Nature

Do you value getting consent for actions one person does that affect another? When you use plastic, fill up a tank of gas, buy an airplane ticket, did you get consent from the people whose air, land, and water your actions pollute and deplete? Do you think you should? Do you wish people who polluted and depleted your world had tried to get your consent?

People seem concerned about microplastics. They're in all our bloodstreams. The endocrine disrupting chemicals they leech out probably contribute to globally rising birth defects and globally falling sperm counts. You've probably read about it all. Since plastic doesn't change to non-plastic when it breaks down, but it all breaks down, all plastic will become microplastic. I guess we might burn some and it becomes other pollution, but nearly all of it will become microplastic, which will last something like 500 to 1,000 years. I don't see how any of it being recycled or put in landfills would prevent it from eventually making it in to the oceans. Even stuff in landfills, as sea levels rise, oceans will flood the landfills. We'll have a hard enough…

A lot of people on the left and right seem to want to solve our environmental problems with the solutions they promote for all problems. People on the left want to fight environmental problems with government regulation, to end systemic racism, and to smash the patriarchy. On the right they want to liberalize markets and decrease regulation. Does it seem odd to anyone else that their solutions to these new problems are exactly what they promote to solve problems before them? Does it suggest that maybe they don't understand our environmental problems and are just pushing their old agendas, using the new situation as a pretext? What are the odds that new problems never seen in human history just happen to be solved by solutions…

I love nature. Sometimes I have to share my love for quirky parts of it. Did you know alligators can live 3 years without eating? I find it amazing. They're cold blooded, so don't need little energy to keep their bodies going. In the water, they need little energy to move. I think they can digest more parts of what they eat than many other animals. Still, imaging going three years without eating. Here's the life or death question: say an alligator dies from going too long without eating: When did it die? I would guess its vital signs the day marking three years and the day before weren't that different. Maybe a month before it was so weak it couldn't catch or eat food…

People keep asking how artificial intelligence (or blockchain, nuclear energy, fusion, or whatever the technology of the day) will help them. People think, "Oh, AI will help me do X or Y" where X and Y are things they want to do. Maybe in sustainability they'll use it to make some process more efficient, thinking it will reduce energy use and therefore depletion. Well, everyone else will use that technology too, including the ones causing what problems you're trying to solve. They'll drill deeper, extract faster, and lower costs do extract more profitably. Most of our problems are caused by other people. For example, earth has plenty of resources, or would if so many people weren't consuming them. Guns, abortion, taxes, migration, etc. . .…

Human ingenuity doesn't mean all companies should hire as many people as possible. Business gets it. I've meant to write this post since reading When McKinsey Comes to Town and hosting one of its authors on the podcast, Michael Forsythe. A concept the book coversIs it the case that the "ability to is "rightsizing." I had associated it with McKinsey, since the book documented McKinsey advising companies to do it, but I looked it up and the term seems widespread. For context, people debate over how many people can live sustainably on Earth---its carrying capacity. Many people lob verbal grenades at people who say that number is finite, suggesting it can always be higher. They say people who suggest human population is already above Earth's…

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.