By Greta.
I was good-naturedly "reproached" for not talking "enough" about Greta Thunberg, and I must say that this reproach amazes me for a reason: whoever wants to talk about it should have received so many signals like "if you're wrong, you die" that today rarely even more quoted newspapers avoid the subject, reducing themselves to the mere description of facts (as is happening during the protests for the coal mine).
Anyone with a minimum of political intelligence should have understood one thing: Greta Thunberg has enough "powers" on her side that, ultimately, anyone who touches her with hostile intentions dies. Simply.
And the plethora of agents who systematically eliminate those who actively cross her path on social media is endless: apparently, behind Greta (who is just an avatar of her mother) there is some rather pervasive "power".
Tate, Peterson, (people I didn't think much of, however, so I can't be accused of sympathy: I wrote "pretty bad" about Peterson in unsuspecting times) are just two of the many examples of people who ended up in some trouble with the authorities for just being in Greta's way.
The message is clear.
That said, it is still wise to understand WHY it is dangerous to badmouth Greta, i.e. why the West needs a Greta.
The first thing you may have noticed is that there is nothing behind the marketing of the green transition. What does it mean? It means that for years we have been bombarded, by newspapers, media and even social media, with the idea that the world was making great strides towards a "green transition".
Companies were always advertising things like “by now even the plants at the reception are watered with recycled water” (technically, water recycles itself quite well, and it has been doing it using solar energy, for a few billion years), “the our coffee machine uses only solar energy” , and all the paraphernalia, projected on us 24/7, had made us believe that it was almost there, that fossil fuels were by now numbered, etcetera etcetera.
Then comes an oil and gas crisis, because of the war in Ukraine, and everything collapses. "Car Sharing", electric scooters, electric cars, solar panels, in fact have had very little impact on the dependence on fossil fuels. She was all muina.
But the muine made a LOT of money.
The second thing to understand is what exactly is the crisis that the entire West is going through. It is not a productivity crisis or a technology crisis or a raw materials crisis. The recent discovery of a huge deposit of rare earths in Sweden should show this clearly.
The crisis that the West is going through is a crisis of CREATIVITY.
If the market is constantly looking for innovations, the industry needs economies of scale to compete. Economy of scale that requires standardization. That kills creativity.
Let's take an example:
On the motorway, it may have happened to you to look at the back of a car in front of you, and believe it was the same make and model that you were driving. When you looked closely, you immediately noticed that yes, the back of the car was identical, and the whole body was also almost identical, but the make was different and the model was different. What does it mean?
It means that in the name of economy of scale more and more parts are shared, which IMPLIES the standardization of interfaces, which implies a convergence of design.
At one time, this error in recognizing the model could not have happened, but TODAY we are very, very, very close to the "one model", at least for the range of cars. And perhaps further, if you think that Ferrari has parts in common with some FIAT commercial vehicles.
So the market needs new and different cars to exist, while the industry converges towards a number of truly different models, a number that can now be counted on the fingertips.
In the early days of industry, the answer to the fact that handcrafted production required a creativity that craftsmen had but industrialists was not, was "industrial design". Which initially tried to be a forge of ideas, but nowadays it's a cascade of boredom and standardization. It was not for nothing that Nokia offered dozens of models that were extremely different from them: Apple has standardized the mobile phone so much that we could call it a "glossy parallelepiped" in 100% of the cases.
But the creativity crisis is everywhere: it is true that many things (including Hollywood) have become "industrialised", but on the other hand, there is also the aging of the population (which is allergic to change) and the fact that management is allergic to risk, and therefore prefers the "more of the same success story" to the "new, but perhaps the public doesn't like it".
Even IT continues to go round and round: a few years ago I wrote that, considering a cycle of about 20 years (the time necessary to "socially" forget that the idea is old), there would have been a comeback of SecondLife. And you know what the "metaverse" is. But SecondLife wasn't new either. It was an MMORPG. Another 20 years back, only the power of the computers in play changes.
Just as the “Cloud” is just a Mainframe, Twitter is just IRC with a web interface, Facebook is just a large-scale BBS, Whatsapp is just Jabber on steroids, Instagram is just an imageboard, etc. , etc , etc:
if you want to predict the next big thing in IT, go back 20 years, take the trend of that moment (one that's already dead, so nobody remembers it) and you won't be wrong for sure.
The same goes for fashion, food, and everything: it is recycled every twenty years. The twenty years are needed to make people forget the boom itself, and not realize that the problem is not new at all. RAP comes about 20 years after breakdance, punk is reborn every 20 years, rock is reborn every 20 years, et cetera. The result is that if you're my age and have a good memory, you're full of balls.
