Economic Satisfaction and Social Connection vs Carbon

 Transportation is a wonderful thing, especially when you need it.  And modern highly dispersed and interconnected societies need it.

So suppose we are to reduce the carbon produced by such transportation without radically transforming the nature of that transportation, on the principle that many such alternatives, including worldwide energy capture and storage facilities could introduce even greater environmental costs?

Solving the problem by "using less" or even "using hardly anything" (and no doubt a lot of using less is going to be required in any case).

Would that be 'success' or could it alternatively be described as 'collapse.'

It depends on how economically satisfactory (to Everyone) that can be made to work, and how much social connection it maintains.

So the optimization problem becomes reducing transportation costs (to the environment, now and in the long haul) while maintaining or even improving how well off people are both economically and socially.

(At the broadest level, this suggests people should be living closer together, or perhaps reorganized in a way that keeps them closest to the social connections they value and more distant from the ones they don't.  As well as other improvements to re-empower social connection.  Such as people being together in socially enhanced mass transportation system...subways with parlors...as opposed to one person in every car, etc.)

Of course this is the opposite direction that maximizing profit brought us to.  At every turn, the ability to form satisfying social relations was sacrificed on the altar of selling more stuff, including personal cars, insurance, accessories, maintenance, and fueling.  And instead of keeping people concentrated in urban centers with more vertical housing, people were dispersed into suburbs and then exurbs, all the better to require people have more of that stuff.

AND, though I believe direct in-person interactions are better than electronically mediated interactions in many ways, there is little doubt that more electronically mediated interactions are a necessary component to maintaining and enhancing social connection, provided that is the way they are used.

There is little doubt of the value of direct personal electronic communications (when they are that way and not some form of spam) as compared with nothing.   But what about Social Media?

I seems to me in principle that Social Media is a good thing, a way of making a public space for people who are widely dispersed.  That's not necessarily an endorsement of modern private Social Media monopolies.  Those are primarily designed to extract profit (selling more stuff) from people's desire for such things, a mixed blessing at best.  (Personally I use various social media monopolies and may be adding more.)

Habitat Loss

 One fundamental issue recent posts have been grappling is the ecological (in terms of species destruction and decimation) cost of expanding human land use.

I have opined that at least when well done (with as little local ecological cost as feasible...not 'fast tracked') some local loss is acceptable if well designed to stop greater global ecological loss.

The overall principle could be described as 'habitat loss.'  We want to minimize that, both by using as little land as we can (and with as little degradation and decimation as we can), and by preserving the environment within every habitat globally as well.  Ultimately we should look at what everything needed (not just here) does everywhere (not just here).

You could think of it either as preserving species or preserving habitat, both are sort of equivalent.

Generally, humanity has operated on the 'it's all there for us' principle.

All There includes the atmosphere, the water, even outer space.

We need to operate on the 'we'll disturb as little as we can' principle, leaving the natural system of our planet as undisturbed as possible.

Our greatest achievements are not in vastness of material, but rather in the depth and inner beauty of our art, science, and social consciousness, and that's what our future aims should be more like.

Other animals may operate on the 'it's all there for us' principle.  But all others are held in check somehow, most often by predators, sometimes by hostile environments, and almost always by lack of resources.  We've exceeded those limits by technical means.  Now only total catastrophe for the planet can come from our future population or economic growth, if not present size.

Protein

 For quite a long time in my life, I didn't think much about protein.  And it seems like current nutritional standards don't speak much to it either.  They have been all about reducing saturated fat.

I was only about 14 when I read a copy of "Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit" by Adelle Davis because my mother had a copy in the bookshelf.  It emphasized the importance of protein, suggesting you have steak and eggs for breakfast, and like that for the rest of the day.

Ironically it was during this same era that I was probably the most protein deficient.  That was because my mother was working nights and most often I had TV dinners for dinner.  So my diet consisted of breakfast cereal (I most often had "Total" thinking that was just what I needed), school lunch (a fried cheese sandwich might be typical), and TV dinners.

Protein deficiency might explain why my growth from ages 11-17 was not as much as my peers, and today at 5' 6"" I'm in the bottom 10% of hight for US males of my age.  I had thought my lack of growth had come earlier, after my double pneumonia hospitalization at age 7, but a friend recounts that when we met (at age 14) we were about the same height, and now he's 6 inches taller.  So much of my lack of growth happened after 14.

Anyway, it was easy to discredit Adele Davis at the time (who was a lifelong tobacco smoker and died of cancer) and the importance of protein faded away amidst many other health fads since then.  So I completely forgot about protein for most of my life.

In my last working years, I might have been getting enough protein anyway because I was eating at a steak bar about 3 times a week, the rest at Chinese and Thai restaurants.  I was getting enough protein, but way too much fats, and I had grown somewhat obese.

