Ugo Bardi

“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.

Despite the hype, nuclear energy of any kind may remain forever a marginal source of energy.

That the nuclear industry was to fail was written on the wall of the reactors because of a series of factual circumstances, surely not because a bunch of long-haired Greens were protesting in the streets.