Nature

First we pave more land nearby and it's no big deal. In fact, the road or housing development boosts the economy. More people can reach places faster. Then we expand that paved area, again no big deal. The we have to travel to get away from it all. There is no local nature, no chance for solitude in nature. Then we pave over yet more to access more remote places, maybe build an airport, to facilitate getting away from it all. Then we acknowledge that we've wrecked or done away with nature nearby so we feel we have to get away and feel entitled to what we need to get away and to the remote nature we get away to. Then we build adorable little…

Richard Feynman is the Nobel laureate physicist who studied what caused the Space Shuttle Explosion of 1986. He learned that the o-rings likely leaked because past measurements showed cracks in them at low temperatures, like those just before the launch. Anyone my age or older remembers the image. He saw that people who saw the earlier cracks saw that because the cracks only went about a third of the way through, "there was 'a safety factor of three.'" I put the full quote below, which I recommend reading, but the gist is that since the o-rings were designed not to crack at all, there was no safety factor. Any cracking at all meant they failed. The Relevance to Landfills I ran into an old friend. Our…

The New Yorker reported this week: Could Switzerland Become the First Country to Cap Its Population?: The Swiss will soon go to the polls for a novel initiative that could upend the nation’s economy and rupture ties with the European Union. An early paragraph describes the article's main issue. I'll share it plus a couple other paragraphs, then my comments after. On June 14th, Switzerland will vote on whether to become the only country in the world to officially cap its population, with a limit of ten million people until 2050. (The current population is 9.1 million.) The initiative, which was put forward by the Swiss People’s Party (S.V.P.) and in recent polls has been supported by as many as fifty-two per cent of respondents,…

After chopping down half a continent's forests, coal must have seemed like manna from heaven, and later oil, gas, and uranium. Bounty of nature. But you could see why they'd love it. It rewarded people for being smart, for being clever, and most of all for helping others. It enabled people to cross distances faster than ever, to build taller and stronger, to warm the cold, to cool the hot, and so on. I suspect that even as early as the beginning, say soon after Watt's steam engine around 1776, some may have already started suspecting that it might have been too good to be true. At first I doubt anyone couldn't see any meaningful problems. Sure, there was smoke in the air that was…

I finished a few papers, books, and videos by Bjorn Lomborg lately, as well as books that refer to or rely on his work, like Superabundance and The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. I follow up most books and movies I finish and find meaningful by reading and watching reviews, commentaries, criticisms (positive, negative, and other), and more. My criticism of Lomborg's work stands independent of the accuracy of his claims. That is, even if everything he writes is accurate, I think it misunderstands the problem. My upcoming book presents my view. Sorry to make you wait for it (initial responses from readers are positive, but they're friends and colleagues so may be biased, though since I'm asking for what I should fix, they know…