Choosing/Decision-Making

When most people say they balance their sustainability actions, they mean balancing their values or feelings. When they call me extreme, I believe they think I'm acting to one extreme of a spectrum. But I act balanced too, just not only considering myself. I balance my interests with how my actions affect others: people our money would displace from their land for resources, people our money would cause to breathe and ingest toxins, people our money would drown in plastic and other waste, and so on. Yesterday, I suggested measuring your sustainability efforts by your effects on others, not how hard you feel you're trying, which motivates inflating the difficulty of acting sustainably, as if not flying was impossible, or not air conditioning at your…

My mind does it too. When I have something to throw away in my hand, I look for a trash can. I think my mind thinks not specifically, "where is a trash can?", but "where can I put this thing I don't want?". The distinction? From the amount of litter I see placed in corners, wedged between fence posts, in planters, on signal boxes, and in whatever place looks like it satisfies a mind's question "where can I put this?", I think many of our minds answer with a "ah, there's a place for it" and feel done. I suspect then their minds think, "wait, this spot feels secure, but it's not the right place to put it." Then begins the rationalization process to convince…

How do we lower pollution? Building solar, wind, nuclear, or even fusion doesn't necessarily lower pollution. Humans faced with new energy sources tend to use the old ones and the new ones. We aren't slowing burning fossil fuels anywhere near the pace what we could. I don't pretend the following solution works politically, but I present it as a start, since it reveals what would work and might generate ideas. Actually, it could work in other countries than the United States. I'd like to help the U.S. reach a place where it would work here. I'll describe the solution, then why it works where others don't. The Ten-Year Solution Take the amount of fossil fuel energy a nation consumes each year. Call that amount ten…

If you're considering changing practices to live more sustainably, how can you tell among different practices suggested by different groups, often self-serving, which are more effective or even effective at all? Does recycling work for paper, metal, glass or plastic? Does changing your diet help? How about carbon offsets for flying? One measure matters more than almost any other, I contend: How much fossil fuel does the change keep underground? For example, if you buy carbon offsets for a flight, you may fund some project, but you still paid for oil to be pumped out of the ground for the jet fuel. Few projects offsets pay for keep oil in the ground. If you find yourself contorting to explain how planting trees or whatever activity…

I'm no epidemiologist, but some trends seem pretty obvious. While we haven't suffered pandemics every hundred years as some have said, several have hit us and the last big one was about a hundred years ago. Then again, we've seen others more recently, like SARS and MERS. The causes of pandemics have been increasing. Not just happening, but we humans have increased them. I'm not saying we deliberately chose to breed viruses, but we've known risks and chosen to disregard them in favor of other values like profits, comfort, and convenience. In particular, we've increased factory farms that breed pathogens, we encroach more on wildlife territory which exposes us to more pathogens, we keep using wet markets, we've increased our population density, and we fly…

When I was a kid, a popular idea of a utopia involved robots taking care of life's needs. Today when people talk about automation, they present it in the context of displacing jobs. Let's say robots and automation could provide all of life's material needs---food, water, shelter, warmth, etc. It seems that yesterday's idea of utopia has become a source of fear. Maybe that's the media selling clicks, since anxiety probably generates more than confidence. If we could create robots and automation to provide everything for us, would we prefer that life? I think we'd expect that if we could, the companies that provided the service would still charge us for it. Nobody could pay for it, so nobody would get it. So why not…