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Carbon Dioxyde is a gas me, you and most of living organisms on earth exhale. It is light, invisible and we generally ignore it (unless you cover your head with the blanket for a minute while in bed).

With all humans weighing about half of gigaton (500,000,000 tons), we manage to emit 40 gigatons (40,000,000,000) of CO2 per year (or 80 times our own weight). Exhaling, unfortunately is not the major source. It is the transformation of our planet into the man-made world of concrete, metal, glass and polymers that does the damage.

Now, CO2 is extremely light, as all gases. 1 ton of CO2 under standard atmosphere (so, at the earth’s surface, or at 101KPa) takes about 556 cubic meters of space!

Imagine if CO2 emitted would be appropriated to each of us equally, that would mean that you and I, each inherit 5 tons of CO2 per year (40×10ꝰ / 8×10ꝰ = 5). That is 2,780m3 of a greenhouse gas per year per person! A cube with a side of 14m. In your lifetime, you will continue “building” your “castle in the sky” out of these cubes and after 80 years of a construction, you and I will be the proud owners of 1 cubic kilometer 3D plot each, warming our hearts as well as the rest of the planet by a few degrees.

OurWorldInData.org is a great source run by the University of Oxford. It allows you to have a deeper understanding of the global trends. It has a set of comprehensive tools for the CO2 emissions and you can see for yourself how your country is doing compared to the world.

Overwhelming amount of emissions comes from the energy sector – more than 73% or 29 gigatons per year (industry 24%, buildings 17,5%, transport 16%). This is by far the first priority to focus on.

On top of that, more than half of the world’s emissions are coming from only these 3 countries: China (31%), USA (13%) and India (7%).

Transforming energy sector from fossil fuels to renewables is an outmost priority for all.

CO2 has been ignored and neglected until the moment it became a killer gas. The gas that will finish human reign on the blue planet unless we learn to emit much less as well as to capture what’s been emitted by us and our predecessors.

Consuming less is the practical and pragmatic answer. The “3R” (reduce, reuse, recycle) is the magic formula for the bright new world that is ahead of us.

What is it that you are ready to forgo to save humans? Don’t worry about the planet, it will live another 7,5 billion years before the sun consumes it. Worry about your children…

Thomas Piketty took a long shot (1000 pages!) trying to connect the dots, extrapolating and giving his vision of the past from the droplets of data in the Paris archives as well as relying on other scholars’ works. An enormous effort to portray the world’s complex socio-economic relations.

Continue reading “Capital and Ideology”

Here I would like to share with you an article by Vanessa Ramirez from the Singularity Hub.

Every industry sooner or later will be disrupted. The speed of transformation that would take centuries or decades is now a matter of months.

Click on the picture to read the article

Here are some new books that I have been traveling with lately

Dark Money

Interesting at the beginning, but then too detailed and repeatative. An account of when, how and at which cost Koch family financed Trump’s ascent to power. From an outsider, it was interesting to learn the know-how of modern intronisation.

The Narrow Corridor

Ouf. Still reading it. Too disturbing for me. Quite a frank representation of societies, cruelty, agression, subjugation. The midieval notion of Leviathan as the state, realised in the book of Thomas Hobbes analysed and applied to the 21st century world.

The conclusion is rather interesting. The Leviathan represents state absolute power and violence and repression is a natural part of the state’s essence. However, there are 3 types of societies today. The stateless, the autocratic and the democratic ones. Therefore the Leviathan can be “chained”, restricted, managed. Or “unchained” in the likes of autocratic and repressive regimes.

I would recommend this book for those, interested in the social contract theory. What are the norms and how they evolve. Why certain things are acceptable and others aren’t. This book is about it.

And the narrow corridor means the path from autocracy to democracy. The reasons why most post colonial world has failed to transform into the Western liberal model explained.

Owning the Earth.

My book of the year. Definately.

Modern history, key world events, transformation of society into what we are today explained by focusing on the 2 main ideas of how we own the earth (privately or collectively).

Slavery, serfdom, England’s industrial revolution, colonial world conquests, Russian and Chinese territorial expansions, American war for independence, all these events carefully analysed and reviewed from the land ownership perspective.

Fascinating.

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die…

As long as I remember myself, the world has been changing. The fall of communism and consecuitive rise of cleptocratic regimes, whose looting appetites would throw my country from one crisis to another. It was like the storm in the sea. Unpredictable, unstable, menacing. So I had to change, to adopt daily. And then one day when the sea was calm I moved to what looked like the perfect world. Just to discover that it was standing in the same stormy sea. Unprepared and relactant to change. In this new world I see mainly two types of people, the ones that “stiff their upper lip and carry on” and the ones that panic and break down. It is only the minority of people, those who have been through storms in life and survived them that embrace changes. 

Everything changes and you cannot step in the same river twice said Heraclitus 2,500 years ago. 

Change yourself to fit the new world!

#embracechange 

This is the stage the brick&mortar industry is in.

Will there be a beautiful butterfly 🦋 or an ugly moth at the end of the transformation? We’ll see.

For what I am certain, not everyone will survive this painful period. I can even bet that Amazon killer is already born. Jeff Bezos himself believes that Amazon is doomed to die.

Steam engines transformed hand-made textile industry, computers transformed book keeping. Mobile phones transformed us all as species. If online is part of our being, shopping online is a force that will transform our twenty five trillion dollar cocoon into something gracious and beautiful.

Gamification, social recognition and instant gratification are the key drivers to “lock” consumer in, to build loyalty. Augmented reality, virtual advisors, live chats with experts should be the new “norm”. The big box is an educational, experiential platform seamlessly linking off and on-line worlds.

My daughter quoted John Lennon today. A bright ray of optimism in the unstable and changing world. Stay strong and don’t lose hope. Improve yourself and those around you daily.

Just watched “A Plastic Ocean” documentary by Craig Leeson on Netflix.

It shows a horror of plastic that contaminates literally all ocean, penetrating all life forms, killing marine animals and birds ending up on our plates poisoning us with toxins.

But what is estonishing is that long before we learnt how to separate and recycle, we have been burning waste, generating electricity.

Today’s technologies allow to use plasma to transform all waste into simple organics, breaking all toxins into simple elements. These modern burning facilities already exist in Norway and Germany and the company shown in the documentary producing scalable waste-to-energy solutions is called PyroGenesis Canada.

Naturally, I’ve checked out the company, their story and their financial documents. Poor lads are about to get bankrupt. They simply don’t have enough orders to stay afloat. Contrary to plastic…