This Sustainable Life

My notes I read from:Why do we still pollute, part 1: the questionsDoes the following sound familiar?We use a lot of energy, but we’ll electrify everything and power them with wind and solar.Yes, we need to build a lot, but prices are cheaper than ever for renewable power and batteries. They fell faster than anyone expected and will keep falling. More solar energy hits the Earth daily than we need in a year.There are some problems, like that the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow, and we haven’t electrified some things, like heavy loaded trucks, airplanes, and container ships, but they’re just engineering issues that we’ll resolve.Nobody at the time of the Wright brothers could have predicted the 747. People a decade ago didn’t predict prices and capacity for renewables and batteries falling so fast.A world where we live like today just without carbon emissions is around the corner. All we have to do is wait, maybe fund some research.Those ideas sound enticing and compelling. Why was everyone so gloomy?What actually are the limits and why? The prices are lower but why not lower still? Is there a lower limit or do you believe it will drop to zero? Why aren’t we building more solar and wind farms? Why aren’t we damming more rivers? Why haven’t we electrified planes, boats, and for that matter more cars? If electric cars are better, why do people still buy internal combustion engine ones?Something is setting those limits. What? Do batteries and electric vehicles only require we build more factories, in which case it’s only a matter of time, or are there limits that we can’t overcome? Maybe some we can overcome and some we can’t. If so, it matters which.Also, I’ve written in my blog that humans have historically responded to new sources of power by using the old one and the new one. Our environmental problems aren’t too little power but too much pollution, just supplying new power doesn’t mean we stop using fossil fuels. Headlines keep touting record using of renewables, but the meaningful measure is how much we’re reducing pollution. We can easily keep building renewables and never stop burning coal and oil even if we can substitute.Why aren’t we closing coal plants? Why do we keep using jet fuels for jets?It’s tempting to believe that somewhere near the source of power supplies there are a few people or companies that are gearing up to supply what we need. Maybe they’re going as fast as they can. They’re just waiting for supplies or a few key technological developments.You probably realize it’s not as simple as that. There are markets and market forces driving development and things get implemented as they can. When market forces drive some development, they do, but not all things respond to market development. For example, people knew about problems with pollution and the greenhouse effect for generations but didn’t act. Why now? Are there things that market forces can’t resolve or won’t address? You probably know about the Tragedy of the Commons, Jevons Paradoxes, and Rebound Effects, which are systems effects where markets produce the opposite goals people expect or desire. How significant are they?Briefly, the tragedy of the commons occurs when private citizens benefit from using a resource that can be depleted but the public loses, for example overfishing the oceans, depleting aquifers, and polluting the atmosphere. Jevons Paradox is that when you make a technology more efficient, you decrease the pollution in each use, but by making it cheaper, more people use it more and for more things, so you may increase the total pollution. Rebound Effects are more broadly when our attempts to decrease pollution end up creating more, which might include replacing some business travel with video conferences, but then traveling for other reasons anyway, or traveling more for vacation with the time or money saved, resulting in more flights.There are other effects too. Prices are supposed to cause markets to allocate resources, but in some cases they don’t. Fish that become scarce sometimes see higher prices, promoting fishing more scarce fish. Fishing technology makes fishing deeper and more aggressively cheaper, so the market sees more fish even though the ocean has fewer, to the point where fish find each other slower so reproduce slower.What if these effects mean our solutions create problems greater than our problems?If we don’t change our systems, these systems effects may overwhelm us. They’re easy to ignore, but what if they dominate our situation? What if our air becomes unbreathable? About ten million people a year die from breathing—a number greater than the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust and near estimates of how many people died in the Atlantic Slave Trade, over years and centuries. Pollution is killing that many per year, a number which is increasing, and we can’t stop that polluted air from dispersing all over the globe. If we keep increasing that pollution, might all of Earth’s air kill people globally? Besides dying, what would life be like if the whole globe is like Beijing or New Delhi all the time? Pollution doesn’t come only from carbon dioxide.What other processes are we