More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Indeed, it’s a fallacy to think that people “need resources” in the first place.17 They need ways of growing food, moving around, lighting their homes, displaying information, and other sources of well-being. They satisfy these needs with ideas: with recipes, formulas, techniques, blueprints, and algorithms for manipulating the physical world to give them what they want. The human mind, with its recursive combinatorial power, can explore an infinite space of ideas, and is not limited by the quantity of any particular kind of stuff in the ground. When one idea no longer works, another can take
...more
In reality, societies have always abandoned a resource for a better one long before the old one was exhausted.
since 1970, when the Environmental Protection Agency was established, the United States has slashed its emissions of five air pollutants by almost two-thirds. Over the same period, the population grew by more than 40 percent, and those people drove twice as many miles and became two and a half times richer. Energy use has leveled off, and even carbon dioxide emissions have turned a corner,
The time-lagged decline of deforestation in the tropics is one sign that environmental protection is spreading from developed countries to the rest of the world.
For the cleaner environment we enjoy today we must thank the arguments, activism, legislation, regulations, treaties, and technological ingenuity of the people who sought to improve it in the past.35 We’ll need more of each to sustain the progress we’ve made, prevent reversals (particularly under the Trump presidency), and extend it to the wicked problems that still face us, such as the health of the oceans and, as we shall see, atmospheric greenhouse gases.
it’s time to retire the morality play in which modern humans are a vile race of despoilers and plunderers who will hasten the apocalypse unless they undo the Industrial Revolution, renounce technology, and return to an ascetic harmony with nature. Instead, we can treat environmental protection as a problem to be solved: how can people live safe, comfortable, and stimulating lives with the least possible pollution and loss of natural habitats?
One key is to decouple productivity from resources: to get more human benefit from less matter and energy. This puts a premium on density.36
All these processes are helped along by another friend of the Earth, dematerialization. Progress in technology allows us to do more with less.
Digital technology is also dematerializing the world by enabling the sharing economy, so that cars, tools, and bedrooms needn’t be made in huge numbers that sit around unused most of the time.
Something in the nature of technology, particularly information technology, works to decouple human flourishing from the exploitation of physical stuff.
the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen from about 270 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to more than 400 parts today.
If the emission of greenhouse gases continues, the Earth’s average temperature will rise to at least 1.5°C (2.7°F) above the preindustrial level by the end of the 21st century, and perhaps to 4°C (7.2°F) above that level or more. That will cause more frequent and more severe heat waves, more floods in wet regions, more droughts in dry regions, heavier storms, more severe hurricanes, lower crop yields in warm regions, the extinction of more species, the loss of coral reefs (because the oceans will be both warmer and more acidic), and an average rise in sea level of between 0.7 and 1.2 meters (2
...more
To keep the rise to 2°C or less, the world would, at a minimum, have to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by half or more by the middle of the 21st century and eliminate them altogether before the turn of the 22nd.
a movement within the American political right, heavily underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are warming the planet.47 In doing so they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy.
people are likelier to accept the fact of global warming when they are told that the problem is solvable by innovations in policy and technology than when they are given dire warnings about how awful it will be.55
the world’s emission of greenhouse gases, which are dominated by heavy industry (29 percent), buildings (18 percent), transport (15 percent), land-use change (15 percent), and the energy needed to supply energy (13 percent). (Livestock is responsible for 5.5 percent, mostly methane rather than CO2, and aviation for 1.5 percent.)56
People have trouble thinking in scale: they don’t differentiate among actions that would reduce CO2 emissions by thousands of tons, millions of tons, and billions of tons.57 Nor do they distinguish among level, rate, acceleration, and higher-order derivatives—between actions that would affect the rate of increase in CO2 emissions, affect the rate of CO2 emissions, affect the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and affect global temperatures (which will rise even if the level of CO2 remains constant). Only the last of these matters, but if one doesn’t think in scale and in orders of change, one can
...more
the human moral sense is not particularly moral; it encourages dehumanization (“politicians are pigs”) and punitive aggression (“make the polluters pay”).
people esteem others according to how much time or money they forfeit in their altruistic acts rather than by how much good they accomplish.59
The enlightened response to climate change is to figure out how to get the most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases.
