CRMA
This morning at 12.57 I receive a message from a Parliamentary official. I see red right away, not because of the innocent, diligent official, but because there was a red spot in the message:
I turn the red document in chat XIV, and thus learn from my colleagues what I should have understood for myself (if I had had time to read everything, including the title of the document above the red spot!): I won a report in Commission XIV, I am became, unbeknownst to me, the speaker of this stuff here . A little mortified by my negligence, I tried to understand how I could have missed the assignment of a position of great interest to me and in general of a certain responsibility, at least in theory (that is, at least if the Italian Parliament were listened to by someone in Europe). Simple! The last presidency was held on the 24th:
when we were engaged in this stuff here, also related:
The wise Candiani got there immediately: "You missed the UdP because you were at your conference and then we forgot to warn you!" There is, there are so many things to do. My May 24 was like this, to give you an idea:
(a slight overlapping of commitments in the early afternoon). The other days are even worse. But we still try to keep the thread of the conversation.
And so here I am grappling with yet another repulsive acronym (CRMA, pronounced siaremei, Critical Raw Materials Act ) generated by the bureaucracy of Babel. The original text is here , the parliamentary file here . Perhaps fascinating reading for an anthropologist of the times to come, certainly disturbing for a contemporary, especially if a politician.
Two things stand out in particular.
One, the ignorance of European translators, who are indeed of very poor quality, when compared with those of our Parliament. Europeanese is repulsive in the original (that is, in the language of the only country that has so far left, as per a well-known prophecy), but translated it becomes stinging, flaying the mucous membranes of the oropharynx. Then there are little problems of general knowledge, some excusable, such as confusing tantalum with Tantalus (in fact, there is a relationship between the king of Lydia and the element with atomic weight 73 registered Ta as Taranto, but it could only have been born from the mind of a Scandinavian ), others sincerely a little less, like the surprising "common logarithm" mentioned in the appendix, translation of "common logarithm", which in Italian would be called decimal logarithm (or vulgar). The fact is that the "common logarithm" of European salaried workers immediately made me think of the abandoned cart of Asterix in Britain (those who were translators)!
Then, for heaven's sake: if one knows what one is talking about, one orients oneself.
But if instead one does not know it, much less, and this perhaps explains the second thing that stands out on a first, superficial reading: the radical and incurable unawareness, or perhaps Freudian repression, of the scarcity that makes certain raw materials, all of a sudden, "critical" or "strategic", is induced by what we have called ecological caesura. This unawareness has two origins. One is ignorance. It says: "how are these teares? I'm rare…", therefore, as if to say: in some cases it is the lexicon that guides you to take the scarcity of certain resources as a fact of nature. But this is not exactly the case: lanthanides are mostly not "rare" , as a cursory consultation of Wikimm… could easily illustrate: iodine, mercury, silver and gold (to name four) are much rarer than " and rare teas". The fact is that subliminally conveying the idea of natural scarcity helps, because it avoids reckoning with the fact that what awaits us in the next few years is a man-made disaster , the second caused by Leuropa . The other is religion: the dogma of claimatceing cannot be questioned, it is not admissible: there is no alternative, we will stick with it, it is Greta who traces the furrow and the ECB which defends it… In short: always the same story, for some centuries now: but it can be useful to know in which new bottles the old wine is sold to us.
However, this unawareness is not without consequences. A greater awareness of the fact that "earths are not rare" per se, that it is we who make them so with industrial policy choices conceived in the interests of some (including the former colonial powers, because the ecological caesura is also and above all neocolonialism ) and against that of others, a greater awareness of this datum which I hope I have made you appreciate, would force the Eurots to come to terms with the fact that their delirium is making objectively "rare", "critical", "scarce" in economic terms also elements that are extremely abundant in physical terms on the earth's crust, such as silicon (second most abundant element), aluminum (third most abundant element):
( here ), the same iron (which in alloy with carbon gives steel, essential for example for wind towers). If you pay attention to Gianclaudio's reasoning, the same logical fallacies that we have seen at work in the heuristic religion, with the annexed monetary caesura, clearly emerge in the climate religion, with the annexed ecological caesura. All a nice rattle off peremptory deadlines and fixed parameters, which lend themselves so much to compose captivating infographics:
(deadlines and parameters which, incidentally, are conceived as a trap for the South in which the hunter of the North often gets caught), but a radical, astounding inability to reason holistically, to keep together I won't say three or four, but at least two pieces of a problem! Example: if you switch from an extremely concentrated and efficient energy source such as fossil fuels, obviously you have to lighten the means of transport, then switch to a light metal such as aluminium, which would be abundant, but it is not, because its production it notoriously requires large quantities of energy, which are precisely those which, by giving up fossil fuels, you will find yourself lacking . A series of vicious circles, logical aporias, perverse retroactions which cannot fail to lead to the failure of the project, in full logical isomorphism with those unleashed by the single currency (which, to mention just one, induced the most indebted countries to go into greater debt , distorting their borrowing costs downwards, while inhibiting their ability to repay their debts, by distorting their real exchange rates upwards). Always always the same story: four Nazis closed in their bunker, which isolates them from reality, but not from defeat, dictate rules, rules, rules, daughters of a sick abstraction, of a morbid Wille zur Macht (which today takes on the pompous name of "European sovereignty"), heedless of the lives of others, ready to chew their cyanide capsule rather than admit they were wrong.
How much longer can we tolerate being "governed" like this?
(… oh well, I sleep on it. Among other things, tomorrow maybe I won't even be able to hinge the provision because I'm on duty in the trenches of desperate housewives: L'Aria che tira! It will be an interesting bilocation experiment: Heaven can wait, but holiness is at hand …)
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2023/05/crma.html on Tue, 30 May 2023 20:16:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.