doing that pollute besides emitting greenhouse gases? What if renewables that lower greenhouse emissions don’t reduce other pollution? What if nuclear and fusion produce other pollution?You know about the concept of embedded carbon—how much carbon was emitted in making something. We generally think if we use the thing enough, the one-time manufacturing hit averages down to negligible. What it it doesn’t? Cars don’t last forever. Even if electric vehicles last longer than internal combustion engine ones, what if the embedded carbon and other pollution in manufacturing it doesn’t become negligible over its lifetime, yet billions of people keep buying them year after year?You might say, but we can bring down the embedded carbon by decarbonizing the manufacturing process. Can we? Are there limits to what we can decarbonize? While no one at the Wright brothers’ time could have imagined or predicted the 747, we can imagine a lot more that we can’t reach. We reached the Concorde and other supersonic flight, but pulled back from it. Why?Just because we made advances in one field, does that mean we’ll produce the advances we want in another? We thought antibiotics and vaccines would stop pandemics, yet the current one has us more worried about a future one. This one may metastasize with another variant. The delta variant may continue to grow. Who knows if antibiotics will keep working?I’m prompted to ask these questions all at once for two main reasons.The first is that our media, business leaders, and politicians keep focusing on the march of progress on solutions. Partly, I love hearing about more renewables and how people replace business trips with video, but we don’t focus on shutting down polluting plants and we don’t pay attention to system effects. If you make a polluting system more efficient, you pollute more efficiently. That describes our world today. We use less effort to produce more pollution than ever. I can swipe my finger on a cell phone screen and causes a 2-ton vehicle to travel miles to bring food in containers that will poison wildlife for centuries, maybe millennia. That cell phone is billions of times more efficient than ENIAC or the computers that put people on the moon, but they drive server farms that pollute more than most nations. We pollute more with less effort than ever.The second is that I’ve come across news that answers a lot of the questions, which I’ll talk about in part 2, but the news is more like the Concorde than the 747. That is, it looks like when we look at the engineering and details, we aren’t at the start of uncharted territories but at the ends of long lines of research reaching limits from the laws of physics.Nobody wants technology to help us more than I do, but if we try to fight the laws of thermodynamics, we will lose. I talked to the chief engineer of a company that has won awards for developing battery powered planes. We recorded a podcast episode that’s in the editing pipeline so you’ll get to hear it from him. There is a rosy future for electric planes, just not carrying people across oceans. I’ve also read a few reports on technological limits I’ll summarize and link to in the next episode.First, I wanted to pose the questions I’ve pondered that led me to pursue the answers enthusiastically. The answers matter. If potential solutions don’t work, the faster we pursue ones that can, the more likely we can succeed to some degree. We can’t bring back the ten million people who died in the past year from breathing air, nor the lives lost from past behavior that we can’t change, nor even the lives to be lost from results locked in for the next centuries. The people dying today are dying from past behavior. But we can change our behavior today to avoid killing people from our behavior. We wish past generations had changed. We can. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gernot Wagner posted a story in New York Magazine about personally acting in a big way on his living situation.People criticized his sharing something vulnerable. Sadly, people acting in stewardship, in everyone's interest, still today have to suffer criticism. I describe in this episode his article, the criticism he faced (as did I), and the systemic effect of this criticism.Quoting from my book, I'll show how strongly blind criticism exacerbates inaction and accelerates polluting. Beyond annoying, it augments the problems.Gernot's article: How I Greened My Prewar Apartment (It Wasn’t Easy): A climate economist overhauls his leaky, 200-year-old co-op.His home pageThe video of Dennis Meadows' hula hoop demonstration Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I met Ambrose through recent guest Scott Hardin-Nieri. Regular listeners likely noticed how I've been hosting more guests leading religious communities. I'm drawn by a few things. One of the main reasons is that I find many who want to speak and act more on sustainability.Another is that I find that when they act, they do so out of motivations and emotions that feel closer to mine than mainstream environmentalists. I admit my perception may be biased, but from religious actors, I feel joy, glory, duty, and passion. From environmentalists, I feel less rewarding emotions. I find Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce more inspiring than hugging trees.Ambrose is taking on leading the intersection of two demographic groups many wrote off or consider uninterested, actively apathetic, or even anti-interested in environmental stewardship---blacks and Christians. He doesn't find them uninterested. On the contrary, he is organizing and supporting increasing numbers of sub-communities.I believe evangelicals and conservatives have the potential to lead stewardship in the United States. I believe they are held back by people not connecting with them on their values, which seems crazy because they, like everyone, values clean air, land, and water. I think people don't listen to them, which makes leading them difficult to impossible.In this episode, Ambrose shares trends he sees, work he's doing, and his results working in black religious communities.Green the Church Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For my first time in years of picking up litter, I saw a woman picking some up methodically, like she does it regularly. I told her I did too and we had a great conversation. Someone who does something enough knows the ins and outs. We talk differently than people who don't do it.We had a wonderful conversation that day, shortly after parade-goers wrecked Washington Square Park. We lamented the state of human culture that we pollute so much. We also appreciated each other's passion for picking up litter methodically, consistently, and finding reward in it.She turned out to be Martha Stewart's daughter, which seems like American royalty, but we just riffed on our common passion. Whether her humor, our common passion, or something else kept the conversation flowing, we talked for a while. We recorded this podcast conversation at her home a couple days later, my first in-person episode in over a year.We discuss many facets of picking up litter how only seasoned practitioners can, knowing the details, with mutual appreciation.I hope you hear our passions, joys, and connections over picking up litter.How do you think Martha Stewart's daughter would handle bottles of urine?How would she involve the rest of the family?Listen and find out. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Below are the notes I introduced this episode with. If you want to see the park, I posted two videos here. Prepare to be disgusted, maybe even shocked.You'll hear me talking about my local park, one of the most drug-ridden in New York CityBecause it's my back yard and I refuse to retreat from the degradation, you'll hear my passion. This was all extemporaneous, so you can tell the time I spend in my neighborhood, talking to neighbors and politicians to help.But please translate in your mind the addicts giving up and trashing common land to all of us as addicts to a/c, flying, twenty-minute showers, SUVs, meat, big families, and so on. At 80 percent overweight and obese, we're addicted to refined sugar and fat.I mention in the recording how the crack and heroin's pollution is small compared to rich people's, but I want to start you off with that perspective, since I'm illustrating our culture and all of our behavior that's not helping anyone as our health, longevity, abundance, and stability are decreasing, not increasing.I'm talking about us. If you think heroin and crack users who see no future actually do have futures if they overcome their addictions then you know you can too.Your excuses that you have to for work or family are as specious and self-serving as theirs.Please listen to this episode thinking of us as the addict.You'll hear potential solutions. You can live them yourself. You can live without flying, meat, long showers, more than one child, and so on.When you do you can lead others. Addicts need role models to see they can switch. I hope you believe how I had to transition from being just like you if you think you can't live without flying or whatever. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Strolling, not scrolling!Sarah acts sustainably and loves it. She shares that love. I loved this conversation, a relief from everyone making stewardship a burden and chore. She knows the science but leads with emotion based on experience.The conversation was half love-fest of common experience, half sharing our frustration at people not acting for reasons we don't get anymore since they don't realize how fun living in harmony with nature and people is.We shared about being called extreme, which feels crazy to two people who are just having fun. Who ever heard of someone enjoying life, nature, and people too much?We lamented feeling misunderstood of not having fun.We shared our confusion about people not acting since for us it's fun. We aren't really confused since we were there too, but we have to work to get back to a state of not wanting to act in stewardship.We shared embracing nature.We lamented society's disconnection from nature.We're annoyed that people who think they care keep pushing work instead of joy, technology instead of simplicity and connection.Enjoy two people sharing joy living sustainably doing all we can to bring everyone else to experience that joy.Sarah's page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Here