This Sustainable Life

Sorry the audio doesn't show the big Trump flag behind Andrew, because in this episode, I hear a regular guy who sees America's small towns and big cities becoming polluted and acts. Not that Trump supporters aren't regular people, but that I see the mainstream environmental view of Trump supporters as the enemy, people who don't get it, or won't.I think it takes two to tango in cases like this. If you paint people as enemies who can't get it, I don't see how you can expect them to listen to you. If you only speak in terms of your values, I don't think people with different values will feel understood or want to listen to you.Meanwhile, I find that all people have intrinsic motivation to act on the environment. Connect with people on their terms and they'll engage, including American conservatives on sustainability and the environment.Andrew, as you'll hear, for example, acts on his own motivation to recycle. He likes it and finds it easy enough that his action gets his girlfriend in on the project. That is, he leads her. He doesn't try to convince her. He does something he likes and she joins in. He shares how he feels more people should do it.We also talk about politics and how to engage conservatives more. It's not that hard.Sometimes I feel I'm almost the only person who can see liberals and conservatives both increasing America's stewardship and sustainability. Everyone agrees on traffic laws, for example, like not to cross double yellow lines. I'm working to get sustainability to a similar place. After Dark with Rob and AndrewMy latest guest appearance on After Dark: Space The Final FrontierMy videos of the trash in my neighborhood Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the 500th episode, I share the outcome I expect to make happen from all this podcast experience as part of my mission to change culture to embrace, not refrain from or fear, sustainability and stewardship.I describe how I will lead people at leverage points of systems to share their intrinsic motivation, act on it, and lead their organizations to huge changes for their intrinsic motivations.When our culture changes, we will act because we want to, not because we have to. Then we will be off to the races to change.Episode 000 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The notes I read from for this episode:I asked many questions on the last episode. The core ones were “why aren’t we switching to renewables and not polluting faster?” I know we can’t switch overnight, but what sets the pace? Do we know if the limits will go away, like we just need to build more factories, or maybe they won’t, like what led us to retract from supersonic flight? It worked in some ways, but not enough. A mix of social, business, engineering, and physics issues pulled us back.How much farther can advances go? Can we expect as great advances as the 747 compared to the Wright brothers’ first plane? How much of the solar power hitting the Earth can we effectively use?I point you to a paper called Pulling Back The Curtain On The Energy Transition Tale, which I link to in the notes. It’s not peer-reviewed, but shares all its sources. It looks at the limitations of renewable energy sources. What does it take to build solar and wind farms? How many do we have to build? How many can we? Things like that. I recommend reading it. I’ll share some highlights, or lowlights.To start off, most, about 80 percent of energy comes fossil fuels directly, like heating iron to make steel. Some processes can use electrical power but not all. They cite sources that generating that 20 percent of electrical power would cost $11 trillion for solar cells, just a small part of over $250 trillion, though it would have to be in the desert since we couldn’t transmit it far from there. We’d need to grow the grid 14 times faster than we are to do it by 2050.[EDIT: They published a peer-reviewed version of the paper: Through the Eye of a Needle: An Eco-Heterodox Perspective on the Renewable Energy Transition, by Megan K. Seibert and William E. Rees]That’s still not covering fossil fuel things like heating and container ships. We’d have to build solar and wind farms 3 to 4 times faster than ever every years until 2050. Since they last 15 to 25 years, once finished, we’d have to replace them all.Making the solar cells and windmills requires steel, cement, concrete, and other materials that require temperatures we so far only get from fossil fuels, so we’d have to keep burning them to create the would-be sustainable renewables, but they aren’t sustainable if they require fossil fuels in perpetuity. They also emit greenhouse gases. The paper goes into more detail about alternatives like biogas that don’t work for other reasons. For one thing, land we use to grow fuel we aren’t growing food with, but we’re projected to need all that food.Building solar panels requires fossil fuel-burning temperatures. The processes produce toxic by-products and other greenhouse gases besides CO2. They require some rare minerals that may run out and so far have often led to human rights abuses in mining them.Since they operate a few decades, disposing of them may lead them to be 10 percent of electronic waste. Recycling materials so far use techniques that expose people to toxic waste.Batteries and other storage require hundreds of times more capacity than we have. “The world’s largest battery manufacturing facility—Tesla’s $5 billion Gigafactory in Nevada—could store only three minutes’ worth of annual U.S. electricity demand in its entire year of production. Fabricating a quantity of batteries that could store even two days’ worth of U.S. electricity demand would require 1,000 years of Gigafactory production.”The paper goes into more detail about limitations of batteries and other storage worth reading. Any number of its points might be enough to derail renewables.