The Great Disruption

of any damage being done to our capital stocks.3

Given what we now know about the environmental impact of consumption and the anxiety that drives it, maybe we should see advertising as pollution,

Close one thousand dirty coal power plants within five years

The fascinating thing is how comprehensive this is, impacting life expectancy, obesity, imprisonment rates, teenage pregnancy, mental health, levels of trust in the community, educational performance, status of women, and so on.

The only source of gain is that when one person does better than a peer, that person feels better. So getting more money and stuff than whomever you compare yourself to does bring a level of satisfaction because it increases your self-worth. But the net gain for society remains at zero, with all of us just switching places around inside the system

Capture or burn methane

criteria to consider technologies against. For energy, mine are simple. They have to deliver close to zero CO2 emissions, they should be as safe as we can afford, they should be able to be rolled out at scale quickly, and they should be considered in a systems context. The latter means we should consider factors like our quality of life, our geopol

The natural ones are about how the environment behaves as a system, with interconnectedness, tipping points, and feedback loops. Examples are issues like the ocean’s absorption of CO2 emissions causing acidification, which can undermine marine life, then accelerating the collapse of fisheries.

Strand half of the world’s aircraft