Fake News

President Trump invented "Fake News" while at the same time providing us with its concise definition. Fake news is simply those which he doesn't like! We would, however, give too much weight to the importance of this president if we wanted to accuse him of having invented "Fake Reality". The contrast between reality as it is and reality as we want it to be has - for better or worse - accompanied humanity since the beginning of history. It is important to emphasize its positive impact too, because every utopia, every thought that aims at improvement, must first push aside that eternal objection: "No, there is no alternative". Not infrequently it is precisely the greatest innovators who prove to be quite blind to real reality, because they carry a vision within their heads of some future reality they want to create. Perhaps the historically most significant example of such creative blindness is provided by Francis Bacon, the inventor of modern times - if I may be allowed to use such a bold expression. At the same time that William Shakespeare raised his country to cultural excellence, this man foresaw a world completely transformed by technology and science, a world where the visible, the weighable and the measurable acquire paramount importance, so that man, through precise observation, would come to be the ruler of nature. Francis Bacon drew this vision solely from his own head, for in surrounding reality he found little to make it even conceivable. I am not saying that there was a lack of great inventors. After all, Galileo was his contemporary and Isaac Newton was born less than twenty years after Bacon's death. But the Lord Chancellor was blind to the fact that his vision would have remained without consequences - and indeed had no consequences for two and a half centuries - had it not been for the really decisive breakthrough at the end of the 18th century: fossil revolution. The actual turning point bringing about the Anthropocene, an epoch which marks the beginning of man's undisputed dominion over nature and the exponential growth of material wealth, was made possible only by the fact that the immense stocks of coal stored in millions of years in the depths of the earth (one hundred years later supplemented by those oil and gas) came to be mined on a large scale. *1* Without the industrial exploitation of these as yet unearthed treasures, Bacon's vision and all subsequent inventions would have remained inspired mental exercises, utopian visions, as they had occupied man's fantasies in myth and fairytales for so many centuries. But now it happened that two curves were simultaneously set on an exponential course: the progression of wealth on the one hand and that of fossil fire on the other. While global GNP - converted into US dollars in 1990 - was still around 650 billion around 1800, it had reached around 1.98 trillion by 1900, that is, about three times that much. With 28 trillion dollars around 1990, this amount had grown fourteenfold in less than a single century (Maddison). This development reflects quite accurately the exponential increase in world energy consumption. In 1800, the latter amounted to about 400 million tons of oil equivalents. A hundred years later it was already 1.9 billion tons, almost five times as much. In the next ninety years, until 1990, consumption then increased by a factor of sixteen to 30 billion tons (McNeill)... The correlation between the two exponential curves is obvious. Coal and oil would never have been effective without the invention of the steam engine (and much later diesel and electric engines), but on the other hand these engines were able to begin their triumphal march solely because mankind had ignited the fossil fire in the meantime. Industrial revolution and the use of fossil raw materials thus form an indissoluble unit. Only when facing this obvious truth will we be in a position to draw the logical and inevitable conclusion - and this is indeed highly disturbing: the exhaustion of its fossil raw material base could condemn the Industrial Revolution to having