Ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure to be here and my task today is to tell you about something that stands at the basis of everything we do: mineral resources. It it is the subject of a book that is the result of a research program sponsored by the Club of Rome and that has involved me and 16 co-authors. Here is the cover of  “the Plundered Planet.”

For the time being we have only the German version, we are working at the English one, but that will take some time – a few months. In any case, the title should be clear to you even if you don’t speak German and you can notice that we say “The Plundered Planet;” not “The Improved Planet”, or “The Developed Planet”. No, this is the concept: plundering. We have been acting with mineral resources as if we were pirates looting a captured galleon: grabbing everything we can, as fast as we can….