Author: france

Price Wars

una sorpresa un bellissimo libro che vi invito a leggere ed eccovi una recensione di Price Wars di Rupert Russell in 1,2,3

1 come dice il sottotitolo è un libro sul contributo dei prezzi delle commodity al caos politico ed economico dei nostri tempi. Russell visita tutti i luoghi delle crisi degni anni 10,, Mosul, il Donbass,, Caracas, Mogadishu, il Guatamela. Bellissimi i reportage su Donbass e Caracas. Nella narrazione i reportage sono intervallati da interviste a studiosi portatori di piccoli pezzi di teoria che formano l’argomentazione, anche del calibro di Jeffrey Sachs per dire. Alla fine da una narrazione viva, emozionale della sociale e politica, emerge una rigorosa trattazione dei risvolti finanziari ed economici in un continuo zoom-dezoom dal macro al micro, dai luoghi dei reportage ai mercati globali, caos e frattali usati bene insieme nell’argomentazione. E dal caos degli anni 10 emerge chiaramente come i prezzi del petrolio causano guerre, i prezze dei cereali fame e rivolte per il pane, i prezzi della case, sappiamo delle grandi crisi finanziarie ma c’è dell’altro. La cosa che si apprezza di più di questo libro è la capacità di svelare un filo conduttore nelle crisi del decennio passato e, nel capitolo finale dedicato al Covid, riconoscere la discontinuità e proporre una tesi per il decennio in corso

2 è un libro che mi ha sorpreso per la forza della narrazione e degli argomenti. Molto incuriosito, ho cercato info sull’autore, è phd di sociologia ad Harvard ma complimenti, capisce davvero economa e finanza . In realtà il suo titolo è Sceneggiatore e Regista e quindi mi sono accorto, ma lo sapevo perchè lo dice nel libro, che esiste un documentario Price Wars, quindi progetto multimediale, ed è già stato trasmesso da Artè in Francia e Germania nel 2021, adesso lo sto cercando

3 ciliegina sulla torta, ho scoperto che figlio di Ken Russel, il regista inglese di Tommy e Quadrophenia e in qualche modo tutto è tornato a posto, figlio d’arte e non di un regista qualunque 🙂

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reasonable things to say, and ideology

these are reasonable things to say:

-your EV has 200 kg of metals in its batteries and it is a big environment impact

-you PV panel need rare eartchs mostly mined in China, and lot of chinese polisylicon too

-desertec (solar in the sahara) will never work out, EU economis won’t accept to depend on african countries

so, you have 200kg of metals and you car will run on it for 1,000 techarges and 200k kms. Your combustion engine in that time would need some 20 tons of fossil fuel. 100X impact on the environment, it seems, and 40 tons of CO2 in the atmosphere

same reasoning applies to PV panels, you need rare earths once, they will produce electricity for 30 years only with solar rays. But then China will hold us up, but if that happens, panels keep producing, when Putin stops sending gas to Europe we shiver and the price shots up immediately, haven’t you noticed?

And Desertec, this crazy idea of producing solar energy in the Sahara desert for Euope, are we so crazy to depend on adfrican countries for our energy? Apparently yes, we produce oil in Libya, Nigeria, Congo

if you did not think how unreasonable are the 3 sentences above it’s not your fault, it’s the habit to an energy system that runs smoothly in the background. If you look at the background then you worry, but mainstream communication always avoid to have you look behind the curtain, they successfully appeal to your comfort in keeping an effective status quo. You re being a conservative to whom a fossil ideology successfully appeals. It tells you things that sound sincerely reasonable, throws data at you that looks like science, you feel good with it but really are being vulnerable to ideological appellations to some feelings you have for a world that works well for you, warm house, big car, flights, things that are wrecking the planet for everybody. Do not stop at the reasonableness of things you hear, think outside the fossil ideology that encrust you, look at the world out there with fresh eyes

Fascismo fissile

il vittimismo dei nucleari

il grande passato perduto e rimpianto

l’attesa della palingenesi, la prossima generazione, il reattore di IV generazione

lo stato deve fare qualcosa, ogni stato, anche se si adora il mercato lo stato deve investire perchè non si può aspettare il mercato

c’è una cospirazione contro il nucleare, la burocrazia rallenta e blocca i nuovi impianti, i nemici del nucleare diffondono fake news per fuorviare il pubblico, e allora c’è anche bisogno di un avvocato dell’atomo per denunciare il complotto dei verdi radical chic

perchè il nucleare è centralizzato, per pochi eletti e toglie la potenza elettrica alle masse. Bisogna fare prima del solare e dell’eolico, si deve arginare il socialismo energetico

è una tecnologia centralizzata, iniziatica, si deve studiare per entrare nella elite niucleare

Marshall Sahlins on economists

this bit from Anarchy, in a manner of speaking told by Graeber: “I’m a student of Marshall Sahlins, so I was trained to see unlimited desire as a theological illusion. Marshall always insisted the trouble with what we have come to call Western civilization is that it was founded on a false idea of human nature that traces back to the Sophists perhaps, through the Christian fathers’ conception of original sin, to liberal economists’ conception of utility.”

