secrets that never die We are voices of who resist We are free and our world is free. At the end, another Iranian woman sang in the most beautiful voice: Of the just and the unjust They only spoke and did nothing Oh, God! Oh, God! See the chasm between their words and their actions. In-between they sang the "Bird of Dawn," a metaphor for h...

The essence of my unchanging argument is as follows: An exponential growth of human population can be supported for a while by a similarly exponential increase of production of power as primary energy per unit time and food we must eat each day. After a certain time interval , whose length depends on the rate of population growth and technology, both the population and the means of its survival must stabilize or collapse.  The elapsed time to collapse depends strongly on the rate of deterioration of environmental services of the Earth: abundance of clean air, water, good soil, large healthy forests, and biodiversity in general, as well as on the healthy oceans. Please note the two key phrases: "for a while" and "a certain time interval."  My argument is generally  rejected, because most people focus on the here and now, and forget that a few decades are less than a blink of an eye in history of humanity.  In the more sophisticated circles of "main-stream...

I want to write about many things that deeply disturb me. But if I did, most readers would not bother to read my sermons and others would be shaken and annoyed by their implications. So I'll limit myself to commenting briefly on the growing chasm between complexity of a modern society and inability of most everyone living in this society to grasp and follow its complexity. Converse is also true: Since we do not understand the complicated world around us, we resort to the simplistic, narrow, and random snippets we call "our opinions". Most of these snippets have little to do with reality, thus the gap between what is and how we perceive it keeps on widening. Let's start from something light and uplifting. I keep on hearing good news about the various new sources of energy that will totally displace the existing fuel mix: "Genetically modified bacteria or viruses that produce enough liquid fuels to make crude oil production obsolete." Or "North Dakota i...

On January 10, 2011 - 11:49am, the Oildrum posted an article by  Luis de Sousa  Peak Coal: the Olduvai perspective . It is an interesting article and we appreciate the author's arguments against the peak of global rate of coal production.  However, here are a few facts on the ground recorded by Greg Croft and me: Last year, China imported 150/690=22% of all seaborne steam coal traded worldwide in 2010, and projections are that China will try to import more this year.  China also has firm plans of of limiting energy use and shutting down 2,000 coal-intensive industrial facilities.  In short, it seems that China's coal production has peaked.  China produces roughly 1/2 of world's coal. The Oildrum article does not seem to address the ever-increasing mine depths that will ultimately curtail and stop coal production from these mines. Mozambique is going to become the second biggest exporter of metallurgical coal, which is not the same as the second ...