Hidden Costs – 8 Oct 2018
The coming concrete crisis | How plastic bags came to rule our lives | How to stop data centres from gobbling up the world’s electricity
Bart Anderson
Could Donald Trump be the last world emperor?
Empires are short-lived structures created and kept together by the availability of mineral resources, fossil fuels in our times. They tend to decline and fall with the decline of the resources that created them, and that’s the destiny of the current World Empire: the American one.
U.S. government embraces climate catastrophe, but is it a ‘crisis’?
The United States government has now officially embraced climate change as a catastrophe in the making. Only it contends that the catastrophe is now inevitable no matter what humans do…and so, we should do nothing at all since whatever we do won’t matter much.
Let’s talk! – 24 Sept 2018
Excerpts: A field guide to bad faith arguments | No, I will not debate you | Against civility, or why Habermas recommends a wild public sphere
The problem with models…is getting stuck on just one
We humans are constantly modeling the world around us to find patterns that will help us. But sometimes we forget that our models are just that, tentative outlines of how the world seems to work. Getting stuck on just one model with no flexibility is often the result of vested interests pushing that model. We need to be smarter than that to solve the problems we now face as individuals and as a global society.
‘The Expanse’ is a story about systemic ruin
The science fiction noir thriller, “The Expanse,” has a lot to say about systemic risks in society and about what not to do about them.
A kinder, gentler GMO; what could possibly go wrong?
CRISPR, the latest fad in genetic engineering, is touted as both safer and more versatile than previous techniques. But those touting it are making the same demonstrably false assumption that people using the old techniques made.
Climate change, water and the infrastructure problem
The naive notion that we can, for example, “just use more air conditioning” as the globe warms betrays a perplexing misunderstanding of what we face. Even if one ignores the insanity of burning more climate-warming fossil fuels to make electricity for more air-conditioning, there is the embedded assumption that our current infrastructure with only minor modifications will withstand the pressures placed upon it in a future transformed by climate change and other depredations.
Seawalls for oil refineries and other ironies of climate change adaptation
Several climate change deniers in the Texas political establishment aren’t deniers after all. They just don’t want the industry which got them elected (and could get them defeated just as easily) to pay anything to protect itself from the very dangers to which the use of the industry’s products exposes the entire globe.
Artificial intelligence, fake images and crumbling trust in our narratives
How do we anchor ourselves in a world in which neither the narratives we are told nor the images we are shown can be trusted?
Climate, politics and the narrow vision of futurists
“The Future” is a sales pitch designed to keep us locked into existing institutions and power relationships. It has nothing to do with solving our real problems or liberating us from the increasing power of corporations and the governments they have captured. It is, in fact, an elitist vision of a future entirely run by wealthy technologists who find politics and environmental disruption inconvenient.
Eternity, nature, society and the absurd fantasies of the rich
Professor and author Douglas Rushkoff recently wrote about a group of wealthy individuals who paid him to answer questions about how to manage their lives after what they believe will be the collapse of society.