are the notes I read from:Comments on Better Angels of Our NatureI finally finished Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature. I started it more than skeptical of its main thesis. The book is 800 pages long, so I’m sure I’ll oversimplify and not do it justice, but I recommend it so you can get his full message. He says that we are living in the least violent time in history and it was due to enlightenment values of classical liberalism. I was sure he’d missed some important issue or discounted the risk of nuclear war or pandemic. I’d find some flaw in his analysis.On the contrary, the more I read, or listened to to be precise, the more compelling I found his case. I won’t recapitulate the whole thing, but I agree with his thesis, if I’m not oversimplifying, that we live in the least violent time and it’s due to classical liberalism.What caused liberalism is another question. He spent time looking for exogenous causes. After all, humans were human when we were more violent and now that we’re less violent. Did something change? One main cause he found was the development of printing. Printing spread ideas. Some cultures adopted it and others didn’t so observing their different evolutions suggested its value. I agree printing was a major cause.In this episode, I want to suggest a major potential point he barely touched on, but that 1. I believe is a greater cause, or at least worth considering more, and 2. if we miss this cause, we miss other effects, especially if the cause disappears. More importantly, this cause may be changing today, and if we misunderstand it, if a critical pillar of support goes away, we could lose everything we’ve gained and a lot more.Reading from The Smithsonian Magazine and The Nation:On August 24, 1967, Abbie Hoffman and a group of friends invaded the heart of American capitalism, the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. They threw money from the visitors’ gallery onto the floor, and the brokers and traders there leapt into the air to grab the dollar bills floating down. Trading was interrupted, briefly. News coverage was massive.Before entering the stock exchange gallery, Hoffman had passed out handfuls of dollar bills to each of the protesters. Once in the gallery above the trading floor, the protesters threw the dollars over to the stock traders. Participant Bruce Dancis recalled, “At first people on the floor were stunned. They didn’t know what was happening. They looked up and when they saw money was being thrown they started to cheer, and there was a big scramble for the dollars.”The protesters exited the Stock Exchange and were immediately beset by reporters, who wanted to know who they were and what they’d done.People risked their jobs whose cash flows dwarfed mere dollars to scramble for them.With that historical example in your mind, imagine this fictional scene: a battle where suddenly manna fell from heaven. By manna, I mean something that satisfies all your wants. You can kill the guy next to you or gather manna. Once everyone starts gathering manna, who wants to fight and risk being killed when you can gather more? Now imagine you learn that not only will tomorrow bring more manna, but so will the next year, decade, generation, century, and as far as anyone can foresee.Would you expect people to fight less? I would. Would they not devote themselves to more liberal pursuits in the traditional sense of the word—culture, arts, learning, trade? I believe humans with an unending supply of manna would trace the path Steven Pinker’s book described.Well, the manna started appearing over 500 years ago. Well, before written history, people knew of coal, but our ancestors really started learning its utility, though not its potential global danger, centuries before the Industrial Revolution. That foundation, among others, eventually enabled the Industrial Revolution to happen.Most people attribute the gains of the Industrial Revolution to human ingenuity in creating machines, economic systems, political systems, and so on. They built machines to cross oceans and continents, manufacture things to scrape the sky, and so on, enabling people to work in teams as large as nations. Sure, humans were ingenious, but imagine a locomotive or steamboat without coal. Ingenuity doesn’t boil water to make steam. It tells you how, but we didn’t create the coal. We found it.Besides increased liberal pursuits, would you not have more kids, especially if your neighbors did? After all, your need to work to feed them or bequeath them land just dropped precipitously. If everyone you knew had just learned of two new continents, isn’t that manna in the form of real estate?Of course, independent of fossil fuel and real estate manna, plenty of other advances in science and humanities contributed to the explosion of technology that led to the Industrial Revolution and its material abundance but once Watt's steam engine and Smith's Wealth of Nations kicked in, they were tied together in a cycle driven by that manna.As long as you take that manna for granted, you might assign the progress to human ingenuity, but we needed the fossil fuels too. Without them we would have had no steamships, no