Nature

I value family. Extracting fuel and minerals leads to things that tear families apart, like making them refugees, child labor in dangerous mines, people living far from the homes they grew up in, causing people to die young, and more. Valuing family is one of the main reasons I don't fly. I don't want to tear families apart. Likewise with communities. I don't want to fund tearing communities apart. Can you think of activities that tear families and communities apart more than flying? I can't think of many activities and institutions that tear families and communities apart more than flying. War comes to mind, but war usually results from running out of resources or conflict over resources, which flying contributes to. Maybe I'm missing something.…

I haven't posted about the book The Once and Future World by podcast guest J. B. MacKinnon lately, but it's one of the more eye-opening books I've found on the environment. He asked, researched, and answered how nature looked before modernity impinged on it. In case you worried, he qualified that nature didn't exist in a perfect state, let alone a static one. It changed all the time. Still, he pointed out how much more life there was: Sailing ships at sea remote from land got stuck because the density of fish was that great. Today we get excited to see a whale. Captains' logs described seeing whales as far as the eye could see, all day long. Fish swimming up the Hudson River to…

I read an article by podcast guest Elizabeth Kolbert about running out of food. Like nearly everyone, she takes for granted that our population will keep growing and we have to feed them. Like nearly everyone, she figures we have to keep producing more food. She quoted Norman Borlaug's Nobel acceptance speech. He won the Nobel Prize for the Green Revolution so is a reasonable person to learn from. She left out the most important part of what he said, what set his direction for much of his career, which said that making more food won't solve the problem. Only curbing population does. No one values humanity, technology, innovation, and markets more than he did. I wrote a letter to the editor clarifying what she…

Today in 1988, the New York Times front page headline said "Global Warming Has Begun." Today today, Americans blame, rationalize, and justify, but pollute more than ever. They blame CEOs, companies, and politicians, denying and suppressing that they pay them to do what they do. We can stop if we choose to. It would mean valuing other people's suffering over our convenience.

I just read a series of articles in the Economist analyzing the effect they predict artificial intelligence will have on the environment. They started by calculating the costs to build the computers and train the algorithms. They calculated the costs to operate the computers, which was much greater. Then they started writing about how people would use AI to increase efficiencies in grids, factories, transportation, and so on. When people answer if they think AI will help or hurt, they almost always answer how they expect they would use it for their goals. This series of articles didn't look at what seems most likely the greatest impact: how people who pollute and deplete will use AI for their purposes. They aren't trying to pollute any…