Can someone explain to me how in the world those in favor of small government regulation in business can expect to protect the environment? It seems a fantasy to expect corporations to just be good world citizens on their own. Won't the financial motive always favor doing something for their own bottom line over doing something good for the planet?

Public / consumer education and outrage seems to make for a miniscule feedback system. People can't follow complex issues as a whole, and tire of hearing any message too often. They are also easy to fool into thinking they've done their part. Think of the people who buy brand new hybrid cars, oblivious to to the damage they continue to cause and typically not even considering doing something more serious than this trivial gesture.

We have a thousand years of detailed history of the interplay between companies and the environment, across many eras, fads, peoples, lands, etc, and I don't read any of it as showing evidence that an unregulated business community will on their own make the environment better than it is.

Pointing out one small set of companies or sectors here or there does no good. One must show that this is good for the whole of a country's businesses.

Very interesting to watch documents morph over time as the decisions change about what's to be blocked out of documents. It's even more insightful when they first publish documents and then later take out even more information. [Read more…]

I need a better name for this, but this is a project I was daydreaming about today: the Human Constraint Project. The goal is to form a group for the massive reduction in human population in a healthy way (psychologically, sociologically, intellectually). It is perhaps unrealizable, but you can never tell what you can accomplish until you try. It would be a group dedicated to studying ways in which one can get humans to voluntarily massively reduce their numbers in a peaceful, constructive way that greatly increases both the standard of living and the standard of living for the rest of the ecosystem.

Over-population is the one problem which, unless it is tackled, all other problems are unsolvable (global warming, despeciation, deforestation, pollution, etc).

Because Boston's emergency alert teams are really really bad at their jobs, someone who's actually good at his has to lose his job. Jim Samples (CEO of Cartoon Network) didn't deserve this. Why not fire the Boston officials who botched their responses up so badly? The same ads were in many other cities without setting off full-scale alerts. [Read more…]

I'm at my wits end thinking about population and the general destruction of the biosphere. There are way way too many people, and it's still growing exponentially. Yes, even in the U.S., and yes, even if you factor out all the immigration, legal or otherwise. The destruction of species is at such a huge rate I can't think about it often. Even without global warming, human beings have absolutely no collective sense of how to take care of this planet. And as I walk around my neighborhood I can see endless rows of baby strollers of different sorts, parents lifting them into SUVs, talking about how they're having more soon. [Read more…]

Had an aggravating discussion the other day with someone who asked me "if I had time for the environment today." Of course, I do, as I waste far too much of my day on nonsense. But I wanted to ask him if he knew any environmental group that is trying to take on the issue of human over-population. He didn't know where I could look for such a thing, but also didn't see the correlation between population and concerns for the environment, which I can only attribute to his being a bit young and hasn't thought about these things from this angle before. But … if environmental groups don't seem to know the relationship (even if they don't state it outright for worry over public reactions) then what are they thinking? Gah. I plan on talking a lot more about population control at some point, but wanted to at least breach the topic today on here.

US government officials continually inform us that we are in a state of war, but are we? Even newspapers and TV/cable news shows parrot the sentiment. As far as I can tell, we are most certainly not at war. At most, the phrase is a rhetorical turn to justify a certain course of foreign and domestic policy. [Read more…]