Nature

The title says it all: People who fly do it for themselves and end up hurting others. People who avoid flying do it for others and end up helping themselves. When someone explains why they have to fly, it's a reason that helps themselves. They may say they fly for family, work, or to be a good citizen, but it comes back to themselves. They benefit. They hurt the rest of the world: the people and wildlife displaced to dig the oil, the ten million a year who die from breathing polluted air, those hurt from sea level rise and climate change, those who suffer from noise pollution near airports, and so on. When someone says why they don't fly, some sense of stewardship and…

I support energy efficiency as a tactic within a strategy of reducing consumption. Most people treat efficiency as a strategy. Confusing its priority and putting it as a strategy distracts from what we need to solve our environmental problems, specifically growth. Say there's a guy addicted to cocaine who lost everything. One problem is he's killing himself with the drug. A second problem is that without a place to live or make himself presentable, he can't make an honest living. Pile of Refined Sugar Increasing energy efficiency isn't exactly like increasing the energy supply, but overlaps in some effects. To that extent, imagine you tried to solve the coke addict's second problem first, figuring that e can't make living, so you supply him with resources…

I can't help sharing feedback from someone I've never met, who wrote me after cooking a famous no-packaging vegan stew based on my video to make seitan and stew in a few minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjrm2pnZZQ0 That person wrote: I just used your recipe and made a soup lunch for my family. Turned out fantastic and was extremely quick to make. Thank you for sharing!I've tried to make seitan before but never had much success with it. I would let the dough come together in the food process with many ingredients and spices. I would then form a large seitan roast which I tried pressure cooking, boiling, and baking. I think the combination of cutting the seitan into small chunks and pressure cooking it as you suggest…

The more I learn about renewables, the more I find they rely on fossil fuels more than I thought. They don't seem that renewable and relying on false promises looks like it's leading us to delay acting, as we have for a centure. I wrote about all the scams we fall for. Desiring as we are to find ways to keep society intact, we want technologies like hydrogen energy storage and market ideas like carbon offsets to work. Over and over they don't. For some reason, we consider spending billions of dollars to build a new power grid for wind and solar, or plants to split or fuse atoms, a straightforward, even simple, next step, but having fewer children or not buying SUVs unnatural and…

Two days ago I posted my conclusions from talking to the Chief Engineer of an electric plane company, Terik Weekes. The laws of physics dictate that without fossil fuels and a with population that needs land for food more than bio jet fuel, we won't be able to fly across oceans. (Read more in my post Prepare yourself that you will soon be unable to fly across an ocean​.) Last night in an unrelated conversation, a friend told me about National Geographic's spit in the face of people and wildlife suffering from pollution: Around the World by Private Jet​. Check out their plane, a special designed that pollutes more per person: Instead of the standard 233 seats, the jet's interior has been customized to accommodate…

If we changed all the technology from Japan's or Europe's rail systems with ours, in Japan and Europe, they'd have their now-crappy trains on crappy tracks to dilapidated stations running on time and the US would have its now super-advanced trains running late and missing stops. Japanese train If we changed the people instead, the US would start running its trains on time and Japan's would run late. Think of that next time someone tries to solve a social problem like the environment with technology. I'll take culture over technology any day. I'd rather have both, but American culture needs fixing more than technology. Our technological innovations exacerbate our cultural problems because technology augments the values of the people and culture wielding it. In the…

You know Godwin's Law, right? It says: As an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches 1. It has a corollary that Whoever makes the comparison loses the debate. Well, I'm stating a similar law about discussions on the environment, Spodek's Law: In a discussion on the environment, anyone who bases their point on an economist is wrong. First things first: I'm not comparing economists to Hitler. That should appear obvious since it is, but I'm clarifying it anyway. I also concede that exceptions will exist, as in all laws, but fewer than you'd think. Also, I'm partly joking. The more I read and learn about economists' views on the environment, the…

One of my graduate school professors told us the following way to remember the natural logarithm/exponential number e to 20 decimal places, which I'll share with you what some scientists consider fun. I forget which professor told us, but I think I was at Penn, which means 1993-94. He only told us once. It stuck effortlessly, so I consider it effective. And fun. How to remember e to 20 decimal places Everyone remembers 2.7. Years you can chunk as a single number, so with the year 1828, you get the next eight digits because it repeats: 18281828. So remembering one number gives you: 2.718281828 Next remember 45, which gets you the next eight digits because you double it, then repeat it, then halve it: 45904523.…