LifeItself

This is what I just wrote to my Spanish friend, Pedro P., who reacted wisely to a  piece by George Monbiot.  Just to make it crystal clear, I want to be in the Light and think pleasant, peaceful thoughts.  They are essential to my biological survival. "Well, dear Pedro, when I listen to most people, and listen carefully to what they have to say (a very rare skill nowadays, when every human bonobo tries to outshout all other bonobos with their logorrheic narcissistic performances), I see and feel the shreds of a brightly painted fabric torn into small random pieces, stirred and thrown up into the air, and falling on me silently like snowflakes.  Each fabric snowflake may make sense, but together they certainly do not. And the person who throws these flakes at me feels reassured by the sheer number of them; the more the truer.  Scientists excel at scattering around the oft-unedited products of their subconsciousness that are self-contradictory, illogical flake-by...

I just attended an SPE workshop, "Oil and Gas Technology for a Net-Zero World – Defining Our Grand Challenges for the Next Decade."  Of the 60 people in the audience, I knew 1/3, some very well.  It makes sense, because I have been an SPE member for 40 years, and a Distinguished Member for 20 years.  Last year, I received an SPE EOR/IOR Pioneer Award for my work at Shell and UC Berkeley on the thermal enhanced oil recovery processes that involved foams, and their upscaling to field operations. This was nice, because Shell recognized me as one of their best reservoir engineers, and in 1985 I received an internal Shell Recognition Award for the same work. But I am not a mere oil & gas reservoir engineer.  First and foremost, I am a chemical engineer and physicist, who has thought rigorously about the sustainability of human civilization , ecology and thermodynamics of industrial agriculture and large biofuel systems, as well as about the overall gross and net prima...

 Five years ago, I described this very famous 1980 wager  here . Wikipedia has a good, understated description  of the wager.   Ehrlich-Simon wager according to the Wall Street Journal, Jonathan V. Last , August 30, 2013, more less when I started analyzing this wager. The fact that Ehrlich "lost" according to the omnipotent neoliberal economists was used broadly as a vindication of the power of economics in predicting what would happen in the physical world.  But were the economists mostly spouting nonsense, as is their long-standing tradition? Natural copper.  Copper is one of the most important metals in the global economy that gravitates towards the "low carbon solutions" (whatever this term may mean to you). Source: Wikipedia. In short, Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing. Ehrlich chose copper (Cu), ch...

We are in the western part of Turkish Anatolia, which in Greek means "East" or "Sunrise."  Suddenly, we are inside of many of the oldest human stories that are particularly dear to my heart. The ancient city of Troy is here.  Around 1300 B.C., when Troy was almost 4000 years old, the mother of all Greek wars was fought there, and immortalized by Homer five centuries later in probably the most important oral stories and later texts ever conceived by rational men: The Iliad and Odyssey.  Some of the Greek Gods were born here, many other dueled with one another for power and revenge, or gave birth to the heroes and heroines who determined fate of Troy and future of mankind. My favorite scary goddess, Nemesis, who is reputed to have been conceived by the primordial Goddess of Night, Nyx, played a pivotal role in the fate of Troy. Her name was derived from the Greek words nemêsis and nemô, meaning "dispenser of dues." This full size statue of beautiful Nem...

I just arrived in Saudi Arabia after 17 hours of flights from the U.S.  My wife and I attended our son's beautiful wedding in Sonoma, California, bonded with our children, students and many friends, and I attended the largest Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) conference in Houston, where I realized that I knew most people over fifty.  Kind of scary, but what can one expect after being an SPE member for 33 years? The Patzek family in Sonoma, California, just before the latest enlargement. You may ask what are my impressions from America after a nine-month absence?  There are many positive impressions and some are mixed.  First, we miss America. I loved the lush green trees in Texas, and the beautiful live oaks everywhere I looked in my Austin neighborhood.  I loved being with my children, friends and neighbors.  I did not like the rampant inflation of the cost of food and most living necessities.  This inflation has been at least 10% per year ...

Dr. Erle C. Ellis is an associate professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, where he teaches environmental science, landscape ecology and biogeochemistry.  He would remain anonymous to most of us, had he not written a New York Times editorial, " Overpopulation is not the problem ."  Later, Dr. Ellis attempted to explain himself in more detail as a guest blogger for Andrew C. Revkin. Upon reading this rare gem of technobabble, I asked the students in my class, E4: Earth, Environment, Energy, and Economics , to read it and express their own thoughts in up to 740-word essays.  I never commented on Ellis' editorial, so as not to influence opinions of my class.  Just like Revkin, I have encouraged some of the students to publish in my blog. The New York Times, September 14, 2013. The image is by Katherine Streeter. What follows is a sample of the students' essays. Not all is lost yet... Brien Allen is from Ker...