Sublime

The future is a replay of the past—a combination of admirable advances and (un)avoidable setbacks. But there is something new as we look ahead, that unmistakably increasing (albeit not unanimous) conviction that, of all the risks we face, global climate change is the one that needs to be tackled most urgently and effectively. And there are two fund

It would be a lot easier to expand our use of solar and wind energy if we had better ways to store the large quantities of electricity we’d need to cover gaps in the flow of that energy.

Meanwhile, nuclear fission began to generate commercial electricity in 1956 at Britain’s Calder Hall, saw its greatest expansion during the 1980s, peaked in 2006, and has since declined slightly to about 10 percent of global electricity generation.

He went on to rethink modern architecture from a biological perspective and later publicly broke with the environmental movement over nuclear power and GMO food.

The technological and political context has changed in important ways too. Globalization has had destabilizing effects, ranging from climate change to the spread of technology into far more hands than ever before, including a…

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One sweeping, simplifying way to describe the advances of modern civilization is to see them as serial quests to reduce the risks that come from us being complex and fragile organisms trying to survive against many odds in a world abounding with dangers.

My calculations show that in the future—by lowering the share of beef and raising the share of pork, chicken meat, eggs, and dairy products, by more efficient feeding, and by better use of crop residues and food processing by-products—we could match recent global meat output while greatly limiting livestock’s environmental impact, including its sha

Securing the sufficient delivery of water, growing and processing crops, feeding and slaughtering animals, producing and converting enormous quantities of primary energies, and extracting and altering raw materials to fit a myriad of uses are endeavors whose scales (required to meet the demand of billions of consumers) and infrastructures (that ena

Quests to avoid unnecessary energy use, to reduce air pollution and water, and to provide more comfortable living conditions should be perennial imperatives, not sudden desperate actions aimed at preventing a catastrophe.