railroads, no steam-powered factories, no coal mines, no substitute for slavery, no artificial fertilizer so no Green Revolution, no solar panels, no nuclear. Just windmills, water wheels, sailboats. Ability to amass armies, navies, and build pyramids and empires.Even if we discover that the manna will run out—that is, we have limited fossil fuels—a system based on it with enough momentum will sustain itself long after we’d want to stop using it. We can’t easily stop using them today even if we want to. I would say we’re addicted to their results.Because we now know that the limit to this fossil fuel manna is only partly running of it. Equally, the global danger is that It poisons our air, land, water, and wildlife we depend on, like bees. Burning fossil fuels is lowering Earth’s ability to sustain life. We've used up the space and resources to process that waste and with plastic and toxic chemical increased its toxicity. Back to Steven Pinker, he searched for an exogenous cause to the changes he described. He found printing as one candidate. Europe's adoption led to its liberalization while Islam's rejection led to its stagnation.I started his book expecting to find flaw. I thought, “he must not realize how much less violent we are today, or how less stable our peace today is compared to his imagination,” but I found him completely persuasive. I agree we're less violent than ever and the causes all as he suggests.I grant him everything in his book and offer this one change that I think will strengthen his case, fill in the missing exogenous sources he sought, but change his outlook. While not the only contribution, the fossil fuel manna contributed to everything he described.I’m not a historian, so I’m only going on broad trends. The timing seems to work. Fossil fuels started kicking in on brightening human futures well before the Industrial Revolution so around the right times and places, as well as not in the wrong times and places. I’m not saying fossil fuels were the only cause, but I expect a major one.I don't mean to take away from all the achievements he described. They're tremendous, but they depend in part on discovering something we can take no credit for producing and whose deadly side effects, combined with the laws of thermodynamics they helped us discover, force us to choose from stopping accepting the manna or allowing it to kill us. First we didn’t know the side-effects. I don’t blame anyone. But now they are undeniable and incalculably deadly, on the scale of billions.I believe we can retain the advances fossil fuels helped us discover and achieve without them, but the transition requires time. Had we started transitioning generations ago, with a smaller population and less addiction, we could take time.If we start today, and we haven't in earnest, well, already nine million died in 2019 from breathing air, a number on par with the Holocaust and Atlantic slave trade, except annual and increasing, so there's no avoiding destruction.But if we reduce fossil fuel use with everything we've got, we'll face economic shocks. A lot of economists worry about them, but I understand that government management within historical norms could keep those shocks within historical boundaries, as described in JB MacKinnon's upcoming book The Day the World Stopped Shopping, but we can keep from losing billions of lives.To clarify, by reducing fossil fuels I don't just mean adding more renewable sources. Humans throughout history have met new manna with new growth. So yes we have to produce more energy through renewables, but also shut down what burns fossil fuels first: coal plants, airplane engines, container ships, car engines, artificial fertilizers, and more. To leave it in the ground or risk billions of people dying.My point is to speak to one person—Steve Pinker—in, I believe, the view of his thesis, that I agree in his view of the better angels of our nature, but I believe those angels were fed on fossil fuels beyond what he recognized. I didn't spend the time in this discussion to reach his rhetorical level, but I hope I crossed enough of a threshold for him to engage on the topic: how much did our society develop from fossil fuels and what happens if we remove them?I have no self-interest to promote. I'm motivated as much through the wonder I felt at his masterful book. It's almost fifteen years since I read The Blank Slate and loved it. I’ve seen him speak in person and found it riveting. I saw him once in my neighborhood and said hi.I believe that if he considers this one element, that he will either see flaw in my perspective or not. If he does, I would love to be relieved of my mistaken view. If not, I believe he will feel compelled to consider it more and may even reach the point I have, that it is the most important pursuit anyone could work on.I think many people don't consider it because, well what can anyone do? Only governments and corporations can make a difference. But believing one's first attempt at a solution won't work is no proof no solution exists. I have found many and would love to pick up from this point.As I said, he walked right into likely reader disagreement, took it on, and persuaded. I expected to disagree with him. I