When I retired, I pretty much quit going to restaurants (and COVID made it nearly complete) and for awhile my diet at first was mostly frozen dinners (which generally do NOT have enough protein, just as when I was a kid).  It was during that era that I noticed that along with losing weight (which was very good) my muscles were getting very weak.  I started adding steak, prepared chicken, and spaghetti to my diet.

That helped, but I really didn't start getting enough protein to retain muscle mass until I started drinking whey protein powders in the last couple years.  I currently use a Whey Isolate with no added ingredients except Lecithin.  I'm not sure whether it's the fact that it's an isolate or the fact that it doesn't have Stevia* and other ingredients, but this power I am now using is the first one to not give me any gas (which causes lots of other problems, like making it harder to urinate at night).  Previously both whey powers and pea powders gave me terrible gas.  And pea powders were the worst.  (*My current theory is that Stevia is one of the things that gives me the worst gas.  Every single "high protein" product containing Stevia has given me too much gas to keep using.)  I've never notice any "lactose intolerance" from any other milk products, so I'm thinking I may not actually need to use a "whey protein isolate" which minimizes the lactose compared with a "whey protein concentrate."

Thanks to whey powder, it's possible for me to skip having any meat at breakfast or lunch.  I only have meat at dinner (and typically only 4-5 ounces).  And that's a big plus for me, because the luncheon meats I was chomping on before have way too high sodium.  By reserving meat for just one meal a day, I can cook it myself with no added salt.  I now believe that minimizing meat intake this way (one small portion per day, with protein supplements at other times) is the way to go.  I can hardly think about the complexity of getting enough protein on a Vegan diet.

As I make myself a glass of whey protein, I think of the fact that this is basically concentrated milk protein.  A glass of whey protein is much like a glass of milk, but with 2-3 times the protein and little to none of the sugars (lactose).

But this brings back another story about my childhood which might even better explain my stunted growth.

Sometime around the age of 14 I met a new friend who convinced me it was not necessary to drink milk.  Prior to that, I had been almost a religious milk drinker, drinking at least a quart a day.  "Milk is for babies" he said.  So I started drinking sugary fruit juices and sometimes even soft drinks (which had been nearly forbidden at my house).  Now it may have been true that he did not need milk, because he had a stay-at-home mother who cooked dinner every night.  But for me it was a probably essential supplement.

Milk had been a key part of my diet, providing the calcium I basically wasn't getting elsewhere, and supplementing the protein I wasn't getting enough of.

That was when I stopped drinking milk for the rest of my life, but the same message was underlined by a later friend with lactose intolerance (who temporarily had me convinced I had lactose intolerance too, it took a few years for me to figure out that I did not have any lactose intolerance) and read articles such as PETA's where they say that drinking beer is better than drinking milk.  (This same friend also had a theory that chocolate was nutritionally sufficient and sometimes, for a month at a time, lived on nothing but chocolate.  Now I know chocolate does not have enough protein, and has too much sugar and fat for the protein that it does have.)

For quite awhile I had 1-2 drinks of alcohol per day, and didn't think anything was wrong with that.  But alcohol has some negative effects, and alcoholic drinks generally have no protein and little other of nutritional value.  (Now I'm back to 1-2 drinks per week and not every week either, which had been my standard before the age of 40.)

Just how good is whey protein from milk?  According to Livestrong, whey protein has a better balance of proteins than red meat.

Local vs Global Environmental Destruction

Starting with the previous post, I've been trying to grapple with a fundamental principle.  Is it more important to preserve the local environment or the global environment?

So suppose we have a choice to continue burning fossil fuels whose impact on ecologically important land is is relatively tiny, but have a global impact on the extinction of species or have massive solar farms using a much larger fraction of the ecologically useful land, therefore driving local extinctions (which add up globally)?

One thing is already clear.  Not all square meters are the same.  And there are impacts through occupation, degradation, and decimation, leading to a continuation of the concept that concentration is generally better than dispersal.  Some areas are more ecologically sensitive than others, both in principle, or as they are now, or as they might be restored at various levels of time, cost, or opportunity cost.

Anyway, I'm defining the question as I do because it is in fact generally my belief that preserving the global environment is the highest priority, and probably needs to be considered foremost.  So I'm all for wide area renewable energy systems, accompanied by vast reduction in energy waste (or even use) as well.  It should be done in such a way as to minimize both local and global degradation, and some areas are so sensitive they should not be degraded at all.  But generally it is most important to save the whole.

By a similar token, it is more important to save a species rather than individuals of a species.

This is not to say that growth can continue as before, with renewable on top of fossil fuels, and global war and planned obsolescence lead to vast waste.