“Large cranes (used to load and unload cargo, in large construction projects, in mining operations, and more), container and other large ships, airplanes, and medium and heavy duty trucks” may never be able to run on batteries or anything other than fossil fuels.Wind turbines require magnets that require rare earth metals whose mining produces toxic and radioactive waste. The blades are fiberglass that can’t be recycled or reused. Making the towers requires fossil fuels to make the steel and power the large vehicles to transport them. Installing the towers requires heavy trucks and machinery that batteries can’t power to dig deep and manufacture the materials. Plus they use a lot of cement and concrete, which emit a lot of greenhouse gases.Technology may overcome some of these problems, but remember, these technologies were supposed to solve the problems of past technologies, which were supposed to handle the problems of technologies before them. The paper doesn’t say it, but each solution seems to require more work than all the ones it replaces. Why should we expect this round to be the last when each before only enlarged the problems? Every indication suggests more problems to come with all the waste to manage, manufacture that doesn’t go away, and raw materials we’ll keep needing, destroying the environment and creating deadly working conditions.The paper then goes into hydropower, fission, and fusion. Hydro has few places that can be dammed left. Fission would need many more to be built, but they take long times and have big waste management issues. The paper details many problems with fusion that may never be solvable—high operating costs, huge needs for water when many areas humans live in are becoming arid, time to build if ever feasible, and so on.The paper covers carbon capture and storage, mainly pointing out that no viable schemes exist nor on any remotely useful scale. It covers the social exploitation that has always accompanied mining the materials needed for batteries, magnets, and other material parts of renewables.It talks about physical limits to potential advances. Most of these fields are mature and the technologies reaching those physical limits. Solar cells can’t produce much more power per area than they are, nor can wind.While cars and bicycles can run from batteries, large trucks for transportation and construction, planes, and freight ships can’t. Probably whole systems of trains can’t run on renewables or at least would need an expanded grid whose construction would take away from the rest of the economy. All high-speed rail projects in the US run over in cost and time.As for flying, you’ll get to hear the details from the chief engineer when our conversation emerges from the editing pipeline. My high-level takeaways, though, are that batteries add weight and are near their limits on being able to hold enough energy for a long flight and to deliver power fast enough without overheating. These two properties—holding energy and delivering power fast—tend to be exclusive. If you improve one you lose the other. To fly a heavier plane requires moving slower, but planes can only slow so much. It means fewer people and different plane design, but plane design is a mature field. No one knows any new advances. They’re mostly implementing old ones that the industry didn’t use because it optimized for profitability, not sustainability, before pollution became the issue it did.I understood from him that currently no technologies allow for flights of the capacity, speed, and distance we now consider normal. If we reached the limits of all technologies, I understood we still couldn’t fly dozens of people thousands of miles. Going from North America to Europe would require stopping over in Greenland or Iceland not to recharge, which would take a long time, but to change planes, which would require lots of extra planes on the ground, which adds costs and pollution to manufacture extra planes.Meanwhile, the Atlantic would now have a huge bottleneck if we could even fly those distances, build enough planes, and generate enough power to charge them in Greenland and Iceland. How many flights per day could these small islands process? Could we cross the Pacific at all by plane?I’m not bringing these points up to bring you down. I didn’t make up this research. I learned of it through podcast guest Dave Gardner’s podcast Growthbusters episode Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Green New Deal, featuring Megan Seibert, who explains this research and her views. She’s part of the Real Green New Deal project, which I also link to in the notes.It seems to me if you have to cross Death Valley, it’s useful to know how much water you need and can bring. If we don’t have enough, nobody wins by starting to cross, knowing we won’t make it.By contrast, reducing consumption and birth rate require no new technological advances, cost little money and probably save more, and when implemented in voluntary non-coercive ways have improved measures of health, longevity, prosperity, abundance, and stability. Solutions exist, just not the ones we’ve fantasized for generations would work.Living much simpler lives is beyond possible. Contrary to mainstream beliefs, it means what I believe anyone would call a better life not despite not flying all over the world at whim but because of it. Living as our ancestors did doesn’t mean 30 becomes old age or we lose science. On the contrary, probably more longevity and more meaningful interaction with nature.Life can be great living sustainably. Our entitlement holds us back, not a physical lack of viability. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.