expect most did. But I agree with him and consider myself educated for it, plus admire his research and writing skills. If I’m off point or he considered it, I hope to learn what I missed. If I hit something critical, I’d love to engage him further on how to spread word of the danger.I’ll put on the page a plot that previous guest Tom Murphy calls his most important plot with a link to his description of it. It shows humanity’s source of energy. Wood and food for hundreds of thousands of years. Then suddenly it shoots up almost instantaneously. Then for the next hundreds of thousands of years, he has a question mark, but makes a strong case there will be a drop.Question remains: how much of our decreasing violence resulted from blind luck of fossil fuels? Independent of contribution to past, how much of present lack of violence depends on fossil fuels and disregard of pollution? If we remove fossil fuels or take heed of pollution and future looks less abundant than assumptions contributing to peace, do we lose peace? If we believe renewables and nuclear will replace, what if time scale is off -if can't ramp them up as fast as fossil fuels decrease. Problem isn't lack of coal. What if pollution lowers future more than expectations?Even accepting seamless shift to renewables, positive-sum of future from fossil fuels will disappear. Will our philosophies adjust fast enough?What if some things can't substitute, like container ships, flying, and artificial fertilizers? What if pollution overwhelms?Seems to me his thesis may be correct, but if fundamental cause is not human philosophy and if much of the philosophy that was proximate cause resulted from that fundemental cause, and that fundamental cause will disappear or harm than help, then the final takeaway may be to eloquently showcase what we erroneously take credit for and may lose.Are we sitting on a four-legged stool about to lose one, which might mildly affect our stability? Or a three-legged stool about lose one? Or two or all three?Not a matter of opinion. Can be quantified, not argued as belief.But greater issue is what to do if we're about to lose a leg or two of a three-legged stool. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Myanmar's military coup beginning February 1, 2021 made front-page news around the globe and remains there six months later. In Yangon, As Chief Investment Officer of one of the nation's largest conglomerates, Nevcan witnessed firsthand and lived through the events.She shares what happened, how citizens and foreigners responded, the issues from an insider view, and the scant hope of near-term resolution. Hearing how hours before the coup began, nobody outside the military knew it would happen, combined with the resulting deadlock and violence, one can't help but wonder how close any society is to slipping into chaos without a way out.I've known Nevcan since meeting her in business school a decade ago, so we speak openly. We also talk about her starting her branch of the This Sustainable Life podcast family, which will focus on global economic and finance leaders. I can't wait to hear her episodes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Don't you feel gypped that some of the most amazing potential parts of our lives were stripped away by people overindulging in polluting behavior? Or by automation that removed working the land from consideration as noble action?Karen and I talk about overpopulation that will soon return to mainstream and the values of wholesomeness of activities connected to the cycles of life. Besides sharing observations from a life of conservation, she shares her big success growing tomatoes, spending quality time with her family.Here are some early results of her planting tomatoes, which she's since reported have grown beyond her expectations, leading her to see things she had been mission, connecting with family, and otherwise engaging with the world.Stewardship isn't deprivationKaren's stories of her experience will remind you that life without craving and always wanting more brings reflection, connection, calm, and more reward. Whatever you're doing now, acting more in stewardship and sustainability will lead you to wish you had acted more, earlier.Karen's page: Moving Upstream... Where Possibilities Come to RoostMove Upstream: A Call to Solve OverpopulationChange Our Stories, Change Our World Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Martin and I continued our conversation about America, its problems, and what we can do about it. I misread him that he had a specific plan, but that didn't stop him from clarifying and continuing more of what we spoke about last time.We talked about education, arts, voting, government, the future, the past, competition, and more.Listen for reflections from a master communicator who has worked with people at the forefront of American business for decades.I mentioned before that I was prompted to reconnect with Martin after almost two decades while seeing him give a webinar online. I took the liberty of capturing the screen when he showed this slide. I hope you can tell why it made me connect. Creativity is up there with curiosity for me. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.