Ugo Bardi

Can China face the challenges awaiting humankind in the near future?

This post was inspired by a recent article by Tom Murphy, in which he tells how he discovered that most science is not just useless but an evil force worsening the human situation. So much that he decided to quit. Murphy’s case is not isolated; a feeling of dismay runs through the very fabric of scientific research. My career as a scientist parallels Tom’s experience.

“The Limits to Growth” was a study of the future of the global economy. Its basic message was that growth could not continue to go on forever on a finite planet.

Of course, Afghanistan has no oil, and this much was known. But in the 1990s the oil reserves of the Caspian region, adjacent to Afghanistan, had been the object of a game of aggrandizing that led to exaggerating their extent at least of an order of magnitude.

What could bring down the industrial civilization? Would it be global warming (fire) or resource depletion (ice)? At present, it may well be that depletion is hitting us faster. But, in the long run, global warming may hit us much harder. Maybe the fall of our civilization will be Fire AND ice.

Nowadays, we are obsessed with the idea that we need to “produce energy.” That is, of course, a wrong way to express the concept.