The whole growth paradigm must end or it will be ended.  But replacement of fossil systems with renewable systems is a way forward in the event that it's even possible to avoid collapse.  In other words, if I'm wrong, and there's more hope than I think.

There's not such a thing as non-replacement as long as the growth paradigm continues.  If renewable energy isn't built, that same effort will likely go into building something whose environment destruction is even greater.

Another factor that needs be considered is the degree to which occupation, degradation, and decimation actually occur.

Wind farms in particular might leave a lot of space around essentially undisturbed, though the degree to which local animals are affected would need to be determined.  I believe Solar Farms produce greater occupation+degradation+decimation, but can still leave some space useful to local species.

Wind farms are a threat to individual birds, but what about bird species?  I generally believe this problem is exaggerated, birds generally learn to avoid wind farms, which is not so easy with pollution, cars, or tall buildings.

One thing to optimize would be to minimize the number of species made extinct, perhaps with an additional term of 1/10,000 the number of individuals killed from sensitive species, assuming an entire species to be 'worth' about that many, or whatever number makes sense in context.

 

The Ecological Cost of Human Living Space

Over the years, I've heard many very wrongheaded ideas about the environmental cost of living space.

One set of people seemed to believe that city living is more destructive to the environment than country living, because cities are hugely destructive to the environment, more than houses in the country.  This used to be a popular idea, and many of my friends had the idea they'd eliminate their harm to the environment by living far out in the country, far removed from anyone else if possible.

But nowadays nearly everyone recognizes that spreading the same number of people doing the same things out over a larger amount of land would almost by necessity make their living even more destructive to the environment.  Human concentration is one of the simplest and best ways of reducing the human environmental footprint.  The basic principle is that the more concentrated human activities are, the more undivided space is left to non-human wildlife.  That needs to be something we think about and this essay was motivated towards that end.

There are many ways in which this is true (and a few that it might not be*):

1) Occupation.  More land may be occupied per person in far out back habitation (and changing any bit of land for human purposes counts as this kind of 'occupation' to a greater or lesser degree...so if I have a long private paved road leading to my far out back house, that entire road counts as part of my ecological footprint per unit of land area nearly as much as my house.  Even an unpaved gravel road is somewhat destructive to the environment, though likely somewhat less than a paved road.  It is land stolen from nature (wildlife).  And then there are fences which may be the worst kind of occupation of all per unit of area they are built on (counting not only as space but despoilment and decimation).

2) Despoilment.  Any part of that land where I use pesticides, herbicides, etc, is also 'occupied' and perhaps in the worst way of all, since such chemicals can themselves migrate or cause issues for migratory species.  Likewise with growing decorative plants, grass, anything that it not natural or useable by the wildlife in that area, and especially if it is GMO and contains bio toxins (though that specific issue is covered by #3).  (Growing crops for human consumption cannot be counted here because it is a social need wherever people live...it has to be done somewhere...but if the dispersed crop growing is done more destructively than otherwise, then that would count as greater damage, or if it is done less destructively, then it would undo a despoilment which would otherwise occur and would be a benefit instead of a cost.)

3) Decimation.  More natural space and habitats may be decimated this way.  A paved road is not just the space it occupies, but the way it divides what is on the right side of the road from what is on the left side of the road.  The now separated spaces are worth less to wildlife than would one wide open space.

4) Transportation costs.  Transportation to and from a far out place means that the transportation energy (and other environmental costs) adds an addition factor for all the human goods used to live, or produced for others.

Those are big and pretty straightforward.  But there are others

5) Embedded construction transportation costs.  Even constructing my far out back home has much greater environmental costs, as all the raw materials and workers must be transported through the surrounding area, causing more Occupation and Decimation by that very process, and giving my home a greater embedded energy cost.  Also all the raw material most likely has to travel a longer distance from where it is extracted or prepared for human use--this is not necessarily true, but probably true in most cases nowadays for anything like a modern home (and not an igloo made from surrounding ice).

6) Greater Apriori Ecological Sensitivity

This is not necessarily true.  A city might have been built (and possibly long ago) in a very environmentally sensitive place, which for example multiple species might (have) used for migratory, mating, or feeding purposes, so you could argue it is just as environmentally destructive to live there.  But often people fantasize or realize living in uniquely sensitive areas even where cities could not be built.  Beaches and mountain forests are good examples.

7) Greater Post Hoc Ecological Sensitivity

Cities already exist, and adding one more person might not even cause the existing city to need to physically occupy more land.  More vertical space could be added, or any pre-existing space within the city might be better used.  OTOH, adding one more person living (in some style anyway) out back is much more likely to make a difference in the space available for wildlife.

