LifeItself

In this blog and other blogs that will follow, I will show you how laws of nature limit human expectations borne from ignorance and arrogance.  First, I would like to remind those readers who might be scientifically-challenged that the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology are called "laws," because we, scientists, have found no exceptions to them in as many experiments as have been carried out for as long as these laws have been on the books.  I repeat: As opposed to legal laws, the laws of nature do not allow exceptions, do not listen to lobbyists, shrug off presidents, and dispatch ignorant scientists to the trash bin of history. Just like ignorance of the law cannot be a legal excuse, ignorance of the laws of nature is a crime, not an oops. But, because most societies do not care much about nature, this crime generally goes unpunished by human laws.  In the long run, however, trespassing against the laws of nature has only one outcome: We perish by one means or a...

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 am on a short vacation with my wife.  We are staying in my daughter boyfriend's family summer house in Casadero, 9 miles west from Guerneville, CA.  It is a very nice house in the middle of a majestic redwood forest, separated by a long forest driveway from the road. In the house, I find five white document boxes that hold an archive of old LA Times newspapers.  I open the first box and pick up at random the business section for LA Times dated May 21, 1992.  In it, my eyes lock immediately on a report bemoaning President Bush's handling of the Savings and Loans debacle, and how the government loan pools favor big S&Ls relative to ordinary people.  Then I see an article stating that people will never again look the same at investing into houses. (In May 1992, we were in the second year of a major housing slump.)   Does this sound familiar, or what?   Why have we forgotten?  I take it back: Why have most people forgotten? I have no...

My dear old friends from McKinsey & Company have come up with their view of the world's top technologies .  As a historical note, beginning in the mid 1980's and through the 1990's, McKinsey was instrumental in irreversibly damaging the U.S. oil and gas industry.  McKinsey was hired by the scared oil & gas managers to do a hatchet job on the researchers and operations staffs across the U.S. and - for a lot of money - did a awesomely devastating job. Suffices it to say that the oil and gas industry in the U.S. will never again have the same breadth and depth, ever.  This statement of fact has some interesting connotations when it comes to operating in the ultra-difficult, super-inhospitable environments, which seem to enter into our future.  In fairness to McKinsey and several other consulting outfits, they acted as expensive mercenaries used by management to execute (no pun intended) the already agreed upon plans, as in: "What do you want me to conclude, bo...

On May 17th, 2013, Joe Nocera of the New York Times wrote an editorial, Energy Exports Are Good!   In it he follows the classic paradigm of neoliberalism: Let the "markets" decide what will happen with natural gas and let us export it if someone so desires. According to Wikipedia, neoliberalism in economics was originally coined in 1938 by the German scholar Alexander Rüstow at a colloquium that defined the concept of neoliberalism as “the priority of the price mechanism, the free enterprise, the system of competition and a strong and impartial state.” To be "neoliberal" meant that – in the name of liberalism – a modern economic policy was required. So far so good, especially if everything can be traded over infinitely long times (centuries for us) with a perfectly smooth substitution of one resource for another and one product for another.  But this assumption does not hold for depletable resources, whose production does not adjust easily and instantaneously t...

The Spring 2013 Semester has just ended and I am beginning to see light in the tunnel. So I can restart writing my long-neglected blog.  Many things have happened in the four months since my last entry:  Thousands upon thousands of innocent people have died in wars and ethnic/religious strife. Most of these wars have as background access to oil, gas, and drinking or irrigation water. More narrowly, Shell decided not to go back to the Arctic in 2013, and Statoil and ConocoPhillips are waiting on Shell to go to the Arctic. According to mass media, the world is awash in liquid hydrocarbons everywhere. Or is it? The question I have been asking myself repeatedly is: How do I explain things to people who in general are not interested in l earning and understanding the things I am trying to explain? I just checked Google to find out about "peak oil." Google reported that 58 million people posted something with this phrase. Then I googled the "peak oil myth."  Among th...

As Nicholas Taleb stated in "Antifragility": Now as a skeptical empiricist, I do not consider that resisting new technology is necessarily irrational: Waiting for time to operate its testing might be a valid approach if one holds that we have an incomplete picture of things. This is what naturalistic risk management is about. [ I.e., management of risk by nature, TWP.] However, it is downright irrational if one holds on to an old technology that is not naturalistic at all yet visibly harmful, or when the switch to a new technology ... is obviously free of possible side effects that did not exist with the previous one.  (Page 191) So what does this statement have to do with the current developments in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas?  It turns out that a lot. First, both sides in the Arctic disputes have taken fragile, absolutist positions. Environmentalists claim that there is no technology that could ever be applied in the Arctic from here to eternity, because all techno...