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We must overcome the instinct to see natural products as superior to artificial ones, if we are to save species like sea turtles and elephants. Consider how dangerous that instinct was in the case of tortoiseshell.
We must also find a way to train ourselves to see the artificial product as superior to the natural one.
Humankind is thus well-prepared to understand an important, paradoxical truth: it is only by embracing the artificial that we can save what’s natural.
“Species-Area Relationships Always Overestimate Extinction Rates from Habitat Loss.” It showed that extinctions “require greater loss of habitat than previously thought.”
two species lost every year, for an annual extinction rate of 0.001 percent.
“People who claim we’re in the sixth mass extinction don’t understand enough about mass extinctions to understand the logical flaw in their argument.”
The number of designated protected areas in the world has grown from 9,214 in 1962 to 102,102 in 2003 to 244,869 in 2020.
You have to be careful what situations you try to conserve.
‘Is it worth saving this species at the cost of the social, political, and economic cost on the human side?’
Cities cover just more than half a percent of the ice-free surface of the earth.17 Less than half a percent of Earth is covered by pavement or buildings.18
the rate of reforestation is catching up to a slowing rate of deforestation.19
The environmental and economic benefits of fossil fuels are that they are more energy-dense and abundant. A kilogram of coal has almost twice as much energy as a kilogram of wood, while a kilogram of Suparti’s liquefied petroleum gas has three times the energy as the rice husk biomass she cooked with back on the farm.66
Today, all hydroelectric dams, all fossil fuel production, and all nuclear plants require less than 0.2 percent of the Earth’s ice-free land. The earth’s food production takes 200 times more land than this.67
Humans today use more wood for fuel than at any other time in history, even as it constitutes a lower share of total energy.
Coal is terrible for carbon. But it’s by burning a lot of coal they make themselves wealthier, and by making themselves wealthier they have less children.
It was vegetable oil, not an international treaty, that saved the whales.
Where 15 percent of Earth’s land surface is protected, just less than 8 percent of the world’s oceans are.81
If every American became vegetarian, U.S. emissions would drop by just 5 percent.
just 2 to 4 percent of Americans are vegetarian or vegan. About 80 percent of those who try to become vegetarian or vegan eventually abandon their diet, and more than half do so within the first year.
Meat production roughly doubled in the United States since the early 1960s, and yet greenhouse gas emissions from livestock declined by 11 percent during the same period.
The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.
“There are now at least seventeen systematic reviews looking at the clinical trials and nearly all conclude that saturated fats have no impact on mortality,”
Liberals and environmentalists are far more likely than conservatives to become vegetarians.
Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.”
“Diets that replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat do not convincingly reduce cardiovascular events or mortality,” it
Annals of Internal Medicine published two of the largest and more rigorous studies of meat consumption to date. They found that any negative health impacts of eating red meat, to the extent they exist at all, would be too small to matter.
around the world, most people prefer to eat meat.
vegetarians in Western countries tell researchers that they eat fish, chicken, and even red meat, on occasion.
The worst energy accident of all time was the 1975 collapse of the Banqiao hydroelectric dam in China. It collapsed and killed between 170,000 and 230,000 people.17
It’s not that nuclear energy never kills. It’s that its death toll is vanishingly small. Here are some annual death totals: walking (270,000), driving (1.35 million), working (2.3 million), air pollution (4.2 million).18 By contrast, nuclear’s known total death toll is just over one hundred.
Nuclear has long been one of the cheapest ways to make electricity in the world. In most of the world, including Europe and Asia, nuclear electricity is usually cheaper than electricity from natural gas and coal.
it is impossible to imagine a realistic scenario in which terrorists could break into a nuclear plant, use a crane to raise the 100-ton canister of used fuel rods onto an 18-wheel truck, drive it out of the plant along the highway to a coastal port, send it by boat to somewhere with a reprocessing plant, unload it, and then reprocess it. In the real world, the terrorists would be gunned down before getting through the nuclear plant’s entrance.
Only nuclear, not solar and wind, can provide abundant, reliable, and inexpensive heat. Thus, only nuclear can affordably create the hydrogen gas and electricity that will provide services such as heating, cooking, and transportation, which are currently provided by fossil fuels.
Displacement is a psychological concept very similar to scapegoating. The idea is that we take our negative emotions out on weaker objects because we fear the more powerful object. If the boss yells at us, we kick the dog because talking back to the boss is too dangerous. In this case, the nuclear weapons were the boss and nuclear power plants were the dog.
obviate
“If you’re trying to get people aroused about what is going on,” said one of Pesonen’s antinuclear colleagues, “you use the most emotional issue you can find.”
people can be really fundamentally dishonest at times,”
a wind farm requires roughly 450 times more land than a natural gas power plant.
farmers should go organic; we should use biofuels and other bioenergies; our cars should be smaller; homes and buildings should be made more energy efficient; and we should reduce our use of plastic.
The maximum efficiency of wind turbines is 59.3 percent, something scientists have known for more than one hundred years.
The achievable power density of a solar farm is up to 50 watts of electricity per square meter. By contrast, the power density of natural gas and nuclear plants ranges from 2,000 to 6,000 watts per square meter.
example, if the United States were to try to generate all of the energy it uses with renewables, 25 percent to 50 percent of all land in the United States would be required.87 By contrast, today’s energy system requires just 0.5 percent of land in the United States.
Scientists now know that corn making and using ethanol emits twice as much greenhouse gas as gasoline. Even switchgrass, long touted as more sustainable, produces 50 percent more emissions.
If the United States were to replace all of its gasoline with corn ethanol, it would need an area 50 percent larger than all of the current U.S. cropland.
Not only are 350.org, Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF all funded by fossil fuel billionaires, they are also all trying to kill America’s largest source of carbon-free electricity, nuclear power.
how long, exactly, have oil and gas interests been funding environmental groups to shut down nuclear plants?
Between 1976 and 1979, Brown and his allies killed so many nuclear power plants that, had they been built, California would today be generating almost all of its electricity from zero-pollution power plants.54
The people who benefited the most from the green stimulus were billionaires, including Musk, Doerr, Kaiser, Khosla, Ted Turner, Pat Stryker, and Paul Tudor Jones.
sometimes seemingly altruistic environmental philanthropies have a financial interest in their advocacy.
Financial conflicts of interest are no less conflicts of interest just because a person is ideologically committed.