Even if the city expands for one new person, the space immediately next to the city was already somewhat degraded for wildlife by the city being next to it.  So even if the a priori ecological sensitivity of the surrounding locales were identical, and the same amount of new space were used, expanding the city might still have less Post Facto Ecological Sensitivity that one more person living in the far out back (and all the things I've already described).

Generally, using or even taking advantage of an environmental insult which already exists is less destructive that creating a brand new environmental insult de novo.  After some personal meditation on the subject, it seems to me that about half of the environmental cost of a construction for human habitation is due to the agents causing it to be constructed, which may include both the developer and the first buyer for homes built on speculation that they will be sold.  Or it could be 100% for an owner built construction that is so unique that it is never going to be used later by someone else (who would share some of the environmental responsibility going forward later).  Flipping this around it's clear that anyone occupying a pre-existing home is responsible for much less than half of the environmental cost of its creation, which is further reduced by the lengths of previous (and post) occupation.  (This same kind of calculation works for other human artifacts, such as cars.  There is much less post hoc environmental harm in acquiring and using a pre-existing car than a new one, then adjusted by other factors such as how damaging that particular car is.)

*****

Of course there are additional factors regarding how energy efficient it is to operate the home, etc.  Those are not part of this discussion which is really just about the spaces and less how they are operated.  Presumably energy economy could be achieved either in the city or the country, and it would probably be easier in the city.

* There could also be compensating factors, including living on less (and it would have to be much less , or locally produced/obtained, to compensate for the transportation and other costs), and dispersal of waste to the degree it is better neutralized by natural forces, though such dispersal is not necessarily a good thing either, especially if chemical wastes are involved.  Many people do indeed envision their living in the great out back is something they could do with far less, and that could make it a better choice despite all of the above.  But often people's vision may not include all the things necessary for comfortable living, which may be most easily obtained in pre-existing housing in cities.

The Purpose of Life

Capitalism and much of the world today is driven by the notion that the purpose of life is to live as "large" as possible.  Make as much money as you can (larger amounts typically involve some sort of expoitation--of nature, other humans, etc) and live as large as you can.  Maximize!

That's seemingly in line with the ideas motivating the US doctrine of Total Spectrum Dominance.  The Maximize doctrine leads to unending bad outcomes for most.

But sages and philosophers back to the beginning of recorded history have opined something very different, more like Minimize!  Live as small as possible, with the smallest meaningful footprint on the rest of the world (including nature, other humans, etc).  Do as little harm to others as possible.  And mostly life is not about making (ie stealing from nature or someone else) the most for oneself, instead it's about integrating with everyone and everything else, for mutual satisfaction that relies on satisfying the other as much as, if not more, than oneself.  In every era there have been many who have seen this with their own minds and followed.  (My favorite sage has long been Laozi, though I'm not a Taoist as such.)

Many non-monotheistic theologies also present this sort of end to human life.  Each individual thread of conscious existence does not disappear, instead it merges with the 'all.'  The end of self and ego, but not the end of anything else.  This is seen as the extension of living more and more that way in our self-constrained life, as should be everyone's goal.

As long as human societies and human technologies (including AI) remain committed to the Maximize doctrine, and to the degree they are, they will fail and horribly.

In short, the purpose of self-centered conscious life is to grow past it.

RFK Jr

 On balance, RFK Jr looks like the best available Presidential candidate.

Here's a good interview published by Scheerpost.

He opposes the US proxy war in Ukraine and in almost all of the correct terms.  He opposes neoliberalism and supports green energy.  He wants to be an FDR President and I believe him.

In the past I have been angered by his statements about vaccines in general.  But he says all his children have been vaccinated.  (For Covid too?)  I wonder about his book about Fauci, but I accept the view that CDC has not been as helpful as they should have been wrt COVID.  (In my view, the best thing would have been to get N95 masks into the hands of all Americans as quickly as possible.)

He did win a $290 million lawsuit against Monsanto (which sounds good to me).

He's running as a Democrat, which sound to me like a more serious gambit than any 3rd party gig.

He's being assisted by Dennis Kucinich, one of my most favorite Presidential candidates ever (I supported Kucinich in two primaries).  That alone was enough to make me rethink RFK Jr.

Another alternative candidate, Marianne Williamson, also sounds good in similar ways.  But she doesn't step out of line with the Washington Consensus on Ukraine.

The most important important of our time is for the US to walk back from Full Spectrum Dominance and embrace multipolarity in much the way China has.

What we have now in Biden and the Divided Congress is a dangerous acceleration into WW3.  If this continues, it may be the end of human civilization real soon now.

That is the most important issue of our time, and the second is Global Heating, and RFK Jr addresses both.