Ugo Bardi is known to the reader of the Light, who in 2015 was picked up by a Larrun “What can sink us like the Roman Empire?” Bardi is an Italian professor of chemistry at the University of Florence, he is an expert in system dynamics, he is the author of several books on the oil summit and the exploitation of raw materials. ‘Peak Civilisation: In that ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire’ he told how in the 5th century the civilisation developing in Greece and in the Empire of Rome, XXI.ean, sank in comparison with the crisis that industrial civilization is suffering.

In that analysis, Bardi stated: “Did the Romans understand what was happening to them? (…) We have many texts of Roman historians, but no one seemed to understand what was going on.” That is, getting used to the ever hotter pearl water, we go like the frog of an old story, without realizing that we have to die cooked when we don't leave it. On the contrary, the symptoms of system collapse can be sown daily in our environment.

A Ugo Bardi one of these symptoms has erupted in his family and confessed in his blog The Cassandra’s legacy: “Impoverishing Italy – impoverishing in Italy. Effects of oil twilight.” It is a house built by its parents and that has had to be sold by Ugore for more than 50 years, as it cannot pay its expenses.

I am not mistaken: Dr. Bardi has not been ruined in misery, he is a professor of a public university, his wife also works, they invite him to give lectures around the world, he is considered a middle-class member who has done well in dealing with the crisis and yet “wealth and poverty are relative perceptions and my illusion is that every year I am poorer, like most Italians.” Gross Domestic Product and other indices will tell you what you want about wealth, but the professor has been forced to sell the house that his parents built in the 1960s on a hill near Florence. In Euskal Herria, we also began to hear events similar to the story of Italian.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Italy experienced an economic miracle, amidst the heat wave of cheap oil all over the world. Soon after the war private cars began to be opened, health services for all, holidays on the shore of the sea, being able to buy their own housing, etc.

Ugo's father and mother were architects and professors of the university and in the 1960s they were able to build their dream home, a small village of about 300 square meters of materials, with a beautiful garden, which according to fashion spread by the United States.

There the parents aged and died. Ugo inherited in 2012 and realized that some repairs had to be done inside, and it was not in vain 50 years. She and he started: fixing the roof, restoring the greenhouse, conditioning the living room… “but after two years we looked and said: ‘In vain’.

They realized that that beautiful house was too big for them, after spending a little bit of money on refurbishment work. To begin with, I needed air conditioning and very expensive heating; in Florence, climate warming today, unlike what happened in 1960, the need for air conditioning. “Then there is the cost of transport and it is deadly. On the outskirts of American style you need private cars; in 1960 it seemed normal, but today in no case, cars are hugely expensive, traffic accumulations everywhere, disaster. And don’t forget taxes, which have also become a full-speed charge.”

Fossil fuel cycle and my family

Once the house has been sold, another surprise is that the prices of the chalets that are outside the city have also decreased. However, they have managed to sell them and the Barditarrak are collecting and carrying all the pieces of the house, with the painful work of deciding which of the memories accumulated in their half-century life they take and throw away. Don’t be complacent about the Barditas, who have enough money to buy a nice garden house in a neighborhood in Florence. Now they will also try to reject the car. Surely, the expert at the oil summit has acknowledged, part of what is the lack of growth is living on his own skin.

“It’s amazing how things have changed in these 50 years. In theory, as a university professor, I earn more than my parents, who were teachers. My wife also has a good salary. But in no way could we dream of building or buying a house like the one they inherited from our parents. There has been a profound change in the heart of Italian society, and the change is called the twilight of the oil age. Wealth and energy are two sides of the same coin: with less energy available, Italians cannot pay today what they could pay 50 years ago.”

But despite the reduction in energy at the root of the current conflicts, it seems that we cannot talk about it in public debates. As a result, the majority of the population does not understand what is happening to them, but they realize that their lives are constantly being hindered, even though they are told by television about other things. Therefore, they blame any other country, Europe, Angela Merkel, politicians, immigrants, gypsies, foreigners in general.Asi are exaggerating racism, hatred, fascism, poverty, the wealth of the rich… “It is normal, it has happened, one day things will improve, they will pass, but I fear it will not be soon.”

Two years ago in the blog Ugo Bardi reported the last two centuries of his family: “The cycle of fossil fuels and the history of my family.” The Basque who encourages it will find its family and people reflected: In Tuscany they also lived in the same simplicity as our ancestors, many condemned to emigrate, until the industry came to Europe, in the wake of the coal and steam revolution that began in Britain, in those relocations a century ago. This is how this era of prosperity began and reached us, until tenants became the first industrial workers, what is known as the economy of services. And similarly, it's taken one and the other the last chaparron.

“Our ancestors were not rich, most were simple workers, some of them poor. Only the golden age of oil allowed some to build a beautiful house on a hill. May my descendants stay here.” It is not certain that they can do so, either in Tuscany or in the Goierri.