If we recycled products as good as we are at recycling ideas, there would probably be no need for Greta, but that's it: the creativity crisis in the West is endemic.
But why not continue with the good old "we sell the same crap every 20 years, who cares?". The answer is simple: we are no longer alone.
IT would have continued with Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Reddit & co for much longer, if a product called “TikTok” hadn't arrived from China.
We are not (anymore) alone, and if there is one thing we CANNOT afford, it is a creativity crisis. On the other hand, our flagship products are so industrialized that we can, in fact, only produce crap that has the exact same standardization and the exact same economy of scale.
But even without the Chinese, there is a second problem: as products become more and more the same, becoming more standardized, one thing happens:
- Competition occurs at the expense of price.
- The brand disappears.
What does it mean? Take the Internet. All ISPs offer you the “big 3”: IP, VoIP, IPTV. Since the product is identical, when I moved house I didn't try to move my contract elsewhere. I just looked for who offered the most bandwidth at the lowest cost and made the contract there. I didn't give a damn who the company was. Moral, the Brand no longer has value. Whether it's O2, Vodafone, DT, the problem doesn't arise. The router is always a Fritz, and in the end I'm only interested in the bandwidth.
And the same will happen with cars: SUVs are now so similar to each other that you choose them for the price. Not for the brand. Only old people care now.
The other point of standardization is that it can only happen at the expense of prices. And that reduces margins. Which implies even more economies of scale. Which requires even more standardization. And so on.
So how do we break the cycle of lack of creativity, for example in the automotive world?
Obvious: let's move on to the electric car.
But in order not to lose the heritage of years and years of convergent design, we will continue to make them with 5 seats (even when the population of many cities is made up of families of 3 and 50% singles), and the design will not take ' NEVER consider the fact that you have lost two quintals of steel that we used to call “the engine”.
But it doesn't matter, because if we don't offer new products, the brand disappears and we fight only on the price. Why do you think a Tesla costs so much? Because it doesn't compete on price, but on feature: it's electric.
As a lot of competition comes, we'll talk about it again, Tesla pricing.
The real estate sector in Europe also has a problem. The population doesn't grow, we don't really need new houses, even if we buy thousands of houses to keep prices up, the game isn't worth the candle because houses don't appreciate.
Is there a way to re-evaluate them? Of course. We impose ever stricter green certifications, we put panels on the roofs, we change the systems, and blablabla. And we will have an increase in investments, with a revaluation of properties: this will not be convenient for owners of a single house, but it will be very convenient for investors in the Real Estate world, because if you buy a house to invest in, a revaluation is music to your ears.
I could talk about fashion, which now competes only on materials, one more "green" and "recyclable" than the other, we can talk about any sector, and I would always get the same thing: green is the only way they can to propose something new, in the acclaimed desert of western “creativity”. That she's dead.
You will tell me “but the climate crisis exists, and it is serious”. There is no climate "crisis", there is climate change. Probably caused by CO2 emissions, and all. It becomes a crisis when it collides with economic needs, political needs and marketing needs. What I mean?
- No climate model predicts the extinction of the human species in the next century. Nobody. "Last generation" or "last generation" refers to hypotheses made more than twenty years ago, on which there is no longer a scientific consensus.
- A variation of 1.5 degrees has already occurred in the past, a few centuries ago, at the end of the Maunder minimum, and it wasn't so devastating. After all, there is scientific consensus on the nature of global warming, but there is only speculation about the effects. Of course, an "extreme" climatic event can destroy entire inhabited areas, but there are places on the planet where the climate is ALWAYS extreme. You know, in some places there is a rainy season, where the "water bomb" is called "week" and an event like the one that devastated Ischia is called "Wednesday". If the house collapses from the rain, the problem may be the rain. But also the house.
- The human species has adapted to the most extreme climates without saying a word. We have populations living in the Arctic Circle and populations living in the Sahara desert. These catastrophic conjectures are quite questionable.
- CO2 does not heat immediately. The warming we see today is CO2 from several years ago. Even if we stop emitting CO2 now, the situation will worsen for many years before reversing. It is time to ask how to survive the warming, rather than focus entirely on the need to stop it.
- CO2 does not disappear immediately. Depending on the studies, they are from 80 to 120 years old. So even if we were to stop today, after a few years of deterioration we would have a good century of warming climate.
This doesn't mean that stopping emissions is wrong: it means that if we really believed it, in addition to stopping emissions, we should ask ourselves how we will survive the next century. But nobody does.
