In memoriam (the income from transhumance)
I have an hour to gather my thoughts before going to hear from Slovakian Maroš Šefčovič , who, thanks to the legitimacy conferred by being elected from a country with fewer inhabitants than Campania, is in charge of overseeing the international trade dossier at the European Commission. This could be an opportunity to clear up some misunderstandings. I have another opportunity right around the corner, because at 4:15 PM I'm speaking at this conference … hence the title of this post!
We have commemorated many people here: some you never even suspected existed, others, like Tony Thirlwall, or Alberto Alesina, or, in other respects, Gustav Leonhardt, we had happened to mention and they were nevertheless well-known, if not central to the development of our thinking. But the dear memory I will celebrate today, offering my solidarity to the afflicted mourners, is that of the green , because, in case it wasn't clear, that lu grìn s'ha mort ora was also said by the boss of bosses, in a post written a couple of days ago , which clearly shows a desire to distance ourselves from the suicide of the West, with a minimal investment in communication aimed essentially at saving face.
Your friend tells us that the catastrophic narrative about green is unfounded:
Joining us on our historical positions. So, enough with nonsense like " the planet is boiling " and the like. Now, it's unfortunately a given that the narrative about the transition is either catastrophic or it isn't, for the simple reason that the set of solutions being proposed are so irrational that only the threat of a state of emergency can force voters to accept them.
There's little to discuss about irrationality, but I'd like to illustrate it with two facts that are well known to all, not without making a preliminary point: the current paradigm of climatology, essentially based on the greenhouse effect as the sole explanation for what is (perhaps) happening, will suffer the fate of all paradigms, the one we discussed here. But we don't need to dispute it, for the simple reason that the solutions being proposed to reduce CO2 require increased CO2 production. The emissions data since 1990 (the reference date) are as follows:
The European Union and the United States are already on a downward trend, and our obsessions can only worsen the trend in China and India, for the simple reason that turning to Chinese products (solar panels, electric cars, etc.) means running at full speed a machine in which energy production has an emissions intensity double that of ours (although declining).
The many idiots who talk to us about China being a "champion of renewables" should be reminded that although renewables may be expanding rapidly in absolute terms in a country whose surface area is almost 32 times that of Italy and whose population is approximately 24 times that of Italy, in relative terms the Chinese energy mix remains dominated by a dear, old friend:
So pushing us towards electrification without first considering supply chains and technologies means pushing us towards carbonisation, not decarbonisation.
But the two elements I wanted to offer you were different.
First, while a kilogram of gasoline today contains, as it did a century ago, 43 MJ of chemical energy, corresponding to 12 kWh, which can power a standard car for 15 km, a kilogram of lithium batteries contains 0.3 kWh of energy. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions. Considering the superior efficiency of electric motors, etc., the lower energy density of batteries ultimately translates into the need to carry more than ten times more weight to cover the same distance. Energy density remains a key factor, which is also why, for certain applications (airliners, off-road vehicles, tugboats, etc.), the mere idea of converting to electric is laughable, and therefore the dogma of decarbonization must necessarily be honored in some way other than by handing it over to China.
Second, electricity must be transported. The copper needed to connect to the grid (and also to build) a myriad of "renewable" generation plants, as well as to scatter charging stations along the road network, etc., apparently doesn't exist anywhere in the Earth's crust, and in any case, its extraction isn't free.
These are the things we learned from Sergio Giraldo and Gianclaudio Torlizzi: the so-called energy transition is not necessarily decarbonization (when you consider the entire supply chain) and is not simply a move away from "fossils," but more correctly a transition from "fossils" to a different class of raw materials: critical minerals, whose extraction, refining, etc., is highly polluting (even in terms of emissions: and therefore does not necessarily lead to decarbonization).
On the basis of these factual premises we can quickly enjoy together the three nails that Gates plants in the coffin of lu grìn .
Humanity has other problems than not dying of heat tomorrow, and not dying of hunger today, as humbly pointed out by the writer:
It falls squarely among them, and with greater priority. If I could have figured it out a month ago, a genius like Bill Gates could have figured it out years ago, right?
Temperature isn't everything, because it doesn't inform us about quality of life, which depends on technological progress and the measures taken to mitigate the effects of "change." Focusing solely on "cooling" rather than mitigation is a tragic, grotesque mistake (another thing you may have heard us say).
As a corollary, after having financed the chorus of braying Furies who, with cries of "we'll all boil!", forced us to kill our development model (the only one in the world moving in the right direction), now your friend comes to tell us that we should actually care about our prosperity, which, in any case, is crucial, given that cooling or mitigating the situation requires a lot of money, and it's not by killing our economy, as we have done, that we'll put it aside.
Furthermore, our friend explains that even if we continued to commit suicide, we would still face a certain degree of warming. For this reason, policies that insist solely on decarbonization, supported by a terrorist narrative, are misguided.
Just think!
He's saying it now, but, as my friend Sergio pointed out to me, people like Warren Buffett have always known it, who "has progressively increased his stake in Occidental Petroleum to over 28% of the capital by investing €15 billion. He also maintains a large stake in Chevron (€25 billion), which ESG funds had dumped. Finally, he hasn't made any significant investments in green tech nor has he ever talked about it." Other "passing" figures, like Larry Fink of Blackrock, have recently learned this. "After inflating the ESG bubble, in his 2025 annual letter he didn't use the words 'net zero', 'sustainability', or 'ESG'. He instead spoke of 'energy pragmatism', even saying last March that 'the pendulum had swung too far to the left.'" "Let's stop for a moment. Let's be clear right away that gas will play an important role in the United States for decades. Maybe 50 years."
Just think, a friend who's coming to #goofy14 told me this three years ago…
Why so much simultaneous repentance?
Well, due to two concomitant factors: the wave of bankruptcies of grin companies, which has left tens of thousands of people directly unemployed (i.e., excluding related industries) in the last two years, and the end of the transhumance income, that is, the illusion of being able to inflate the grin bubble with subsidies forever, just as the illusion of being able to inflate the bellies of the indivanados with subsidies had to be abandoned. The second factor explains the first, and the first explains the second: if inefficiency is too great, the subsidy becomes suicide, and if suicide disappears, inefficiency takes its toll.
The bill has finally arrived, and now let's go have fun with those who don't want to take note…
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/2025/10/in-memoriam-il-reddito-di-transumanza.html on Thu, 30 Oct 2025 13:57:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.