Carbon Budget

we can emit only 400 Gigatonnes more of CO2 to stay within 1,5 degree warming and you can check when we will run out of budget on this “clock” https://www.mcc-berlin.net/en/research/co2-budget.html

One plain climate justice definition could be “everyone gets a fair share of the budget” which Oxfam translates into: top 10% should reduce emissions by 95% to allow bottom 50% to treble their emissions, this is the current distribution of emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-by-income-region.

The rigid budget also implies the longer we take to start reducing emissions the deepest cuts we will have to endure, check the “ski slope” diagram which really should prompt everybody into action now https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-mitigation-15c

Desertec down under

while Desertec is going nowhere, 2 similar projects down under look to produce renewables in the desert aeras of the nortern territories and dispatfch it via HVDC to Indonesia and Singapore: Sun Cable and Pilbara’s Asia Renewable Enrgy Hub

Sun Cable is a cable from Darwin to SIngapore, it’s a ctually a s’pore startup planning to buil genertion and transmission and is alive and kicking, calim: the world’s larget solar infrastructure website https://suncable.sg/ story from Guardian in 2019

Pilbara hub is this one https://asianrehub.com/ described better here https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/asian-renewable-energy-hub-areh-pilbara/ 11 GW of which 3 to 6 will go voersears, building will start in 2023 with HVDC to Jackarta

But Pilbara is a mining regiion, iron ore and lots of renewable projects are geared toward decrbonising mines and even producing hydrogen and ammonia. Lots of announcements with HVDC links too

BTW Desertec isn’t really dead, Italy’s Terna will shortly start building a 0,5 MW interconnection to Tunisia

reading march 26th 2022

microplastics, now found in human blood, foundto pass BBB barrier in mice https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01143-3?fbclid=IwAR3xaaMzRgYrrg0D980ccmoZSif1HdebRh4PQq3L_aIg6P5M9l7cmDkaeg8

Doctorow on cryptography, crypopuncks vs spooks, financial secrecy for abused minorities and abusing elites, the need for the rule of law, the only ultimate protection because of the attacker advantage and the rubber-hose cryptanalysys, i.e. even with the best crypto you can be mugged to give out keys https://onezero.medium.com/rubber-hoses-fd685385dcd4

Tooze on urban warfare, urbicide, MOUT, history and theory to start thinking about Mariupol, and new wars https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-104-from-mostar-to-mariupol?s=r

Policy Tensor on tge geopolitics of money in Asia, following the war in Ukraine. Currency reserves, possible decline os USD as reserve currency, India pivot etc https://policytensor.substack.com/p/the-geometry-of-fear-in-eurasia?s=r

DoE critic, non-binary and decolonization

Untenable History by Carolyn Nakamura a “radical” archeologist who has done 15 seasons at Cathalyouk and writes “Graeber and Wengrow certainly take some liberties, but they are unquestionably qualified to wade through and interpret such research. And they cover a staggering expanse of time and space. Given this gaping outlook, they do trim or omit many analyses and discussions that might snag or muddle their mission to demote the ideal of egalitarianism (past, present and future), wrest freedom from its Roman perversion, and reclaim the collective power of political choice and imagination.”

most of the critic is about the effort to rewrite history by forcing male-famale dualism into it and sort of seeing kandiarok and first people through the lens of colonization. Can’t say, haven’t read much

“we should not assume that Neolithic human figurines obeyed a rigid female/male binary, or that sex-based categories held the same meanings or importance as they do in many contemporary cultures”

“Dawn effectively traps Kanadironk (along with other histories and cultures) within their history—history that is totalizing, imperial and colonial, and composed from shined up and lined up facts, if not exactly fiction”

biblio: Lisa Lowe. 2015. The Intimacy of Four Continents. Duke University Press, 136, n. 3.

BTW not really related but a reading of few days back “Compost the Colony,, Anarchist Decolonization” https://medium.com/tvergastein-journal/compost-the-colony-exploring-anarchist-decolonization-5e3f4301664a