After all, no one really believes in heating either, or even in pollution. Before looking for a house in the city, have you ever consulted a pollution map? No because'? Because you believe it up to a certain point. Before buying a food product, have you ever wondered how polluted the place where it is produced is? No. Otherwise you wouldn't eat products from the Po Valley, which is one of the two most polluted places in Europe.
And so on. The theme itself is irrelevant because, as it should be said, beyond fashion, nobody REALLY gives a shit about anything. Sure, when we're at a restaurant we may prefer "organic" food, but in the final analysis it's about priority 99, that is, "if we've solved all the other problems".
Global warming, like other modifications of the entire ecosystem, is due to the uncontrolled proliferation of an organism called "Homo Sapiens". CO2 is a detail. We had a CFC crisis at the time of the ozone hole. Crisis that we have brought back. Now we have a CO2 crisis. Will we bring her back? Okay. But a growing population goes from one ecological crisis to another. Perhaps we will have a plastics crisis, perhaps cements, perhaps asphalts, but since we are throwing this stuff into the environment in incredible quantities, sooner or later each of them will become a crisis.
We have passed in a few millennia from a population of 80,000 specimens to one of eight billion. In two centuries, from one billion to eight billion.
No ecosystem can survive without changing the state of a species that proliferates in this way. I doubt, personally, that if we don't stop increasing the population we will be able to do anything about it.
That said, going green remains an indispensable breakthrough. Not because it is necessary for the survival of the species: because it is indispensable for the survival of the industrial economy of the entire West, in a condition of disappearance of creativity.
Before closing, I want to tell you about the Carboniferous period. In this period, the plant population that produces lignin has had a "Malthusian" growth, ie an exponential growth limited only by resources. The problem was that none of the organisms digested the trees. For an enormous amount of time, all these dead trees collapsed to the ground and remained on the ground, as if they were made of plastic. Because no organism biodegraded them.
By dint of falling on top of each other, they actually built huge deposits, which then became coal. Because, precisely, it was the Carboniferous.
Then came some fungi, some lichens, and other organisms capable of decomposing wood. The Carboniferous period ended like this. Now at most the peat survives, which comes mostly from the marshes.
What does it mean? It means that plastic is not eternal. It means that there are already organisms capable of digesting it. What happens in such a growth is that the first organisms reproduce themselves, slowly, to excess. Until the population explodes, because there are screwed up resources that no one else has a way to consume, because no organism knows how to consume the resource.
Right now we are in the initial phase of the expansion: we can assume that these bacteria and insects have already encountered plastic. For example, the famous plastic island in the Pacific. If plastic continues to grow, (here we should distinguish between different plastics, of course), it's only a matter of time and then we will see species capable of eating plastic proliferate uncontrollably.
Moral? In the short term, an uncontrolled proliferation of Homo sapiens can screw everything up. But the wild boars have learned to live in the city in less than 50 years, the racoon bears in less than 20, the rats are now centuries old, etcetera. We are not as fast as we think in changing the environment.
This tells you that in the long run, the human species may be unable to change the environment.
Not to mention the viruses: which have shown us that even Homo Sapiens is a resource, that we are not really at the top of the food chain, and that if we call ourselves "superpredators", then judging by the effects, covid is one " bloody fucking predator with the dickhammer”. And if we create the ideal conditions for a Malthusian growth of any organism that feeds on "homo sapiens", probably within a century the problem of emissions will be solved by a sharp drop in number.
It is unlikely that the "more than Malthusian" growth of the homo sapiens species will last much longer. Apparently, "mama nature" is taking aim, and getting better and better. Starting in the twelfth century, the plague took six centuries to arrive and cross Europe. The "Spanish" took months. A new variant of COVID arrives in weeks. I'm sorry, but in a couple of more "practice shots," the growth of Homo sapiens will be, shall we say, "rationalized."
The Anthropocene is not a long-term situation.
BUT this does not mean that, in the end, Western industry is in dire need of "a green turn". And since the creativity crisis is a REAL crisis, I don't advise you to get in the way of an industrial and financial system that is afraid and tries to survive.
The green turning point is:
- the first big branding and marketing idea completely new, in nearly 80 years.
- the first major industrial breakthrough to be sold to customers, for nearly 50 years.
- the last hope of an industrial system that gasps in the lack of creativity and in the most extreme standardization.
There is a NEED, an EXTREME need for a "green breakthrough". Behind "Greta", in addition to her mother, there is EVERYTHING. Pretty much EVERYTHING.
Whoever touches Greta dies.
Point.